One of the many basic rules of country life is that humans have to share place with other, non-human forms of life. So, for example, I share my house with various insects, spiders, a variety of flies, the odd millipede, or hornets with a poor sense of direction. In...
Autumn arrived mid-August at La Chaise. The weather gods gave up trying to be nice and concentrated on being unreliable. Fruitfulness was rampant rather than mellow. Heavy rain storms beat plums, apples and unripe walnuts from the trees. Intermittent bursts of...
It is said one swallow does not make a summer, well – nor do eleven. They just make an appalling racket, rushing in and out of the workshop where there are at least three visible nests. Then they line up, briefly, in rows on the old wire TV antenna, all the...
Small triumph with chickens – sometimes things go nearly right. Below a picture of proud father with his two wives and their four children. Four chicks is rather a poor yield for one cockerel with four hens…as always in such matters, it will be easiest to...
The courgettes are coming, thick and fast, thin and fat, short and long, bright yellow and two shades of green, pale and dark. So, can tomatoes be far behind? A rhetorical question. The answer lies….in the soil, of course…and the behaviour of a climate...
A glut of fruit always produces a crisis, especially for those of the ‘waste not, want not’ school of home management. Composting excess fruit, or allowing the sheep to eat themselves sick on it, seems like a cop-out, like ducking responsibility towards...
Somewhere in the woods, between La Chaise and Chantepoule, there are now pairs of wild chickens, cock and hen couples that have escaped from the chicken caravan and its park. Perhaps as many as four pairs – or perhaps they are all dead. Hen escaping One reason...
The last ten days have been a terrible reminder of the fact that man proposes but God, gods or Nature, disposes. We react more often than we act. Death arrived suddenly amongst the lambs after worming. We had no means of knowing whether it was the strength of the...
The hens are on strike. No longer do we – that is Audrey or Alex – find three to four eggs a day in the hen-house, at best there are two. After more than a year at La Chaise, with freedom to roam all over the front courtyard except for Audrey’s...
Still it has not rained. If one was on holiday at La Chaise, this is happiness. But we live here and have a golf course and around 60 sheep, with their lambs, to maintain. Green grass is essential for both. Fortunately, la grande Kim was free to shear the ewes,... 
