I am now officially bored with the autumnal weather this year. Ever since we moved to Brittany in 2015, the autumns have been periods of beautifully crisp, clear, sometimes sunny days with minimal rainfall. This year it seems to be making up for the last 4 and has continued to be wet, windy and generally unpleasant for outdoor work of which we have lots of plans and ideas.
That said, as I alluded to in last week’s blog, despite the weather we are welcoming more autumnal guests than we ever have and so, with the gîtes occupied, there isn’t so many large inside jobs that I can get on with either. Not that there is so much to do internally until we start our Priory project in the New Year.
One external job that we have had started, as opposed to starting ourselves, is the tree work on the large sycamores on our SW boundary. These trees have grown pretty large and consequently block out a lot of light to our neighbours garden in the morning and our garden in the afternoon. Being sycamores they seed very readily and every year there are thousands of new small trees in the beds. Our biggest fear is that in a good SW’ly wind they may come down, in the worst scenario, right on top of Stable!
Our tree surgeon has made some good progress in the couple of days he has been with us and there is already a lot more light coming into the orchard.
It has generated a lot of wood that we will be able to burn in a couple of years when it is seasoned but also a lot of smaller branch waste that I will need to clear up. Thankfully, I have been allowed a new ‘toy’ to do this that I shall show you when we start! We hope that another couple of days and the woodsman will have cut all he can and just the tidying up will remain.
While our tree surgeon has been able to work outside for a couple of days in the rain his motivation is different from mine and the jobs I want to do are likely to cause more damage to the ground and be muddier so I’ve not stated. I have however finished clearing above Dave’s gym that we started last week and I have done all I can to the new door for Granary in preparation for it being fitted.
David has continued to do some of his Christmas cooking. This week has been fig chutney and his amazing piccalilli so there has been some amazing smells in the house again.
Looking ahead to the coming week there doesn’t seem to be much of a break in the changeable weather – I’m going to have to take up a hobby at this rate because I can’t progress too much else until it does and there’s no more rugby to use as an excuse!
À bientôt.