Topic: Our bit of France!

[peanuts]

I can't resist posting a couple of photos of our newly rotovated veg patch, after seeing Goodlife's beautiful prepared bit of Britain! I love it when it looks like this, no weeds visible, although plenty of weed seeds in the soil I know, along with nasty mole crickets!
Yesterday I sowed the first peas, and I'm full of hope now I've at last sown something. We still have a good patch of winter veg - leeks,  sprouting broccoli, sprouts and Savoy cabbage, plus some frizzy lettuce iunder the cloche, and the last parsnips hiding somewhere.  Autumn raspberries are all along the side of the patch.  As you can see we have BEAUTIFUL weather at the moment, ideal for spring gardening, even if it is frosty first thing in the morning.  It will be up to  near 20º by mid-day.
We are blessed with a soil that is virtually stone free.  Oddly though that is just this part of the garden.  Elsewhere in the garden, even just 10 metres away, the ground is full of stones including many  huge round river bed stones. 

[saddad]

Lovely...
your description of the soil suggests you might be in the silt by an old river course or morraine.. do you ever flood?
 :-\

[peanuts]

We are at the bottom of the hill, and probably the river ran near here several  hundred years ago,m or more.  Now the river is a mile and a half away, thankfully, and lower down too.  Touch lots of wood, we don't flood, but one quarter of our garden is known as the lake, when it rains very hard or long 


Four years ago when we moved here, in March, it rained what seemed like every day, right up until mid June.  Hasn't been like that since, thankfully.  But we were a little miserable, and when we saw some very lifelike plastic decoy ducks, we cheered ourselves up by buying one, with two chicks, to swim in our lake!

[shirlton]

Absolute heaven

[elvis2003]

beautiful! when can we all come to stay?  ;)

[antipodes]

Whereabouts are you in France? There are now a few of us on here!!! I am in the suburbs of Nantes. Bonjour!

[peanuts]

We are very lucky to live on the edge of the Pyrenees. Plenty of rain, occasional ferocious storms, but also warm sunshine in the winter, such as today's.  I think I'm off to do some gardening now it has warmed up a little!

[Paulines7]

It looks lovely.  We stayed at a campsite near Argeles Gazost ten years ago and the wild flowers in that area of the Pyrenees were spectacular. 

How much land do you have there? 

[bridgehouse]

Oh so lovely, and what a lot of land .
   June.

[peanuts]

We moved here from a very old town house (1700s) which had a small  but very productive terraced garden. I used to love thinking of all the people who had worked it before us.  Now we are in a big village, and with far too big a garden.  Still it did enable us to host our son's wedding  a couple of years ago, which was wonderful.  Their vicar even came out to marry them in our garden (they'd done the 'official civil wedding beforehand - she is Brazilian).  It even made history as the first C of E wedding broadcast live on the internet - for the benefit of various relations and elderly grandparents in foreign parts!
We have 5500 sq metres, or about an acre and a third I think. It is completely flat, so a nice change, but the water table is quite near the surface.  At least that means we have a well for watering the garden that hasn't so far run out.
There was no veg patch when we arrived, so we lifted the turf by hand bit by bit the first year, really hard work, and just kept going till we reached the end of that rectangle, without planning just how much a retired couple might actually need!  So we give lots and lots of fruit and veg away.

[Robert_Brenchley]

It's not moraine; too far south, and far too flat. The stony stuff may well be an old river course, while the nice soil is silt from the old flood plain.

[peanuts]

The odd thing, Robert, is that over our acre and a third, there are parts (e.g. the entire area we luckily chose for our veg patch) where the soil is light clay we think, and there are no stones, tiny or big,  and lots of other places where the soil is different,  much lighter, with loads and loads of  small rounded or really big rounded river bed stones - I'm talking well over a foot across. When I think of our good but very stony veg patch we used to have in the UK where I never gardened without a bucket to collect stones in, I have to laugh at myself when out of habit I remove the one small stone that might appear  on the veg patch now, just because it is there and I can see it!

[Robert_Brenchley]

Not so odd when you think how restricted the area of a river bed is, and that it moves about with time. You've probably got a few thousand years of deposits there.

[Digeroo]

Looks wonderful. 

[Pescador]

Tres joli!!