Digging over the vegetable bed (working off breakfast)

‘We don’t eat breakfast during the week, so we like to take a bit of enjoyment on the weekend.’

And with those words Nicow invited us to tuck in. Oh my, what a feast. Brioche, croissants, all manner of exciting pastries I didn’t even have time to sample.  Earl grey tea and home made jam.

And for once I didn’t have to make the jam. This was the feast laid on by our friends Marion and Nicow who had invited us up to Paris for a weekend of rugby and fine food.

Thanks to Nicow we had brilliant seats and experienced a fantastic atmosphere. I waved like a Mexican, roared when the trumpet called, sang the Marseillaise, clapped and cheered appropriately. And still France lost.

To console ourselves, we went to a wonderful Pyreneean restaurant near the Opéra for dinner. Spicy just cooked calamari as a starter, slow roast pork belly with salad and chips, then the who ordered that chocolate fondant with a bit of spice for dessert? The whole restaurant seemed to have also been to the match; boistrous doesn’t quite cover how animated the place was.  I loved it.

And then this breakfast treat.

I wanted to sample Marion’s mother’s quince jelly. And the pear jam. So I was forced to try the brioche and a croissant. Honest.

I’ve never eaten pear jam before: surely it has such a low pectin level that it is hard to set. But the flavour was delicate and the texture firm. I must try and ask Marion for the recipe.

We don’t grow any pears on our farm as the soil is just plain wrong. And the climate vile for such a juicy autumn fruit.  But I could try my hand at it in London where we work through many a conference pear at breakfast

Needless to say after all this rather special and luxurious Paris feasting (no sensible pears) we came back to the farm determined to do a bit of exercise.

A lot in fact. I dug over part of the top vegetable bed before it became too dark to see.

I don’t normally dig any part of the vegetable gardens, preferring to hoe off the weeds and then cover with compost.

But I had sown clover here as a green manure and left this part of the garden fallow for two years. So I felt it was time to turn the good clover into the soil and let things break down for a few weeks.

I’ll be planting spuds here next.  For a just before dusk encore I spread wood ash on all the garden beds and around the fruit trees in the orchard. Believe me, I appreciated the walk.