New Years Eve

A spot of gardening. For a while there I wasn’t sure I was going to make it outside. Which would have been frustrating as it was such a lovely sunny day.   But there was the playful job of trying to get the electricity working in the house.   That meant waiting inside for M. Carriat to work his magic.   And then I had to nip up to the shops.

Nipping up to the shops is a relative thing in rural France. So it took an hour and a half.   That was because it was New Years Eve queuing. First at the boulangerie, and then the same crowd at the butchers.

And then it was but a short traffic jam for the supermarket car park.   Which is comical as it’s usually a tumbleweed sort of town.   But I emerged and managed to get down and dirty in the potager just before lunch.

I have been inspired to make some changes in the vegetable garden in 2013. Last night, owing to no electricity, we were reduced to reading our Christmas books by the light of the fire and about a dozen candles.   It was very 19th century;  but also very enjoyable.   And my reading material was Joy Larkcom’s memoir Just Vegetating.

It is an inspiration and scary to think that so many of the vegetables we take for granted in our seed catalogues were unknown to the general public  just 30 years ago.   Larkcom was a pioneer British ‘plant hunter’ in the fact she took her family on a one year caravanning adventure around Europe seeking out old varieties of heritage seeds and sending them back to seed banks in Britain.

And reading someone passionate about vegetable gardening reminded me that I used to be passionate too.   And have to pick up my game.

One of the things I was pondering was how to evade the problem of moles. I’m never going to get rid of them (being a tree hugging greenie) but I have to try and beat them at their game.   So randomly sowing the parsnips and interplanting them with something else seems to be the solution.   A Larkcom idea.   But I must make careful notes and plan appropriately.   Right now, sowing them in rows seems to be the equivalent of a supermarket trolley dash.

So with all these plans in mind, I have cleared one quadrant of the potager; removing the verbena bonariensis to the wildflower garden and marking out ideas.   I think I am going to sow things north to south this year.   Rather than east to west.

That feels radical and exciting.   And that’s the spark I need. Fun things in the veggie bed.   And on that note; Artur and I would like to wish you all a happy new year.

May it be a year of good gardening, contented cats and happiness.