Pruning the raspberries and corking the house

This week has been pretty relaxing actually, and for the most part this has involved pruning raspberry plants (not trees, nor bushes – what are they called I wonder?). By pruning, I actually mean cutting them all down so they can grow again next year, so no marks for any cleverness there really, nice and simple. Except when you have a speedy toddler to keep up with! This actually ended up being easier than anticipated as, surprisingly there were still quite a few raspberries on the plants, and once Tegan had worked this out she went a hunting and gathering. Every now and then we heard a cry of “more raspberries” and with a bit of direction she was once again occupied. There were also walnuts left on the ground, so she was mostly satisfied for the majority of the time. Once said raspberry plants had been all cut down the chickens were then let loose amongst them to pick at all the bits (not too sure what these “bits are but they seemed happy). Oh just how much fun can once small person have chasing chickens endlessly in and around the posts (put up to keep the plants straight) whilst we weeded the stinging nettles that were left!? I am sure the chickens think “hello chickens”  (repeated endlessly) means “run”!

Tegan having a little rest!

We still continue to sit around the campfire at night and have only eaten inside once. We have moved into the pigsty (old pigsty converted into a studio apartment) so are in the lap of luxury, except there is no heater (or not one that we can use at least) so we are keeping an eye on the weather. At the moment all is well and warm enough, but we have been informed that the weather is on the turn with the full moon next week. Which is also apparently when funny things happen, because of the moon…………

Some of the WWOOFERS have gone although more we think due to arrive. The raw food eating ones left without us getting the chance to explore this curious eating habit further. We are lead to believe that it is something to do with not killing the spirit of the food. There are actually only 5 of us now (6 if your count Tegan), although the work doesn’t seem to have increased any and a generally flexible relaxed attitude to getting things done, sharing the cooking and washing up prevails. I never though that living in a community (although technically this is not really a community as such) would really be my thing, but so far it is a really nice atmosphere.

Mostly the people seem ordinary, and quite like us, with not too many whacky ideas. But occasionally there are some slightly more bizarre ideas on universe and the like (did you not know the world will end in 2011/2012?), and we stop to consider what we think about such things. While we all seem to share the core thoughts about limiting our impact on the environment and a respect for the great outdoors there are also some ideas floating around that are quite new to us. I would say that so far we are not about to jump at most, and while we are toying with the idea of using washing balls in the washing machine when we get home (to reduce the amount of washing powder) we are intrigued, mystified, outraged and amused in fairly even measure by some of the stranger wackier ideas we hear.  I like to think I am open minded, but sometimes my sense of the ridiculous gives me a little kick.

Last weekend we went to Coilloures which is a beautiful seaside town – such a lovely sunny day and such a beautiful place. Tegan was able to run around and play in the sand and we ate take away pizza on the beach. We also spent a day in Ceret where we have found a lovely cyber cafe to sit and scoff lovely sandwiches and use their internet facilities.

Tegan playing with pebbles

The beach

 

Tegan in Ceret chasing Daddy

Andy spent a few half days with Evan, one of the other WWOOFers helping Laurent from the next house (a couple of miles away down the valley) with some building work. His house is in the shadow of the mountain and doesn’t get any sunlight from November to February and so gets very cold. To insulate it he is corking it, that is, sticking up 1m by 0.5m tiles, 10cm thick onto the outside of the house. A slightly bizarre concept at first inspection but apparently these tiles are a wonderous material and are resistant to rotting, vermin and insects. They’ve corked one side of the house and it was still standing when we went past this morning so all’s well. Its been very interesting to discuss eco building ideas with Laurent. Certainly plently of food for thought this week.

The Pyrenees Orientales and an ode to donkey pooh....

So here we are in the third place on our adventures - the stunning Pyrenees Orientales, near a town called Amelie les Bains on another isolated farm, up 9 km of really very windy (but tarmaced road).

The weather has been amazing and we are still comfortably eating all our meals out doors. There are a few other WWOOFers and a few paying guests and we all have meals together. We are loving the evening campfires too which provide a cosy place to sit before and after meals where we can chat and drink "green tea" - another WWOOFER'S name for the cheap larger that is provided (it's in green cans)! Even got my guitar out last night, wanting to feel like I was doing the proper campfire thing - can't actually play more than a few cords, so quickly put it down again, but it felt good to do! And the stars are amazing - such clear skies. 

We've had to work pretty hard - half the time shovelling and carting donkey pooh for compost- we shifted 47 big sacks of the stuff down the mountain to the garden. We had to take a cart up the hill each time which was a bit of a walk and on the way I was inspired to come up with a little ditty:

Oh donkey pooh, oh donkey pooh how fabulous you are
for the garden and the compost heap
we have brought you from afar
We dig you up and drag you down the hill onto the farm
And count the bags that are piling up
and proudly feel my arms
and legs, and back, that are joining in the list of aching parts.
It's rather nice in all this sun to do this tough old job
And we're very glad there is no rain or we'd be walking in a bog
of donkey pooh, ah yes you're great, but we'll leave you there for now.
A different job next week I think, and for now a nice sit down!

Andy's actually on wood chopping duty now, and I've been making jam, and we've all been woking as master bakers making bread and cakes which got sold on a market stall today here in Ceret. Should we be asking for a cut?!

Tegan has been helping us in everything we do in her own inimitable style and seems to be really enjoying herself - there's chickens, a rabbit, horse, dogs and cats all of which she loves, not to mention the river, woods and gardens to keep her amused. Just as importantly the other people here also seem to enjoy Tegan's company and she has managed to entertain everyone with her friendly chat and comic ways!

There are a few rather unusual people who we are learning about, including those who only eat raw food - not quite sure what to say about this at the moment, will wait until I have learnt more! And a couple who have been WWOOFING for 4 years - not bad!

We are writing this in an internet cafe so I think it's time to go now and maybe we will be better organised to write some more inspiring thoughts next time.

The journey of the stick and other stories

So here we are again, packing up ready for the next place! We have had a really great two weeks here with Jan and Dave, been totally spoilt with lovely food, wine and beer and the cosy little flat that we have been living in. Have learnt absolutely no French and communication has been nice and easy. Definitely time to move on!

We had 1 1/2 days off last weekend and went to Montpellier on a wet and miserable Saturday. Very cool place indeed, with a nice cheap and easy tram from the park and ride into the centre of town. Had a great meal at “L’assiette de boeuf” – being a non meat eater I wasn’t immediately drawn to this particular place, but it was raining hard, it was 2pm and they had salmon on the set 11 Euro menu. What a find! Very lovely lunch swashed down with half a litre of red, fantastic. Pedestrianised streets meant that we could comply to Tegan’s demands of “walk” and the rain eased off, so all was well.

The next day we went to the Cirque du Navaselles – beautiful valley in a gorge, rather breathtaking I would say. It’s a sort of ox-bow lake type feature. We walked along the gorge for a bit and had a picnic by the river, all very civilised. And we found a stick – a small non-descript piece of wood that we got Tegan to throw in the water so we could watch it float down stream. She wasn’t particularly interested in it after that but it somehow provided some great entertainment for Andy and I, trying to help move it down the river. Little things on a sunny afternoon………………………………..!

 

Cirque du Navaselles

     

And left a bit down the valley!

The rest of the week has seen us carrying on with lots of collecting wood, clearing bushes and setting fire to things, I think we have both quite enjoyed this, as it feels quite satisfying. Maybe we both have repressed tidy streaks in us! We also put Tegan to work again doing some more weeding (she’s good at that as long as you keep a very close eye on what she pulls up!) and stacking small logs which she did seem to get quite in to.

Helene feeding the bracken fire.

Tegan’s helping with the log stacking (more like stick stacking I suppose!).

 

Tegan examining some more piles of wood.

And yet more wood!

I ended the day today with clearing the leaves out of the swimming pool – if we ever build a swimming pool (thinking the chances are slim to zero on this one) best not to do it under loads of trees with big leaves. All looks quite easy to clean, but the leaves didn’t comply with my chasing them with a giant sieve thing. Not one of my most successful exploits. Andy managed to break the prong off a garden fork whilst digging up a bramble bush – those muscles……………!

Off to near Amelie des Bains (nearish Perpignan) tomorrow although will be staying the night in Carcassonne on the way so we can check it out.

Wildlife we’ve discovered………………..

 

Some kind of stripey cricket thing – as yet unidentified (by us I mean!)

Preying mantis larvae -  there are loads of eggs inside this little thing apparently.

Arbutus (strawberry tree) – you can eat them apparently but not too many as they give you stomach ache

 

Chestnut (La Chataigne) – yes they hurt when you pick them up and several at once are like stickle bricks!

I’m a lumberjack and I’m alright…..

Yes, this week we have been mainly chopping down trees (or at least collecting bits of chopped down trees) but, contrary to Monty Python, we’ve resisted the inclination to wear high heels.

We’ve had a great week in the hills of the Cevannes. We are staying with Jan and Dave, a retired English couple, in a converted silk farmhouse nestled in its own valley and hidden by woods on all sides. We have been given luxury accommodation in a flat at the top of the farmhouse and Jan is a trained chef so our meals are fantastic and plentiful. Dave likes a drop of beer with his lunch and vin rouge with tea and we’re more than happy to accept his invitation to share!

They have 25 hectares of woodland and much of the work concerns the constant battle to prevent the woodland encroaching onto the house and the processing of timber into fire wood. For us city folk this is all something of a revelation. Collecting firewood is not simply a case of collecting sticks from the wood. Fallen trees or branches in the wood need to be cut into manageable lengths. These need to be left for anything up to 3 years depending on the type of wood to let them dry out. We have been collecting these dry lengths from the wood and moving them down into stockpiles ready to be sawn into short lengths for the fire. The evergreen oak for the open fire goes into one pile and the strawberry trees (arbutus and yes its berries look like strawberries) goes in another pile for the wood burning stove. We leave the chestnut wood as this spits and generally doesn’t burn so well. The short lengths are left to dry out some more before we carry them down to the farmhouse and stack them up in the wood shed for winter.

‘I’m a fire starter – twisted fire starter!’, as the Prodigy once sang and whilst I may not be so twisted I have been starting an awful lot of fires this week in a bid to keep the forest at bay. It’s unlawful to start a fire between March and October and having seen how quickly relatively damp bracken goes up I can see why. I now know that ivy leaves (even green ones) are highly flammable and burn with a surprising ferocity and that if you leave a 2m high pile of damp bracken to smoulder then by morning it will have entirely turned to ash.

Tegan seems to be enjoying her new place (and the chocolate pudding that she had this evening!). She has recently added “croissant” to her vocabulary and has made friends with the dog – Mally, cats Bill and Ben and the three goldfish (all with names starting with F that I can’t remember). Other new skills acquired include the ability to count (there are a lot of steps for her to practice on), although the sequence generally goes 1,2 6,9 and sometimes 11! I don’t suppose there is any reason to stick to convention at this stage. She has also been doing some weeding today – pulling up some of the dug up weeds and adding them to the pile, very productive. In general she is on good form, although she does have some new teeth coming through and definitely has moments of being a real toddler when she displays a strong independent streak. The whole change of lifestyle and the moving about can’t be that easy for her to get to grips with, but she seems content to soak up all the new information around her like a little sponge. We also make sure we give her extra cuddles and attention now and again just to let her know that everything is ok (and mummy and daddy aren’t completely mad!).

Nous sommes ici (6/11/09)

Escape from the woodland crusties, and a bit of car trouble……….

Well it wouldn’t be an adventure if all went according to plan (is the way to look at it I suppose!). We left the relative calm and security of Sarrancolin to our next destination near St. Etienne d’Albagnan all full of excitement and wonder at the beautiful scenery that we kept meeting along the way. Added to this was 29 degrees of hot sunshine, what could go wrong?

Well, if you believe in fate, karma or any of those signs that something is not quite right then I suppose getting lost around Toulouse was a bit of a giveaway. I blame this entirely on the French inability to name any of their roads in any sort of coherent fashion, or be in any way consistent with their road signs. That and the fact - that I fell asleep whilst Andy was driving (note – must only do this on motorways due to afore said navigational impediments) meant that we got off the motorway and ended up going back the way we had come on a main road. The result was that we got to our WWOOFING host after dark (about 6pm) feeling pretty tired, but still positive.

The road up to the “house” was incredibly bad – about half an hour of winding unsurfaced roads that ended up literally in the middle of a forest. We arrived to a whole host of people doing various things in the dark, and after standing around kissing some of these people in the dark (in the French greeting sort of way!) and exchanging names went into the house for food. The house was actually a kitchen with a room above it and about 10 people or so people were sat around a long table about to eat. It took us a while to work out that these were mostly other WWOOFERS. Andy thinks the first sign that we were not going to fit in entirely was surely the fact that he was the only one not sprouting a beard (although he had a pretty good unshaven stubble to be proud of). The food though was lovely (if a bit chestnut centric) and once we’d eaten there were murmerings about getting our caravan sorted. We knew that we were staying in a caravan, but didn’t know that everyone else was in caravans too (with the exception of an Israeli couple and their baby) and that the caravans were dotted around in the forest.  Still, we thought that all would look better in the daylight – ha, how wrong can you be?

Lets just say that the caravan was one of the most revolting places I have ever had to sleep (and that includes at least one cow shed in Nepal, and a trekking lodge with a nasty pair of old underpants on the bed). I can only put the photos here for all to see (they may not do the horror justice though) and say that even I (yes, even me) was speechless when I got through the door to see our accommodation. We finally got Tegan to sleep and basically got in our sleeping bags, slept a night on a very ropey mattress and left the next morning unsure what to do next but very sure we didn’t want to be there. Comfort zone well and truely exceeded!

The mattress and dining table. Note also bits of tree holding up the ceiling, and the designer curtains.

The other end.

This caravan definitely hadn’t been anywhere for a while (various bricks holding it up).

We trundled down the hill to Olargues a  beautiful small town nearby and found a lovely bar to have coffee and croissants. It was here that we spent the next night in a B&B and most of the day trying to find somewhere to go next, or at least rearrange our timetable a bit. It was also here that we met Theresa a fascinating “local” English woman who had been there 30 years and was just fun to chat to, and entertained Tegan. And here that the wife of a local restaurant owner managed to hit the side of our parked car by somehow mounting the pavement and denting the side of the car that was next to the pavement. It seemed impossible that someone could get a car into the space if they’d tried, never mind by accident, but there we go! Happily, Mr restaurant left his business card and we went to see him in his little (and rather posh looking) restaurant in a nearby village to sort out the details. Should’ve asked for a free meal while we were at it…………..

Yes – she got her car between the metal railing and our car (dent just in front of the right wheel).

We happily pottered around Olargues in the hot sunshine that day, not feeling too worried that no one seemed to want to take us on for the next few weeks. We managed to bring forward our December WWOOF to 15th Nov, it was just a question of what to do in between then and now. The B & B was lovely but not really economical for more than one night, however the idea of a holiday seemed quite appealing at this point mind you……….

So the next day we found ourselves sat in the car in front of the B&B with the map in our hands wondering where to go next! We decided to point the car in the direction of the Ardeche, based on the fact that I had never been to that bit of France (nor did I really know what was there) and that I had a friend there that we may be able to call if we maybe needed a bed for the night. We had called all the WWOOFING hosts in the neighbouring districts and had had no luck at such short notice, although spoke to some very friendly people, including one or two who had heard some bad things about the place from which we had just escaped.

We drove along in a sort of Pooh Bear way, not really knowing where we were heading and not overly concerned. We stopped at a town called Bedarieux for lunch, described quite rightly by the Rough Guide as “unremarkable” and Andy suddenly had the idea that we should go to Millau. This is a town famous for its giant feat of engineering – the Millau Viaduct, and it was sort of in the general direction we thought we may want to go. So off we went, quite pleased I think to actually have a destination.

Millau turned out to be a nice, large town with all the facilities we needed and we stayed three nights in a “Fast Hotel” – cheap and cheerful on the outskirts of town. It was actually pretty lucky that we ended up taking a pit stop here as it was when we got into the town that we noticed a small drip, drip, drip of petrol coming out of the car. I feared that I had done something terrible to the car whilst driving along the last “not quite road” as I had in fact grounded the car a couple of times! We found a Peugeot garage just down the road from the hotel, although by the time we got there it was shut. Fortuitously as it would turn out, we went round the corner to Laselle Pneus (a branch of First Stop- like KwikFit at home) and a really nice mechanic sorted everything out. The problem turned out to be wear and tear to a pipe going from the petrol cap to the tank and was not my fault (phew) but just corroded with age.

Over the next couple of days we recharged our batteries, and looked into more options for places to go phoned more WWOOFING hosts in some other regions. Again, no luck – a combination of the time of year, short notice and the fact that not everyone is keen on having children along for the ride. We almost forgot to revisit HelpX – another website that we had looked at, similar to WWOOFING but with less emphasis on the organic farm element. Ah ha – success! We are now off to a place in the Cevannes for 2 weeks, to not learn French as the hosts are English, but it will provide us something to keep us occupied for a couple of weeks!