We’ve been together 25 years!!

We have been together for a quarter of a century! That is more than half our lives. Nearly a 3rd of that time we have lived in France (and had Poppy). It seems unbelievable, time is a strange thing...

We had a quiet day followed by sangria, champagne and a nice meal of roast chicken followed by rhubarb fool.

Cheers! Here’s to the next 25!

End of ‘le confinement’

Lots of people had exotic wishes about what they would like to do at the end of the confinement. We just wanted to go for a walk with the dog in the mountains. Our land is lovely, but it gets a bit samey and Poppy doesn’t run around as much on walks at home for some reason so she doesn’t get tired enough!

It has been freakishly sunny for weeks and weeks and the very day the confinement ends it started raining! But we didn’t let that put us off going up to La Mongie for a walk and staying the night.

It is quite strange in the ski area as it looks like a global pandemic hit suddenly and everyone just abandoned everything where it was. There were piste marker poles that had been left in the snow and when the snow melted they just fell over... all the netting and crash pads are still out...

Eclairs as a post walk snack

Roast duck

We buy 6 bottles of champagne in December to celebrate various things through the year. We had to use one for this...

The next morning lots of Alpaca by the apartment

Happy doggie

I don’t know if the new version of blogger will work better than the old and more people will be able to see the video. This is Poppy prancing like an idiot!

Ducklings first swim

The first few days of ducklings (or chicks) is stressful as they are tiny and quite fragile.

I have a rock in the pond so anyone who falls in can get out. I also check several times a day to make sure no duckling is stuck somewhere it can’t get back to the warmth of mum. She is an attentive mum, but not very useful at actually knowing what to do when one is stuck.

I cleaned the pond only this morning but they immediately poo in it then enjoy drinking the poo water. Nice!

Chicks hatched - but we didn’t keep them

I put the eggs on to incubate intending to keep them, but then a friend wanted to raise some chicks so they all went to them as soon as they hatched. 

Here are the eggs just before hatching. If you candle one you can see which ones are likely to hatch as the whole egg appears black except the air cell. The chick breaks through the internal membrane in to the air cell and rests before ‘pipping’ when it makes a little hole in the shell before it rests again and eventually ‘unzips’ round the whole egg so it can get out. The whole process can take 24 hours and is pretty tiring for the chicks.

Of the original 20 eggs, 6 didn’t develop, these were all from the rescue chickens, they were scared of the cockeral at this point obviously! In the end 11 hatched. The hatch was slightly early suggesting a fractionally high temperature. I think the humidity was pretty good and constant throughout and they lost 13% weight from the sample eggs which is good.

 

Ducklings!

Olga hatched 5 duckings! Muscovy’s are meant to be great at hatching loads of eggs, but ours don’t seem to be! But in fact 4 or 5 is a good number at once as their enclosure isn’t huge.

Flowers in the fields

During lock down we have spent much longer than usual walking on our own land. In normal times, we take the dog out several times a week to different places. Not necessarily far from home, but it is nice to get out and about a bit. At the moment we are not allowed to exercise more than 1km from home. We appreciate how fortunate we are having all this space!

Purple flowers - we are not v good at plant id ;)

A bigger purple flower

Daisy

Buttercups. These are pretty in the fields, but a nightmare in the garden as they just won’t DIE and keep spreading maddly.

Burnt tip orchid (looked this one up as it is the first we have seen. Pretty!

Speedwell (maybe!)

... and something a little closer to home, roses and violets