Accidental smallholding
The field was home for our stroppy female ecological lawn mowers, variety Rouge de l'Ouest / Charolais cross. If you see our page Sheepish Beginnings, you will understand why they were stroppy. We've stopped keeping sheep now, but the field is still completely animal-proof, with sheep-fencing around its one kilometre boundary.
Why a walled garden you may ask, when we're in the middle of the country? Simply to protect the produce from the worst of the loose cows, sheep and other assorted wildlife hereabouts, and to offer much needed shelter and a couple of degrees of freedom in the cold winters.
Le Vivray is a very rural smallholding of 8.5 acres, with a cider apple orchard for our cider-making adventures, a walled garden (22m x 22m), a spring with a lavoir (wash pond), and a stream running through the wood at the field bottom.
The lavoir area is fenced off, providing a kind of oasis in the middle of an otherwise rather exposed field, with an arboretum of oak, elm, alder, beech, and mixed hedging, around the holding pond of ~100 000L. The restored lavoir building houses our off-grid power station, and the oasis (known affectionately as Telly Tubby Land) is also where you will see our 3kW wind turbines.
The part of the barn ("grange") nearest the house is known simply enough on the old hand-written cadastral map as "La Vieille Maison" - the old house - and it has had a significant amount of TLC so far, with the new roof, guttering, drainage, doors, insulation, blocks, joists for most of a new floor, staircase, etc. So it can easily become "La Vieille Maison" once more.
Our soil is mostly heavy green clay - of type "make pots out of it" (French: "glaize verte") - but we have supplemented it with our primitive home-made compost over the years we've been naively attempting to coax vegetables out of it. To the point that we can now finally achieve an acceptable harvest, although much of the early planting suffered from the slug rave parties.
We have often lost our tomatoes to blight here in Normandy, and in 2012 many early seedlings drowned in the most rainfall recorded for a century - even here in Normandy!
The setting of the fruit tree blossom also suffered that year, being "out of synch" with both the weather pattern and the buzziness of the pollinators. The rain, cold, and lack of bees and other pollinating insects at the right time meant it was not a good year for plums or early apples.
However we always have enough beetroot, courgettes, beans, peas, carrots etc to see us through the winter, so we enjoy trying out new recipes, such as beetroot wine, and plum and chilli jam!
© 2024 Le Vivray Sally Woods-Bryan & Leslie Bryan Microengineering