Confinement 3 has come and nearly gone.
 |
| Finding the shade in the park. |
It's been a while since I wrote anything here. Sorry about that. Life has its way of pushing writing to the side when things get busy. Here in France, we're nearly at the end of our third national lockdown. There is still a curfew of 11PM, but restaurants, terraces, cinemas, cultural spaces are all re-opening. And just in time for the full-on summer to hit us. The national vaccination programme, with its agonisingly slow start, if finally in full swing and shaving nearly 2% of the general population off the un-vaccinated population every day. We are due for our second dose of Pfizer next week.
Population vaccinée (au 13 juin), par tranches d'âge. L'aire de chaque rond est proportionnelle au nombre d'habitants dans la catégorie d'âge. 💉#Covid19 pic.twitter.com/fSBQ4XzE5B
— Nicolas Berrod (@nicolasberrod) June 14, 2021
Spring seems to have given us a miss this year. We had a hard frost in mid-April that left the vintners out in their fields trying to coat their vines in ice to save the new growth. It was not as fantastic as the fires lit in the fields for the Bordeaux vines, but the local papers said that likely 30% of champagne vines were damaged or lost by the frost! Then from that cold weather straight into summer: hot, sunny, muggy, and dry.
In foraging news, the late frost meant that the usual spring flowers of cherry and elder were delayed. The elders seem to have recovered and are flowering like mad, just a bit later than last year. The cherries, on the other hand, seem to not be producing nearly as much fruit and in some cases no fruit at all. They had been flowering when the frost hit, so our wild cherry experiments are holding until next year.
The garden has already produced tons of strawberries and peas, and the beans are just getting going. Our carrots and radishes are taking off, and new this year are potatoes which seem to be doing well when we compare them to our neighbour's plants.
I have put my solar dehydrator to good use and I have been drying herbs from the garden, nettles (to make a nettle beer!), elder flowers, and more chamomile (I found some great plants growing out in the colza!).
The animals are all doing fine. We've gotten everyone to the vet to get their shots current, and we like the new vet. We're looking forward to when everyone is caught up, have their passports, and we can potentially travel.
J has been working non-stop, but vacation is coming up in July, so we are all looking forward to that.
I have been working as well, but what I am most excited about is a project I came up with after finding a twenty-year old regional tourism project that was very ambitious for its time. More to come on that if it works out. And that's on top of trying to plan renovation work! There's a lot going on over here, but I will attempt to share more of my projects as I finish them up. Several are near completion, and I just need to write them up.
Until next time!
