All change in the potager

Oh there you are. We were wondering if you had wandered off the electronic cliff and forgotten you write a blog post three times a week.

Well. Yes. I had to go to Australia for a trip. And decided to eschew sending you annual shots of eucalyptus trees and views of the sea. I always post the same shots and they really aren’t edifying for a gardener.

A sailor, yes. But not a rural French gardener. My thoughts were all back here at the little farm.

Here is a ‘before’ shot of life last year. The entrance to the lower part of the garden that leads onto the main potager.

Before the pipe work for the septic tank wreaked havoc; the prep work for the building and all sorts of nasties invaded this quiet patch of the potager.

It’s like looking at a treasured portrait of someone before they decided a radical punk haircut was a good idea.

And it’s such a quiet little scene. Just grass paths in between productive garden beds.

Changes are afoot. We have building work starting this autumn and winter and it will impinge on my potager. So instead of just watching my precious plants getting trampled by stone masons and lovely builders, I decided to do some remedial prep.

From afar.

From so afar that I had to hire Nicolas for a few days very hard graft to dismantle things on his own. And I never enjoy delegating… unless it’s something as fiddly as shifting my chestnut fence which is wrapping around half the vegetable garden.

And dismantling permaculture beds which I lovingly made. It’s vile to look on and see the bare earth after all that work.

But luckily Nicolas is a permaculture man himself and dismantled the beds carefully and stockpiled all the parts in a spare part of tarp behind the jostaberries. So I can rebuild. And regrow.

That is the beauty of gardens. You just start again. And never, ever count how many hours, months and years it took to make it in the first place.

The potager is now very tight against this chestnut fence. But it’s temporary. And rickety. And I’ll have to get used to it. In that stolid way one looks on an enforced change and tries to see the bright side.

Well, the dahlias just get on with it, thank goodness. That’s the bright side.

Inside the makeshift palisade there is lush and colour and crops.

Now, no more lurking inside looking at the dahlias on a screen. It’s Wednesday (I just checked, my time zones are shot) so that means cutting the flowers for tomorrow’s market.

And I shall avert my gaze from the horrors outside the fence.