French pragmatism

Once I leave the old railway track, my cycle route home from work continues up the D87 towards Kergrist Moelou. The D stands for Départmentale, ie the road is maintained by the Départment, in our case Côtes d'Armor. 

However, there are bits of the road that look (and feel) as if they have been ploughed and harrowed, where the surface is crumbling, and where a cyclist needs to maintain an altitude of at least a centimeter above the saddle to avoid bruising bits better not mentioned in public...

The Départment has obviously run out of road-mending cash, so they take the pragmatic approach:
Put a sign up telling people what is already painfully evident - caveat emptor, or rather, let the rider beware.
So thats all sorted now.  

These signs have been up for a year to date, and I suspect will continue in place for quite a while longer during this economic pinch.
Oh well, I shall just have to get decent suspension on my push-bike, or better padding in my cycle shorts.

bye bye leylandii !!

Some of you will remember the leylandii hedge round by the orchard.  NOT a thing of beauty, in fact an eyesore that progressively shaded the bottom sheep-field and the orchard. Bloody things just kept getting bigger and bigger. A fairly drastic haircut a few years ago just seemed to stimulate it to grow faster...

Well, the leylandii are no more!

You can see the size of the trees in these two pictures above 

... and the extent to which they shaded the orchard 

It took Yvon and a couple of his mates a short morning to cut them all down to a handy post-sized metre and a half.  That was the easy bit.

The hedge belonged to our neighbours, Marie-Claire and Yvon, but as they don't want the wood, we are going to salvage the stuff big enough for firewood and Yvon will take the rest of the fluffy-stuff away and burn it. (I had envisaged shredding it, but the piles of cut down trees are enormous). We reckon there's at least years worth of house heating in this lot, once its well-dried.

Once the field is clear again, Yvon will cultivate it and re-seed it.  So we need to get this lot dismantled and moved ASAP. We cleared about a metre and a half of one pile this evening...

The field will definitely need some TLC after all this! 

The soil under the hedge is bone dry, 
so now the grass should grow much better

these are the resulting piles of wood to be cleared 
- basically a field-full

The other time constraint is that Easter is fast approaching, and one is not allowed to light a bonfire between Easter and the end of September.
Well, you can, but if it gets out of hand, and burns down someone's crop or house then you are liable... so perhaps best avoided.
Its going to be a busy few weeks I think - I had better stock up on the ibuprofen!

Misty Breton mornings

The high pressure system sitting over us for the last week or so has given us very misty mornings that have become beautiful sunny afternoons - as the song says:
"Theres many a dark and a cloudy morning
Turns out to be a bright sun-shiny day"

The trees at Plouguernével, (the psychiatric hospital where I work) have recently been pollarded in typical French municipal style, and they looked very strange the other morning, looming out of the mist as I walked from one unit to another around the hospital.

Most of the pollards are plane trees, which surround a big grassy area filled with apple trees. There are also lots of big oaks all over the hospital grounds - you can see all three on the picture below.

The bigger trees (below) are limes, that were pollarded a year ago.  They make very eery shapes!

 And here is part of the main building and some of the formal gardens. It really couldn't be anywhere but France, could it?  The mist covers a multitude of sins, and makes it all look quite romantic....

By the time I finish at midday, the sun has cleared away the mist, and I have had some lovely bike rides home in the spring sunshine. (Pete drops me off, and I only cycle home - one dose of 16 kilometers per day is enough at the moment!)

This is the old railway line that I use for the first 8K - not a bad commuting route really, and great to have no cars to worry about, just the occasional dog being walked. This year I have seen deer, rabbits, a red squirrel, buzzards and loads of other birds I usually can't identify.  Last Tuesday, when these pictures were taken, I heard a woodpecker hammering and a skylark singing at the same time. The surface was re-done a couple of years ago throughout its length, from near Rennes to beyond Carhaix. My commuting bit is between kilometer-posts 101 and 109.

Nearer to home are the eoliens, or wind turbines. There are eight in our commune and six in the next-door commune. In the dark, their red lights can be seen from miles around, providing a superb homing reference, if one were needed. They don't affect us much at all - we can just see the tops of two of them from upstairs in our house. Some of our friends, however, are much more disturbed by the noise they make, and the disastrous effect it has on television reception!
Brittany is aiming to produce 20% of its own electricity using renewables by 2020, so these eoliens are a now common sight all over the countryside. Just one of these beasties produces more than enough power for our commune of about 800 souls, but it sure don't get any cheaper.
Not the prettiest of things, but they have a certain presence, and I definitely prefer them to nuclear! They also make handy weather-vanes...

spring!

- all the usual signs, sunshine, lambs (will take some pictures tomorrow), muck-spreading in the fields, mud on the roads.

And now its dusk, the wood burning stove is lit and there is not a single cat in the house. When the weather gets better and the evenings longer and later, its the moggys' playtime!  In winter you can't get near the stove for cats. Nearly time to take off the cat-proof covers from the sofas and store them away for the summer.

Its also time to sow seeds again. I just love it when they poke their green tips up through the soil.

This is my seed germinator system. The glass panes were from the Salford University science labs that were being stripped out when we left the Uni. (from whence we also got all the lovely teak for our kitchen work surfaces). These glass sheets were for cutting-up specimens (doesn't bear thought) and I managed to salvage three from the skip. Without them our various moggies would happily sleep on the comfortable bed of germinating seeds, in the sunshine, throughout the day - bless them.

I have taken to using squares of bubble-wrap to cover the seed pots before they germinate, to keep in the moisture without blocking the light, but also to keep the soil temperature up at night, when the front porch gets quite chilly still. We shall see how it works.

I have taken advantage of the recent flurry of tree cutting and pruning to have a go at making a wooden spoon. This is my first attempt, and is for getting jam out of pots! Here in Brittany, one doesn't use a knife to scoop up your jam, but a teaspoon. This has a longer handle and bigger bowl...

 It's made of white poplar, and will need some finishing once it has dried a bit - it's practically still growing. I have just ordered a pair of knives for making spoons and small bowls - it is going to be a compulsive hobby, methinks, with the amount of wood we cut down each year to keep the place tidy.