Autumn/Winter 2009. Mild temperatures and intermittent drizzle in much of November, interspersed with periods of brilliant warm sunshine and freezing nights in the run up to Christmas.
The gents from the local ‘chasse’ delivered part of their kill, as they do every year. This year it was a haunch of a deer, caught in our woods on Sunday, put straight into the freezer. Then the local firemen came round with their Christmas calendars and collecting box, the proceeds of which go towards their annual outing. You give whatever you like but it’s not obligatory. However you never know when you may need their services!
We finally put the winter cover on the pool: not the smart blue pool cover you’d imagine but some agricultural black plastic, as our pool is not a standard size. Anyway it’s effective and cheap!
Those pretty creeper clad French houses you dream of are lots of work in autumn. Once the leaves have turned crimson and russet, they fall. You are then left with the job of raking and disposing of the resulting mounds of damp leaves. However the children were delighted to find a salamander in one pile. It was allowed to waddle off to another dank home.
During a walk in dry bright weather we heard the haunting sounds of the cranes flying overhead in seemingly endless formations etched out against the brilliant blue sky.
Mushrooms everywhere: in the lawn, in the fields, peeping out of drifts of dead leaves in the woods. We are sick of field mushrooms, and I’ve been freezing them for soups and sauces later in the winter. More interesting are the strange and ugly yellow brown and cream mushrooms we find in the woods, and take into the pharmacy for identification by the pharmacist. In
In the garden we’ve collected all the fallen walnuts and put them to dry on racks, prior to storing them in string bags. I use the string sacks I buy my potatoes and onions in. This year there’s been a bumper crop of nuts after the superb extended summer. We shall not starve this winter!
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