I can’t believe either that we have already entered August, or that I haven’t written a blog for 3 weeks with my last being on French Fête Nationale. This will be pretty short too but normal service will be resumed.
Generally when I don’t write a blog it is for one of a few reasons. Either we have not been at Kergudon the preceding week so we have not achieved anything; or we have been at Kergudon but still haven’t achieved anything (this is by far the most common!); or we are out on the Sunday afternoon when I should have written the blog!
The reason for the 3 week absence is the second of that list. This time of year is, thankfully, our busiest period with guests staying in the accommodation so there is a lot of time taken on the tasks required just running the business.
Over the last 3 weeks we have also had all sorts of weather conditions which, at times, has allowed our guests the opportunity to be out and about while, at others, it was very much staying-in weather. It does mean that I have been able to work outside some of the time while others, I was less motivated to be in the garden!
We haven’t even done any of our Wednesday walks or Sunday strolls. Garratt seems to have got quite old, quite quickly and long walks, especially when the weather is hot, wear him out very rapidly so we have not ventured out.
I have been working however, and have started to level out the piles of soil we had dumped in the orchard a few weeks ago. This is slow progress as I am endeavouring to remove as many of the stones and rocks as possible to prevent damaging my lawnmower in the future, as well as sections of the knot weed rhizome to prevent that establishing itself in that part of the garden.
Also, as the earth is not all good top soil but much more clay-like from deeper down, when it is dry it is solid and needs breaking down to spread it, and when it is wet it is horrible to work with!
I have also spent a couple of days re-weeding the pétanque pitch and access to it. The thing this year’s weather has been good for are weeds! Having cleared the pitch in May so it could be used for the summer, the weeds came back very quickly. It is a vicious circle in that if the pitch isn’t used much the weeds grow, and when there are weeds it isn’t used much! I didn’t take a before picture, but the weeds remaining on the left give you an indication of what it looked like.
We do have big plans for the whole space which, we hope will mean the area will start to be used more, and the removal of weeds adjacent to the pitch which should minimise the number of seeds blown onto the gravel and so reduce the number of weeds growing – a bit!
We took a bit of a step towards achieving those plans a couple of weeks ago as we managed to sell the mini-digger we bought some years ago. While we had used it initially, for the lasty couple of years it had sat in out garage just taking up space and getting in the way. Now it is gone I can start clearing out the garage which will we will purpose as a summer games space and include the area of drive by the pétanque pitch. That should start next week.
Today we did leave Kergudon and do something ‘cultural’ as we visited the chapel of Loc Ildut for its annual pardon (fête day). Saint Ildut is just the other side of Sizun from us and is one of the larger pardons where lots of people wear their traditional Breton costumes.
The pardon goes on all day with a parade of crosses, banners and statues of Saints, including a little Saint Cadou (much smaller than all of the other statues) followed by a pig roast and lots of Breton dancing – we had never visited the chapel before and were only there for a short period but it was interesting to visit, briefly.
There will be more progress in the coming week and there will be a blog next Sunday!
Until then …