French Life-expat France

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 this year I have grandly claimed that I will grow all our vegetables myself, despite my personal preference for staying indoors and taking care of the orchids.

This isn’t the first time we have tried to grow vegetables - after all, where we live the ground is supposedly highly fertile, and the people who lived here before us managed to be self-sufficient for a 100 years, so we should be able to manage a few carrots…

One year, we had just bought a little tractor with a rotovator attachment. That did a magnificent job of turning field into freshly dug earth - we cleared an area of about 300 square metres, that I had calculated was enough to feed all of us year round - and it seemed we were in business. In reality, as it turned out, rotovating weeds does not kill them, it chops their roots into small pieces which each sprout forth into a new weed. So within a few weeks any radishes that tentatively stuck their heads out of the soil were completely buried in a thick mat of dock and bindweed. Our 300 square metres of vegetable garden generated a few peas and a couple of carrots - about enough for one square meal if I remember correctly.

Curiously some of the crops that failed, such as lettuces and garlic, still now appear in the middle of that area of lawn (for it has now been grassed over), years later, and to the surprise of holiday makers who now play in that part of the garden.

We abandoned this first potager because it was next to our small cottage, which we then decided to rent out instead, and supposed that people on holiday didn’t want to watch us fighting with brambles all day.

The next time we tried a bit harder and learned from our mistakes. An area of perhaps 150 square metres was covered with black plastic for several months to kill all the weeds. It was then all dug by hand, and Mrs B added lots of compost. I even made edges out of wood, so that the weeds wouldn’t spread in from the adjoining field.

This worked well in its first spring. All the family skipping gaily over to pick strawberies for breakfast every day, very impressive. Unfortunately the summer was the ‘heatwave’ year in France in which countless people died. Our potager died as well. At least a hundred yards from a water source, it was completely impossible to keep it watered and everything more or less shrivelled up and disappeared. It was like watching Jean de Florette, watching Mrs B valiantly struggling on with a watering can, but it was a battle she was doomed to lose.
To be fair, the fruit bushes managed quite well and are still there now, but that was really the end of potager 2.

Potager 3 is quite a way from the house, which is a disadvantage, but it is next to the old ’source’ (natural spring) for the property, and there is more or less always water to hand. It is probably one of the most attractive places on the property, with the old stone well, the trees all around, and not a sound to be heard except the birds and insects. The area - perhaps 75 square metres - has been covered in black plastic for months, then dug over, and now I have planted a few seeds. Beans, peas, carrots and so forth. I remove weeds within minutes of their arrival. It actually looks like a potager. So this year I have a new optimism.

But there is a dark cloud hanging over this, our third effort to grow vegetables and start to become self-sufficient. The place where we have made the new potager is out of sight of the house where we live, at the top edge of our ‘natural’ field - the field where we encourage nature as much as possible, and have hundreds of rabbits and birds. Will the wildlife completely wreck this years experiment? I’ll tell you in three months, unless I am too busy erecting scaffolding to support 75 square metres of netting, and don’t have time to write.

Meanwhile I am happy to report that last night we had a delicious blackberry crumble. All year around we have plenty of frozen blackberries, thanks mainly to my neglect of the ancient hedgerows that surround our property, so they are now overgrown with brambles.