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... 
