French Life-expat France

Imagine a lovely English style garden border, about 60 metres long and 4 metres wide. It is full to overflowing with trees, shrubs, rose and bulbs, and there is usually something in flower for nine months of the year. It takes Mrs B a lot of work to maintain it, but it runs up the [...]

I was looking from the kitchen door this morning, watching the goldfinches on the birdfeeder as they scared off any great tits and blue tits that dared to try and nibble a sunflower seed, when one of the children pointed out the two deer standing just yards away from the door.
I’m not sure how [...]

Mrs B couldn’t got on her usual Tuesday morning excursion today - she usually sets off exploring with a friend once a week - which meant I get roped on as a rather poor alternative.
As a result, we set off bright and early to explore a few tiny villages we had never visited before, and [...]

Winter is some way off yet, we hope, but there are a few things to be done in advance. The main job to do before it gets cold is to make sure we have a big stock of wood to burn, since it’s the cheapest most environmentally way to heat a house, and also it [...]

Back in May I wrote about some troubles we were having with our EuroPiscine pool liner. Not surprisingly, the problem still hasn’t been resolved and the company seem to have decided that silence is their best approach.
Happily it seems that things can proceed anyway, and our legal representatives have appointed an expert to come around [...]

We’ve just resolved this years little run in with the world of French bureaucracy, mostly of my own making, so we are happy.
A few months ago a nice man from the water board came by, smiling and pleasant, and stuck a piece of paper under my nose for me to sign. They wanted permission to [...]

Woo hoo spring has arrived (I think). We had a lovely sunny day today, with Mrs B singing and dancing in the flowerbeds because she could do some weeding after a couple of weeks of rain.
One job we tackled was ‘big pruning’. This involves Mrs B walking round the gardens pointing at dead branches, and [...]

This week the ‘grass verge’ cutters have been working on our road, and they have asked if they can park their big machinery in our courtyard for a few days.
Called ‘fauchage’ in French, this isn’t so much a light mow for the grassy verges, as a complete ‘back to earth’ experience for any hedge, tree [...]

Well it has taken five years but we have finally done it. Motivated by hearing tales of one of the best ever years for ceps (a type of edible mushroom if you didn’t know) we went searching in our own little woodland and lo and behold we actually found a couple of kilogrammes of them.
Because [...]

I’ve been doing some research into wildlife of France, and it seems that I have been both misled and misleading for the last few years. So here and now I plan to put that right by dispelling two of the great myths of the 20th century.
First I have to apologise in advance, because one of [...]

I have complained before about some of the problems we have in the garden. The longest running problem is water, or lack of it, and the current problem is rabbits - we have an excess of them.
So it is high time to buckle down and sort both of these problems out.

I am a bit concerned today about one of Mrs B’s more exuberant gardening gestures.
At the back of the house we have a nice terrace, with views over miles of beautiful countryside. Then, at the back of the terrace (between us and the view) is a small area of garden, separating us from the fields [...]

I haven’t had much time for writing recently, because it is our busiest two weeks of the year. As you can guess, living in the south of France and running a couple of gites (holiday rental properties) is not always the hardest job in the world.
It is harder than you think - it must be, [...]

In the garden we have several fig trees. These are reasonably attractive, and one of them provides a good amount of shelter for the seating area of one of the holiday gites we have here. We also have an ancient orchard - peaches mainly, and a few apples, pears and nectarines. Doesn’t that sound nice? [...]

This year I have taken over reponsibility for our self-sufficiency. Doesn’t that sound impressive. What it means is, Mrs B has told me I have to pull my weight in the garden, and she has enough to do maintaining the acres of ‘real’ garden around here without having time to plant vegetables as well. So [...]