New water tank

About a year ago I mentioned that we needed to replace the water tank the spring water flows into before being pumped up to the house. A while after that we ordered the new tank. The plumber and the earth excavation man have finally managed to coordinate and appear to install the new tank!
We cut down a tree yesterday and strimmed to give them access. They disappeared down there all morning with their mini digger and made lots of crashing and bashing. They reappeared briefly to say 'eerm do you want to keep the old tank??' and looked very relieved when we said no. I guess they broke it up to get it out.

When we ventured down at lunch time to take a look they had dug down to the rock underneath to sit the new tank on that and created a giant trench to allow the area to drain. They say we need to maintain the trench otherwise it will fill with mud and the tank will float away. Nice! We are thinking about what plants we can plant down there to stabilise it. Would need to be shade and wet loving.
The tank is much bigger than it looks in this photo. 750l. Another improvement on the old tank is a filter on the water inlet, the old tank used to get all silted up inside from time to time - resulting in lovely brown drinking water and a fun day trying to clean it out.

It all looked good. Until we started fiddling with it! The plumber told us we needed to clear the pipe above the tank as we did last summer (it is a lot wetter and muddyer now given all the recent storms) and put back the slate roof of the water channel - they had removed it during their work. He told us we needed to remove the pipe from the tank so the mud we would stir up wouldn't go in to the tank. All good - until we managed to get some stones and twigs wedged in one of the pipes. We did  eventually get them out with the help of some wire, but in the mean time water was going everywhere and we were worried it was going to undermine the foundations of the new tank. We then had a very trying time getting the pipe we had removed back on. We didn't really understand the mechanism of the bolts (still don't) and the water flooding everywhere didn't help. We were sure we would lose one of the little bits... but luckily didn't!

Funny story - Last time the plumber was here - last autumn - he managed to catch a branch of the plum tree at the top of the drive on his van. He drove off at high speed and didn't seem to notice, dragging it half way down the drive before it fell off.
This time just after he arrived another branch went creeeaaaak crash and fell off just behind his van. We think the tree has been waiting to get its revenge, but just mistimed it!

It is a shame as it was laden with soon to ripen plums. C'est la vie as they say!

More baby chickies

I mentioned a while ago that someone gave us some fertilised eggs. We put some of them under a broody hen and others in to the incubator. In the end only 5 hatched and sadly one of the little chicks died so we have 4 little chicks with the broody hen now. Two hatched in the incubator and 3 under the chicken. The chicken accepts additional chicks fine as the eggs are hatching, but we found last time if we tried to give her more later on she wouldn't take them in and kept shooing them away from the ones she already had.

The original chicks are about 15 weeks old and are pretty big now. We can tell hens from roosters (we hope!) and have sold two hens to a neighbor who lost some to foxes recently. We are probably going to sell one more, leaving us with 3 hens and 6 roosters. We plan on keeping one rooster and eating the other five - when they are a bit bigger.

Chicken on left, rooster on right

The roosters combs go red earlier, they have thicker legs and their feathers on their back and neck are pointier than the hens. Often the tails are curved over and the hens are straight but this doesn't seem to be exclusively the case at this age.

This is the rooster we plan on keeping

Of these 12 chickens 2 were brought up by the broody hen and the other 10 by us. Initially the 10 grew faster as they managed to eat more with it there in a little dish for them all the time but later the 2 outside with the chicken grew faster, we suppose because there were able to free range with the flock and eat more. This guy is one of the outside ones. He has nice markings and is starting to show an interest in the older hens - as well as starting to crow a little.

Quail

We have been hoping to get quail for a while, but haven't seen them for sale round here. I am sure they must be but we don't know where to look! I went to Toulouse to pick up Janet from the airport and collected 4 females on the way from just near Toulouse. Very convenient. They kindly laid 4 eggs in transit, but have only been doing one a day between them since then. Hopefully they will get over the shock of the journey and all start laying soon. The eggs are very tasty although being so small they are a bit of a fiddle. One got injured when I tried to catch her to move her from her transit cage to her new home, she panicked and flapped around madly and broke a wing feather and injured her leg. We thought perhaps it was broken and that she wouldn't make it, but she is walking on it now, only a week later so I guess it was just strained in some way. She won't have to be put out of her misery and eaten after all!

At the moment they are living in the run from the chicken house. It comes in to two parts, we are planning on building them a shelter to attach to one half and reattaching the other half to the chicken house.

Then on the trip to deliver Janet back to Toulouse I collected some eggs (from a different place - so they are unrelated). We are incubating them and will keep a male and eat the rest. I ordered 12 and got 26 for the same price! I guess the quail had been laying well!
Quail eggs are tiny so baby quail must be teeny weeny. They grow to adult size and start laying eggs within 6 weeks apparently (compared to perhaps 20-24 weeks for chickens - bit more eating on a chicken I guess!).

Not lazy! Visitors!

I haven't updated for a while, Janet (Doug's mum) has been visiting and somehow there hasn't been time! We did some nice touristy stuff (Lunch at Auberge de Beyrède, Labassère donkey festival, Line dancing display, Château de Mauvesin, wandered round Bagnères de Bigorre etc) as well as useful things around the farm (continued the battle against the grass and weeds, planted various things, lots of eating and drinking)

Donkeys at Labassère

Line dancing

Line dancing

Château Mauvesin

Janet and Doug - Poppy wasn't impressed with history I think

Produce from the garden

Stuff in the potager is growing well, although due to the earlier cold weather and the slugs eating a lot of stuff it is behind where it should be. Quite a lot of things really aren't an impressive size.

We have had some to eat, but not much. If we were relying on it for all our veg we would be starving! 

We have had mange toute, peas, suger snap peas, broad beans, courgette flowers, onions, onion flowers, shallots and courgettes - but only a couple of each. We have had more new potatoes and should eat more soon as they are getting a bit big.

I had not eaten courgette flowers before, they are very tasty raw or cooked. We are learning lots of things about gardening. For example I didn't know courgettes have male and female flowers. You can see the tiny courgette to be on the bottom of the female flowers - the flower opens and the courgette will grow (in some cases it has to be fertilised)

These courgettes are going to be yellow - the flower hasn't opened yet

The male flowers look the same but don't have the tiny courgette

Someone told us that the male flowers could just be removed (and eaten) but I decided to look that up on the internet as it seemed a bit funny that the plant has them but doesn't need them. Apparently a lot of variety (often - or perhaps always I am not sure - F1 hybrids) don't need fertilising but some still do. 

As far as I can tell these ones in the picture need the male flowers (they are Buckingham) but the other ones we have (Early Gem F1) don't. But I can't claim to understand everything about it!

F1 Hybrids are interesting to read about too. We have bought a number of seeds F1 seeds without really knowing what they are - it seems that in some cases they can be a good thing, but not always worth it.

Most of our onions have gone to seed too, so I consulted with the internet again. Last year we planted the onions from little onion seedlings and they did well, this year we used sets (which are partially grown but dormant onion bulbs) and they went to seed. Apparently it more common for sets to go to seed than onion seedlings because onions seed in their second year and the sets are made by growing the onions late in one year then letting them go dormant over the winter then starting them growing the next. We should have chopped the flowers off as soon as they formed, but we did not. The flowers are quite tasty fried in batter.

I am sure we have learnt lots of other riveting things too!

Ice ice baby

We have had our fridge for a while now. A year perhaps. We just got round to connecting up the water and more importantly the ice making functionality. The heat wave we are having inspired us to get on with it. We did ask the plumber to do it, but he didn't turn up and we decided we had better manage ourselves if we are planning on re-plumbing parts of the house!
You can't really see but the pipe runs along the top of the door. It is not a pretty job but good enough for now...

Grass control

You might have noticed in the photo behind the bbq that the grass is getting a bit out of control. While Aidan was here we put him to work mowing the lawn - no slackers you know. He wasn't very impressed with our manual lawn mower, but it looked much better when he finished. Doug did a lot of strimming with the petrol strimmer and I did various things with shears, the scythe and the battery powered strimmer.

Thanks Aidan!

Shed progess

I think slow would sum it up. We are getting there though - digging the hole to level the ground not actually building the shed I mean! It is exhausting work which means we can only manage a couple of hours at a time. The heat isn't helping. We have done three sessions so far - there are other things to do too you know!

Poppy has been very helpful - occasionally digging wildly at the wrong bit and then snoozing in the sun.

Soft rolls recipe

300g strong white flour (bread flour)
1 tsp yeast
11/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
180ml warm milk
15g butter

Warm the milk slightly and melt the butter in it
Put everything in bread maker on the knead only setting (pizza on our breadmaker) and set it going (ours takes 45 mins then leave it a further 30 mins to rise)
Turn out and shape in to 6 roll shapes
Place on a baking tray (not too close together as they are going to grow) and leave to rise for a further 30 mins or until doubled in size
Put in to a hot oven for 15 mins or until brown on top (due to peculiarities of our gas oven which frazzles things from the bottom I turned over for the last few minutes of cooking to brown the top and avoid burning the bottom)

Good with hamburgers!

New BBQ

We have a small webber charcoal BBQ and we find that we don't use it as much as we would like because of the hassle of lighting it. We seem to have some really crappy fuel at the moment, maybe it got damp over the winter, but even with better stuff it is messy and time consuming. So we decided to invest in a gas one.
We bought a smallish Camping Gaz one which seemed to come in 1 million small pieces.

Taking many many MANY long hours to put together (heroic job Doug!). Unhelped by one teeny tiny (but crucial) screw making a successful bid for freedom in to the overly long grass of the lawn (eat faster bunnies!)
Finally it was successfully built and we cooked some yummy burgers on it. Lit at the push of a button, heated up in 5 mins and the dirty bits are dishwasher washable, HURRAH!

Nice sunset too (lots of flashes of lightening and rumbles of thunder after dark too)

The Tour de France

This year the tour finished a stage in to Bagnères de Bigorre, our nearest town. It always comes quite close but does not always pass through Bagnères. In the end we actually decided to go and watch it from a spot in the mountains, just after they finished the last climb as it was going to be packed in town. Lots of people told us that we needed to get up at the crack of dawn and be at our chosen viewing spot by 7am AT THE LATEST - the tour passed through Payolle where we planned on being at about 3.30pm! However we ignored them and sauntered up there for lunch, arriving about 12ish. There was a nice space the size of our car just of the road that we slotted in to before having lunch under a tree and mooshing around a bit. It was pretty busy, but we parked along the very end and found a bit of road with only a few people where we got an excellent view. Before the bikes come through there is 'The Caravan' which is a lot of themed vehicles advertising the various sponsors, they throw hats and other rather crappy freebies as they drive by. The haribo where good though.

We were on a quite flat piece of road along which the bikes went at an astonishing speed. I don't know how fast, but it was highlighted particularly by the speed of the support cars and motor bikes which really made you feel you were standing too close to a very fast road.

You didn't really get a feel for the race as a whole because you only saw the bikes for a few seconds, then they were past and they were going so fast you couldn't really see who was who. But overall it was a fun day as the atmosphere was great, we chatted with a few people and afterwards we hung around and had a BBQ in the woods while we waited for the traffic jam back in to town to die down.
My bro who is visiting watches on TV and was keen to see it in real life. He will be back other years apparently. We will try to station ourselves on a climb next time as the cyclists are going slower - but they are the favored spots.

A year of Poppy

On the 6th of July 2012 we took a long journey to fetch a 3 month old puppy from somewhere north of Toulouse, a couple of hours drive away. On being let out of the cage with her brothers and sisters she shot off at high speed and disappeared for several minutes round the corner before rushing back manically and bouncing all over us. She still behaves exactly like this a year on.
While in Bagenères recently we wondered why we couldn't remember it being so bustling last summer, we came to the conclusion that it was because we hardly made it there last summer due to being exhausted from lack of sleep as Poppy refused to go to sleep at night and woke up early, plus the few hours we had any energy we spent trying to train her to walk on a lead and not jump on people (both still works in progress - the lead thing is much better though).
But despite all that we still love her dearly as she is very affectionate and gentle (unless you are a bunny rabbit, cat or chicken) and loves nothing more than a cuddle in the evening.

A broody hen

One of our chickies has gone broody, the guy we got the eggs from in the spring gave us 15 more eggs as it is apparently the end of the fertilised egg season (they don't keep so well when it is hot I suppose).
We couldn't really put as many as 15 under her so we have put 8 some in the incubator and 7 under her.
After a couple of days of sitting we found the eggs uncovered and a bit cool. The other chickens push her off the eggs so they can lay in the nest box.
On the optimistic assumption that the eggs were growing, and that they survived being a bit cold, we have repaired a fallie apart hen house that someone gave us so she can sit on her own and not be disturbed.

Mating the bunnies

Well, frankly mating the bunnies didn't go exactly to plan. We put them in together as instructed - bunny girl in bunny boy's cage. They ran around frantically for about 5 seconds, then the bunny boy cowered in the corner for the rest of the day and didn't make any kind of attempts to 'do the business'. Bunny Girl prodded him a bit to try to get him interested but it didn't seem to work. Doug thinks he prefers boys, but I think he is just a bit too young and doesn't have the right urges yet.

We are going to wait a couple of weeks and try again.

New Horse!

Har har not OUR new horse!
Tigi (who has been staying with us for some time) has been sold because she is a bit too thorough bred and feisty with butterflies in her head. Her replacement is a good solid chunky cob type like Daisy and Owen, he is called Voltaire, he is quite young at 5 years old, but seems very calm and sensible

At the moment he is introducing himself to Daisy and Owen. There has been a bit of running around and prancing with some kicking and bucking, but nothing to drastic. Bit of a worry but hopefully they will all be friends by morning.