clay render on a straw bale house

Anaig is a specialist in clay renders and I have worked along side her on a couple of straw bale build projects.  Here was slightly different, it was her project.  For years she has put her time, energy and expertise into building houses for others and now it is her turn.  I wasn’t sure how the experience was going to unfold.  Either there was going to be stress, angst and aiming for perfection or else a very laid back attitude.  Thankfully it was the latter.  A great team of volunteers, mainly there to gain experience before their own builds and some just for the sheer heck of participation and in return for the great work they have already received.  I think that once you’ve done some clay rendering there is always a hankering to do a bit more.  It gets into your blood so to speak.

I’d missed the first week, where they’d concentrated on rendering the outside of the building and arrived just as the interior was commencing. There had just been raw bales of straw at the start, which need to be promptly covered to protect them from the elements and rodent attack.  We worked at an unpressured pace, achieving a huge amount of work within the allotted time.  Just a small section upstairs to complete at a later date and a couple of patches that needed quiet, undivided attention to get right.  I got stuck in to some of the more challenging tasks such as corners and getting the two sides of doorway and window openings to match.  It was great to be given the opportunity, wonderful to have advice and guidance of a professional within the field and a proud moment to be told that my work was ‘superb’ by someone as exacting as Anaig.  

The week flew by, we never left the building site, dining in the adjacent barn or outside when it was fine, showering in a makeshift shower room with camping showers hoisted up by a pulley system and spending the evenings discussing our various projects and plans for the future.  

I’ll have to pop back again later in the year to see how work is progressing.  The site stops and starts as Anaig is still working on other projects to fund her build. 

what a beautiful setting

waiting for windows, doors, cladding and a roof

core render complete

straw walls before render

now that's a picture frame

some of the tools we used

le conservatoire vegetal d'aquitaine

Fruit trees.  One of my major goals this year has been to get plenty of long term planting done.  Completed before construction work starts so that during the busy months/years, the trees and shrubs can establish and start to bear fruit, so that once I move into my house there will already be the startings of an orchard and some decent sized trees, shrubs and hedges to continue my gardens around.

I have spent hours and hours researching fruit tree nurseries in the region, visiting several and perusing websites when I’ve had the chance.  Then, by chance, I visited some friends who planted an orchard several years ago.  They had an old catalogue from the place where they had bought all their trees and were still excited about the memories of their visit to the nursery.  

Pascale explained that one weekend a year the nursery has a exhibition and open day to celebrate fruit trees with demonstrations of planting, pruning and grafting.  tastings possibilities for the majority of fruits that are in season, a market area for associated goods and products and, as always at such events in france, the opportunity to eat well and copiously at lunchtime in a marquee dedicated to food.  

Since August I have slowly been learning the technical vocabulary to understand this catalogue, dreaming about my orchard and attempting the almost impossible task of reducing the contents of several hundred trees to a manageable number to buy, plant and care for.  It’s not even as if I have reference from all the British varieties that I know.  Whether they be apples, pears, cherries or grapes, all the names were foreign to me.

I managed to limit my choices to four cherries, four plums/gages, five pears, three hazle nuts, two walnuts, two chestnuts and one quince, though with the apples i reduced the hundred and fifty or so possibles to twenty five and took advice from the knowledgeable  staff to finalise my selection to eight varieties.  I sent my order ahead of time, in the hope that they would all be available.

To be accurate, it’s not specifically a nursery but a conservation orchard. It’s grand name is ‘Le Conservatoire Vegetal de l’Aquitaine’ and it’s aim it to preserve heritage varieties of orchard fruits, research new varieties, care and pruning techniques in a way that helps the wider environment.  The use of mixed species plantings to reduce pest invasions, minimal pruning techniques that stress the plant less, increasing the biodiversity within orchards to aid pollenisation and attract beneficial insects, a whole gammut of ideas that lean towards a more holistic and natural way of caring for our environment.  

The date of the exhibition had been in my diary since July and I wasn’t going to miss it for anything.  

It was amazing.  As described by my friends and more.  I was able to taste the vast majority of the apple varieties that I had chosen, plus a couple of pears and walnuts. I made changes to my order without problem. Noted kiwi varieties that were tasty for later on, along with grapes, cherries and other gages that looked good either in the flesh or on posters and was awed by the sheer enormity of the event.  Photographs will tell the story .......

from afar, and already busy

one of several  demonstration marquees

nice juicy pears

small choice of walnuts

jam making demonstrations

thankfully the organisation was faultless

and more......

Between eight and nine thousand visitors from over 30 departements of france in a weekend.  Three hundred or so volunteers from all over the south west to help, advise, demonstrate and transport peoples purchases back to their vehicles.

collecting trees

It was great to see Vanessa and Lisa again, in their new home this time rather than living outside in a caravan and barn.  I say in, in the loosest possible sense as there is still an enormous quantity of work to do before the house is anywhere near finished, but the majority of constructional work is complete.  A lovely old farm house with wrap around barns on the brow of a hill with views overlooking the countryside and the mountains beyond.  I was there to catch up, but in the main, to help with the planting of two hundred trees that they had ordered back in the summer.

The idea is to replace some of the old boundary lines with hedging, and as such, the girls approached an organisation that specialises in the replanting of hedges and woodland for some advice.  a very helpful lady visited and discussed their plans, showed them possible choices of plants, helping with selection, quantities needed and explained the timescale for planting.  The plants were ordered then and a couple of weeks ago Vanessa received a letter explaining that the trees were about ready and they were to go to a local collection point in a nearby town to pick up the order.  We/they had no real idea of what to expect, we went in their estate car, with trailer and we even debated if there would be room for me and whether I should go or stay.  It was a bit of an unknown quantity.  I could imagine bare root shrubs, but their list contained over thirty trees that I imagined would be in pots just like one would find at a plant nursery.

We arrived in the town and parked up in the square and discussed what type of vehicle might be involved in distributing such trees.  Were we the only ones, or were there other people collecting at the same time?  How would we know who they were?  It was all a bit of a puzzle.  Time ticked by and nothing obvious appeared.  Vanessa and I did a little tour of the surrounding streets in the hope of discovering a throng of hedge happy people gathering their orders, but nothing, the town was quieter than one could imagine on a cold winter Saturday.  No one about at all.  we debated going for a coffee, but decided that it would tempt fate, the lorry would turn up, see no one and head off again without stopping.  We waited and looked and looked and waited.  

A good half an hour later, after checking and rechecking the details,  the name of the street was right, in front of the church was right, the date and time was right, but no one, nothing.  We gave up hope and decided to leave.  Lisa pulled away and headed up around the church to the other side and there, by chance, was what we had been waiting for all along,  a throng of hedge happy people collecting their wares.  They must have arrived a little late and set up after Vanessa and I had done our little tour, as there had been nothing there before.  Anyway, we were welcomed into the gathering and immediately told to head into the community hall to get the tutorial on what to do.  The association takes the business of planting hedges and trees very seriously indeed and provides novices with a forty five minute lecture on the do’s and dont’s of planting.  Unfortunately we missed the most of it, completely in french, and got the final wrapping up summary of what we were expected to do. 

They come and check too, during the following summer, to see how the plants are doing, if you have followed their mulching and aftercare instructions well enough.  Impressive, but much more than any of us had expected and we still didn’t know what we were collecting.  Once the talk was over we headed back outside, as Vanessa and Lisa were queueing to pay and get their order I had a good look over what was waiting to be collected,  bundles of tree stakes, fibre weed mulch matting, bags of bare root trees, tree guards - protection from deer, rabbits and other predators. I spotted the order, two small bin bags with a few twigs poking out of the top, plus a small pile of guards, it would all easily have fitted in the car.  The girls didn’t believe it, they asked a couple of times for the rest of the plants but were told that that was it, two bags and the guards,  it was all noted on the lists and there was to be no mistake.    

The organisation of the collection of plants was all very efficient in a french sort of a way.  You presented your letter and cheque of payment to one person, they took the cheque and stamped the letter which was then passed to another person who cross referenced the letter with name to find another page that outlined the order, this had a code on it that corresponded to another list that provided them with what the last person had to go and look for.  In our case two bin bags and a bundle of guards.  Other people were collecting crates of small plants, bare root fruit trees, all sorts.  The organisers were keen to make sure everyone knew what had to be done for successful planting and establishment of their purchases.  If I end up settling in the vicinity I may well get involved.

We laughed on the way home about what we might have got and what we actually did.  It seemed stupid to have taken the trailer and gotten ourselves all geared up for such a massive event,  we nearly missed it all together.  But the trailer did come in handy, we picked up the order for some friends as Vanessa and Lisa knew that they were midway back from a trip to the UK and had obviously forgotten about their order.  It was a much more voluminous order, with a hundred or so planting mats, guards and trees that almost filled the trailer, we dropped it off on the way home and continued with our little sacks.

snowboard

The last few weeks have flown by and taken ages at the same time.  The weekends extremely busy with guests and week days occupied with chalet maintenance and enjoying the great outdoors.  Normally by now the weather is a little too warm for a ski resort and the snow melts faster and faster up the hillside, the mountain sides start to green up and spring tries to make an appearance.  This year it’s still snowy.  As I write, three days before the end of the ski season, it is snowing, the snow plough has been working through the night and it feels like January again.

It has been sunny, we have had some wonderful days, but like elsewhere in europe it has remained on the cool side.  

After much deliberation I rented a snowboard and gave it a go.  All the comments over the years are true, plenty of padding is needed.  I fell all the time for the first two days, thankful for a helmet and wrist protectors that undoubtedly saved broken wrists and concussion.  More padding would have helped for just about everywhere else, ribs, elbows, shoulders, knees and the like.  I quickly realised that the softer spring snow was more forgiving both for getting to grips with the board and for falling onto.  An early frosty start was not in the least bit enjoyable and I quickly swapped back to skis.

Five half days in and I am starting to enjoy snowboarding.  Getting the hang of linking turns and finding out the tricks of balance and movement that are so very different to being on skis.   It is strange to move sideways all the time and frustrating to buckle and unbuckle a boot to move anywhere once stationery, the alternative is to scuttle around like a crab with both feet strapped in.  I now know why boarders like to board with skiers, the skiers can always give them a tow when they get stuck.   It’s a different sensation to skiing, that uses more energy, especially at the start, and involves more whole body movement.  I’m not one of those numerous people who tries boarding and never uses skis again but I shall return for more next season.  For now, though, the last precious days in the mountains, I shall be making the most of my trusty skis.

Heading back to Pierlo and Sandrines to check out progress at their straw bale house, give them a hand in the garden and get back into speaking french all the time, followed by a couple of weeks on a small farm where they make jams, chutneys, conserves and honey, have a small B n B and are new to HelpX.  They’re close to my departure airport for my spring trip back to the UK.  Looking forward to seeing family and friends back home next month.

les jardins de sortilège

Denis’ parents are an inspiration too.  His mother has created a series of demonstration gardens on the steep slopes of their land, they are open to look round and for guided tours  throughout the summer. Les Jardins de Sortilège. Each area is themed with explanations by storyboard, an illustrated booklet and if you take a tour with a guide, in-depth explanations, edible plant tastings and discussions with a friendly guide along the way.  There were medieval, medicinal, culinary and ornamental areas, collections of mints, plants for dyeing fabrics and producing fabric.  Areas that represented old curates gardens, herbalist gardens and a garden for lovers, a scented leaf geranium collection, several vegetable gardens containing rare and heirloom varieties and most surprising of all, at around 800m altitude in the mountains, a twenty five year old lemon tree, full of fruit, that survives outside with a minimum of protection throughout the year.  It gets a plastic corrugated roof in winter and is a picture of health, there must be an amazing microclimate in this tiny corner of the valley.  Denis' father is a writer, his subject matter is herbal plants, comestible, wild and useful plants and how to use them, the shop at the gardens is packed with his publications and I could easily have bought a copy of just about all of them.

Working in remote areas of the mountains is all very well, but is doing little to forward our search for land.  We chat to folk and spread the word, but as with anywhere out in the countryside, things change slowly and it’ll be by chance that we stumble upon the quantity of land that we need using these methods.  That said, the week at Denis was an emergency stopgap after fleeing the previous host in disgust, it turned out to be inspirational, educational and with the work we did, very good exercise too.

the view from my bedroom window

following the garden path

it looks dangerous but does't sting at all, just a plant that used 

to be used for dieing fabric. 

good gourd

mountain lemons

our work in progress.

what do you think?

in need of renovation, it could make a beautiful home

south facing, off the beaten track, although one of 

the GR walks passes along this route.

October sunshine illuminates this exciting proposition,

an acre of slightly sloping fertile land awaits cultivation and a new venture.

a lick of paint and some new carpet, it'll be fine.

anyone know how to rebuild ceilings, plaster and install a kitchen?

the old owners have even left the tiles to put back on the roof.

All I need to do now is learn the necessary skills.

Images of the second plot of land that I have viewed on my quest to settle down again after four years on the road.  My plan is to find somewhere small and affordable with a decent amount of land.  I want to produce enough fruit and veg to feed myself year round, hopefully provide courses, or at least an insight into productive gardening and for those in need of a bit of guidance. Host helpX helpers to share the bounty of knowledge that I have accumulated over the years and to live more simply with less demands on the excesses of modern consumerism.

Your comments please....