The chickens have escaped!

I’ve managed to get the new fruit trees planted – 12 dwarfing and two “proper fruit trees” as Ian says! It seemed to take much longer than expected, the irrepressible couch grass probably doesn’t help, but two days of hard labour and frequent tea breaks and… voila.

Anyway, we now have an orchard, and the first element to really break up the dull expanse of grass which is our land. Four plums (Victoria, Quetche and Mirabelle), two apple (Belle de Boskoop, of course) two pear (Beurre Hardy and B Giffard) and finally four cherry (Biggareau Moreau/Burlat/Reverchon and Hedelfinger Riesen). Ian’s “real trees” are both Reine de Reinette (sometimes called Queen of Pippins in the English-speaking world). These are all heritage varieties which I researched on the internet. I was going to buy them online from a French specialist nursery but just thought I would ask at my local garden centre and they had all of them – and much cheaper! I hope to put in another 12 at least by next spring so that we can produce a surplus, and it will be a great place for the bees that will hopefully be arriving in May.

We had a guest come to stay in our B&B at the weekend who grows heritage veg in the Manche (north-west of here by 2.5 hours). He has 10 hectares of veg plus 250 salt marsh lambs and supplies lots of posh restaurants in the north of France (including the Ritz Paris!). We had an hour-long chat over breakfast which was very inspiring and he gave me a huge box of parsnips, some carrots, swedes, and Jerusalem artichokes. Any Brit living in France will have been missing their parsnips – they only started selling them in our local supermarket 12 months ago and they are dry and tasteless – but these parsnips were the most incredible we’ve ever tasted! His purple carrots were also delicious, however I have decided not to eat the Jerusalem artichokes but to chuck them in the garden and see what happens! I’ve read that they will suppress all weeds, so I’m hoping to form a barrier at the edge of one of the veg-plots with them.

I spend every spare moment digging in the garden, but the profusion of perennial weed roots is such that progress is very slow. We were hoping for a wwoofer to arrive mid-March, but she cancelled and no-one has so far replaced her. As the 15^th May approaches (our official safe-to-plant-out date) I am beginning to wonder if I will ever get this terrible ground ready for seeds; or if it will all just become a jungle of couch grass, buttercup and bind weed again.