La Darnoire

The first snow of the season; we awoke to find everything covered with around 5cm of the white stuff. It snowed off and on during the day, then turned to rain, which effectively melted all the snow.

All the bonsai trees excepting the big pine were moved indoors a couple of days ago; because the pots are very shallow the roots are susceptible to frost. The big one is in a deeper pot, so it can stay outside for a bit longer.

Last night the temperature dipped to -4° C. The pond had frozen over, and stayed that way for most of the day.

We did our usual weekly shopping in Salbris; one has to be careful on these Departmental roads because they are liable to contain black ice in places.

The afternoon was spent cutting more wood with the chainsaw; the workshop is now nearly empty of scrap bits of wood; we were using one end of the workshop to store all the old bits of timber we had come across whilst de-junking the house and outbuildings!

As far as garden produce goes, we’re still eating watermelons, although now we only have one remaining! Not bad going – eating watermelons in December in the northern hemisphere!

RIP Kenwood.

Yesterday was a sad day; our Kenwood BM200 bread machine gave up the ghost. I’d put all the ingredients in the breadpan, but when I plugged the machine in to the mains, it gave a sad feeble chirrup and the display went blank.

It wasn’t the fault of the plug or the socket. So it looks like we’ll need to get another one. Still, I can’t complain; it’s been used on average twice a week. Every week. For twelve years.

As I hate getting my fingers sticky with dough, LSS finished kneading the dough mix by hand in a bowl, and then we baked it in our Panasonic Dimension 4 Genius combination microwave/grill/oven.

This is starting to sound like an advertisement for kitchen gear! But I just wanted to point out that the oven is even older than the bread machine. It’s been used daily since I bought it. And it’s just turned eighteen.

I’m pleased to report our new kitchen woodstove is working brilliantly.

What? A new stove? No, it’s new to us, but it’s second-hand, and was probably made in the 1970’s. It has seen very little use though. Our old Rosieres was just getting more and more difficult to use, because the seals around the top cast-iron plate had long ago ceased to exist.
Despite having thoroughly cleaned the chimney, we found that the only way we could get the stove going in the mornings was to open all the doors and windows, switch off the newly-installed VMC (extractor fan), and wait for half an hour before the stovepipe was hot enough to draw properly. If we missed out just one of these steps, the kitchen filled with smoke.

So last week LSS had a look on Leboncoin.fr and we spotted a very reasonably-priced kitchen woodburner for sale in a village about 60km away. We asked our neighbour to help with loading and unloading, as these things must weigh nearly 200kg. As it turned out, he was very pleased we had asked him to come along to assist, because the person selling the stove also had a small forge for sale, which was just what our neighbour had been looking for! There was sufficient room on the trailer for the forge, so everyone was happy.

Not only that, but the stove we bought also came with a stainless steel stovepipe! Our old one was definitely not stainless steel, being a very rusty brown colour!

Both stove and rusty stovepipe have now been consigned to the scrap-metal junk-pile. The new stove is installed and functioning, and not only that, not a whisp of smoke escapes when we light it! It seems to put out a lot more heat than the old one, and the dinner LSS made yesterday (burgers and potato wedges) seemed to taste even better than before.

Some progress has also been made with the household water supply; I have become a dab hand at soldering copper pipes together, and water has now reached our new “ballon” in the loft. Hopefully by the end of next week we’ll have nice, clean, transparent borehole water on tap in the kitchen, which will make a nice change from the rust-coloured mouse-flavoured well water we’ve been using in the bath for the past seven months.

I have a certain sympathy for our ancestors. The ones who lived off the land. I’ve spent the evenings of the past two weeks peeling chestnuts, and shelling hazelnuts. Goodness gracious what a lot of work.

I did use some chestnut flour to make some bread. Very tasty, but it doesn’t rise quite as much. The poor food processor was struggling to make the flour; dried chestnuts are incredibly hard. I’m considering looking for a hollow log and using it the way that African women grind their corn. It’s been a bit chilly recently, but we’re still enjoying watermelons, cape gooseberries, raspberries (and of course, chestnuts).

The sloe wine finally finished fermenting, so has been bottled and put away. It’s a 13.5% brew. LSS found several pots of honey in the aged FIL’s pantry; they had been there for years. Instead of throwing them away, we decided to make mead out of them; so we now have a demijohn of mead bubbling away behind the fridge. We haven’t been lazy!

I also swept the chimney a couple of weeks ago, as the stove has been smoking heavily lately. Had to do it first thing in the morning because it was still around 2 degrees outside; the chimney-cleaning hatch is right next to a wasps nest, and the only way I could sweep the chimney without getting dive-bombed by lots of angry wasps was by doing it when it was too cold for them to fly. It took ages for my fingers to warm up. But at least we now have a clean chimney. Is there a market for around 3 pounds of soot? I left it in a neat little pile in the field across the road.

We also got some fuel for the tractor recently, and in a dark recess of the fuel store I discovered a Jerrycan. No, a real one. It’s marked “Kraftstoff 20 l – Feuergefährlich – 1942 – Nowack Bautzen – Wehrmacht”. It must have been left behind by the retreating German army. 70 years old and still being used!

Some progress has been made since my last post; the front door (double-glazed) has finally been installed. I’ve also fabricated a panel to go above the door using some scrap pieces of oak; it contains two adjustable vents so at least we’ll be able to regulate the airflow. Unlike the previous panel, which had an unregulated airflow because one of the panes of glass had a massive hole in it.

The continually-growing mould in the house finally became too much, so I’ve installed a ventilation system upstairs. It consists of an airvent in the pantry, and two in the bedroom ceiling. These are linked by means of flexible pipes to an extractor fan, which runs continually. Only time will tell whether this cures the mould or not, but at least we’re now getting some ventilation to these rooms.

Yesterday was LSS’s birthday, so we decided to celebrate by going to a restaurant. Oh dear, finding a restaurant open on a Tuesday in France is not an easy task. All those we visited in Lamotte Beuvron were closed. We ended up going to the “Au Coin du Feu” in Salbris. And very nice it was too.

Work on the workshop outbuilding is also progressing nicely; I’ve run plastic conduit through the roof space in the barn into the workshop, and the next job is to feed the electrical wiring through the conduit. Once that is done, I’ll be installing an overhead fluorescent light and a couple of plug points. Power tools will soon be available without having to use a 30-metre extension lead!

I also used up our stock of old car tyres in the pond. Two of the banks are eroding, and if we didn’t do anything the pond would soon encompass the garden. I’d known about using tyres as erosion control, but I hadn’t made the connection between the enlarging pond and erosion; it was my sister who suggested the idea! The local agricultural garage is only too happy to give us their old tyres (as they can’t get rid of them!) and also to supply us with old wooden pallets. We’ll need to pay them another visit to get some more. I’m using the pallets to construct a wood shed. The base and lower walls have been completed – I just need to get another nine pallets to finish the walls. The roof will consist of corrugated iron – there are sundry sheets of the stuff lying around on the farm.

Hence the lack of posts recently – I’ve been busy!

But I must end by mentioning the wild boar hunt which took place on the property last weekend – the hunters ended up getting two wild boar, one of which weighed in at a hefty 110kg. We went to see them butchered at a neighbouring farm, and LSS was presented with both boar heads. Undeterred, she made brawn out of them (I don’t particularly like brawn, but there was sufficient meat in the neck area to make several stews. THAT I do like!)

Blooming cat! She had been missing for over 48 hours, and it was very unlike her to miss a meal.

The only thing we could think of was that she’d been taken by a fox.

We had wandered around the property but did not see as much as a whisker. LSS and I were obviously quite upset about it.

But this evening, lo and behold, she turns up, asking for dinner. No sooner had she wolfed it down, when she was off out again. I don’t think we have a cat anymore. We just happen to feed one.

A very grey day today, weatherwise. So we took the opportunity to have a haircut. I cut LSS’s hair, and she cut mine.

We then took a stroll down one of the field paths she’d cleared with the tractor/brushcutter on Friday. We’ve nicknamed it “Sloe Alley” because there are several heavily-laden Prunus spinosa trees all in a row. We had taken a bucket with us, and about 40 minutes of picking resulted in 3.3kg of fruit. The next batch of sloe wine is under way…

After lunch we visited the chestnut trees which grow opposite the house and gathered a bowlful of chestnuts. I’ve started peeling them in order to make chestnut flour. It’s a very labour-intensive process!

For dinner we had pot-roasted pheasant (the bird was donated to us by M&O as a thank-you present for clearing the alleyways around the fields to improve hunting access for M&O’s group of hunters). This was served with fried mushrooms which we gathered yesterday afternoon. We collected a whole basketful, and LSS has cooked and frozen some for later use. They’re the Macrolepiota procera (parasol) which seem to like the grassy areas which were cut short by the tractor/brushcutter. Dinner was very tasty indeed.

Goodness gracious, October already! Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

We’ve been exceedingly busy at La Darnoire Towers recently. Yesterday I bottled our home brewed 7.5% beer, and today was the turn of this year’s batch of 15.3% elderberry wine. This pleasant task was unfortunately interrupted by having to cut some more wood for the wood stove; we’re still going through all the scrap wood we put to one side when we first moved in, and I suspect there’s still enough there to see us through the winter. Still, the advantage is we can heat our bathwater on the kitchen stove without it costing us anything!

On the home renovation front, the new double-glazed windows have now been installed in the bedroom and lounge, and the walls around the windows have been re-plastered using lime render.

Today was also a major milestone. Last Saturday LSS and I lowered the new borehole pump into the borehole, having first of all carefully attached it to a long piece of nylon rope. As you do. To supply power to the pump, we re-used some rigid cables which the aged FIL had lying around. Rigid cables are not the easiest electrical wiring with which to work, but they fitted in the end.

The pump is situated at a depth of 40 metres, and feeding the 32mm water pipe down the borehole tube was not the easiest task in the world either!

Today we fed the remaining 25m of 32mm water pipe through the corrugated tubing which had been buried to a depth of 80cm (for frost protection). It links the borehole itself to the house. I then jury-rigged a piece of 3-core cable to the borehole electric switch to test. I also connected up a length of garden hose to the borehole pipe to lead the water away. We are highly pleased to report that the pump is working very well, and the sight of our own borehole water gushing out of the hosepipe led me to dance a jig. Which is, for those of you that know me well, a very unusual occurrence indeed.

Our neighbours in the next county (just down the road from us, but the county border lies at one edge of the property!) had kindly donated an old 500 litre pressure vessel (ballon) which they no longer required. Well, I suppose we did invite them around for a wild boar barbecue, together with a springbok biltong apéritif! We’ve decided to use this ballon as our thermal store for the hot water. This will involve cutting the top off, cleaning it out thoroughly, and then drilling lots of holes for the various water pipe connections.

But obviously, a cold water supply is the first priority, hence the excitement at getting the borehole pump working!

On the kitchen front, LSS has made several pots of tomato sauce, several pots of tomato ketchup, lots of tomato soup, stuffed tomatoes… (spot a trend here?)
The garden has also produced lots of courgettes, carrots, beans, peas, beetroot, turnips, and – my personal favourite – gala melons and watermelons! Not to mention the strawberries, blueberries and raspberries, of course.
Unfortunately we had to throw away our new batch of blackberry wine. Because I only have one brewing belt, I had to wait for the beer to finish fermenting before I could add the yeast to the blackberry wort. And even though I had sterilized it with some campden tablets, it had started fermenting on its own and smelled rather rank. Maybe next year!

Wildlife diary: Wasps. In early summer, I noticed a few wasps flying in and out of a small opening next to the chimney, and decided to leave them alone. They appear to have built their nest between the kitchen ceiling and the floor of the roof space. They haven’t really bothered us, but one or two have started dropping in for a visit through the aperture between the kitchen ceiling and the wall. I’ll be glad when they die out this winter and I can fill up their entrance hole. It has however been fascinating to watch them from the safety of the kitchen window. They are the first insects stirring in the morning, even with temperatures as low as 2 degrees Centigrade; and they are the last insects flying about when it gets dark. They appear to work even harder than bees.

Don’t bother me…

As an update to the previous post regarding the theft from the aged FIL, further items have come to light. Or rather, they have not come to light because they’re missing. There’s a steel toolbox which apparently had a lot of spanners in it; a boxed screwdriver set, and also last week I needed to pump up the tractor tyres which were a bit flat. Lo and behold, the tyre inflator is also conspicuous by its absence.

So yesterday LSS spoke to the Garde Champêtre (the local town clerk/village policeman) who suggested that she make a statement to the police. It’s not that we are hopeful of getting the stolen items returned, but if it helps to prevent thefts from other aged persons in future….

Off we went to the Gendarmerie in Salbris where the only person on duty in the entire building seemed to be the desk sergeant. LSS explained the situation. The desk sergeant then informed us that we had to call the thief to ask him to return the items he’d taken.

Yes, dear readers, that’s what he said.

This advice seemed rather odd, so we slept on it. This morning, it still seemed odd. In my view it opens the door to all sorts of nastiness including possible defamation of character lawsuits etc. etc. But as we don’t have the thief’s telephone number, LSS spoke to the manager of the domestic aid service (the thief’s employer) and the manager was equally puzzled by this advice.

So LSS called the police sergeant again, to make an appointment so that she could give a statement.

The sergeant was considerably annoyed that LSS had not followed his advice. “In my experience, this usually solves cases of theft,” he said. I kid you not.

Wow, groundbreaking stuff! If this technique gets out, I can see the crime statistics dropping through the floor. It makes one wonder why we have a police force at all.

Personally I think the desk sergeant didn’t want to have to do any more work than was absolutely necessary. We discussed the matter with the aged FIL (who is now aware of what’s missing) and he just wants the whole matter dropped.