The potato pile

A morning of propagating and sowing – rebuilding after all the washing away. I suspect we have lost all those lovely seeds from Ailefroide that we cast onto the banks. So time to see what assets we have and get on with a new batch. One thing you can say is we are stipa rich. All that looting (sorry, collecting) near the train station has yielded a mighty sackful.

Another task was to get those last pink fir potatoes out of the ground and into sacks and under cover. They are fine (well, some are green from exposure to the air, but I suspect that sort of damage happened during the summer when I tired of earthing up and was glutted on the tubers we already had.

The asparagus are none the worse for the storm. Had to read up about the spears to see when I have to cut them down. Not brown yet, so I have a bit of time.

Here is the huge box of the last pink fir apples. Naturally I couldn’t just start in on the excavating. No, had to do a bit of weeding first naturally. I need to get up there with gauntlets before winter if I’m to beat back the brambles that are sneaking through the wire fence. But if I turn my head away all I can see are raspberries and more cabbages and jostaberry cuttings doing very nicely indeed.

Am making amazing tomato sauce with some of the tomatoes for lunch (plus rosemary which I need to make more cuttings before winter. ) With slow cooking the tomatoes are densely rich and tantalising.

The afternoon was spent around the pool. Doesn’t that sound glam? Harrdly, it was remedial time. Everyone arrived at once, Bernard to dig a trench up at our guest house; M. Pontgerard and Pierre-Yves to re-do the decking on one side of the pool. And two electricians to install the new satellite dish. And I seemed to trot between the tasks helping and answering questions and generally getting a quarter of each job done.

But by the end of the day there is television in the house, a safer guesthouse if it floods again, a better deck and a cleaner pool. That’s where I planted myself for the majority of the afternoon. I think I am going to be vacuuming for most of this month.

Tonight after dinner it was washing and grading potatoes while I had my one day of thrill at having 350 television channels to choose from. Mind you, once one has had a surfeit of German shopping programmes. Budapest TV and inane news every fifteen minutes on three different channels all at once it was a quick scuttle back to the BBC radio and listening to a proper world news programme whilst bent over the potato pile in the sink.