Stones and pallettes - des pierres et des pallettes

 Now that we have finally secured additional pallettes for the area behind the little house we know as Ropion, we can finally get down to the serious business of starting to proper store and sort all of the building stone that currently exists around La Cote.  Some of the stone is from collapsed garden walls and more is from the other half of the Ropion house which collapsed several decades ago, but may date back to as early as the Fifteenth century with possible links to the Abbey of Saint Denis in the village of Vaux-sur-Vienne.

The stone varies from very soft tufau (limestone) which would originally have been quarried out the two caves which stretch back into the hillside nearby, to very hard lumps of flint (silex) good for making strong foundations or lower levels of walls/buildings.

 Although you can see that we have made a good start on moving and sorting the stone, there is still a huge pile from the collapsed other half of the old house (Ropion) on the left here.  This is already far clearer than I have ever seen it and masses of ivy and other vegetation has already been removed.  Interestingly from an archaeological/architectural perspective, evidence was also found of a former iron gutter and downpipe behind Ropion which suggests that at some point in its life it did indeed have a system for managing rainwater.

As you can see from the picture on the right, we have recovered large amounts of broken roof tiles which appear to have been deliberately buried in the ground behind the building.  We have kept these as useful building material as interspersed between the softer limestone blocks the can help the walls to breathe and let moisture escape.

bruce.howard's photostream

bruce.howard's photostream on Flickr.

Rebuilding the goat shed over a few of the hottest day's this summer has seen in France - hopefully it won't fall down now!

Garden archaeology or a series of small walls...

 Again we seem to have been too busy doing things at La Cote and elsewhere to keep up to date with recording progress on various mini-projects on this blog.  Anne has recently finished her 375km bike ride with our friend Ruth, from Ouistreham ferry terminal in Normandy to the house here at La Cote.  We were very lucky with the weather, and I was even luckier as I was driving the support van and arranging the logistics (camp sites etc) en route.

Now we've got that out of the way, we can get down to other things back home...

You can see from the pictures here, the wall to the right of the well which we are trying dig out, get a vertical face and then work out how best to rebuild it.  I am looking on this as a training project, hopefully building on the experience gained from working on rebuilding the walls of the ancien lavoir in the village of Ferriere-Larcon.  First we need to grade the stones into piles and let it dry out, then plan to start rebuilding it with suitable lime mortar.  Some of the collapsed stones are very substantial, as I discovered yesterday when moving them with help from our friend Mark.

bruce.howard's photostream

bruce.howard's photostream on Flickr.

Photos of our recent visit to Ferriere-Larcon (Indres et Loire 37)

Jardin Potager (kitchen garden) at Ropion takes shape

 Just realised that we haven't added anything to the blog for absolutely ages! This isn't because we haven't been doing anything, quite the contrary - we've been keeping very busy with the house and garden and lots of things helping us to integrate into the community here in Vaux and learn more about our surroundings.  So in order to 'play catch-up' we are going to try to post a few photos to give a summary of what we've been doing over the last nearly three months!

As you can see from the photos the weather has still been quite wet - we have had some sunnier and warmer days, but the overall climate has been very unseasonal and people in the village talk about it being more like a warm November than actaully being a normal time for June!  Anyway as you will see, all this rain hasn't gone to waste and has of course been very good for the garden.

Photo taken the other day  - veg (and weeds) growing well!

Rain, rain and more rain...

the new 1000 L waterbutts next to the barn

over 500 litres of water in each one!

It is getting slightly boring having all of this rain over the last week or so, but the gardens need it and the local farmers should be a bit happier as a result.  Despite all that I think that the seasonal rainfall is still well below average and the ground water level  (nappe phreatique) has still dropped.  Anyway for our new vegetable garden (jardin potager) we now have over 1000 litres of rain water captured from the roof of the barn (pressoir) available to use in dryer weather which should save us a bit of money on the metered tap water!  Pleased to see that it has been a successful installation and all being well the fig tree will start to camouflage it a bit more in the future.

Saturday sunrise a La Cote

Spring is sprung de grass is riz

fruit trees with blossom looking towards Ropion

Well, after some rather interesting climatic happenings, very late winter snow etc, we now definitely have arrived at our first spring at La Cote.  The cuckoos have been singing in the woods now since at least Wednesday and the lizards are busy scuttling around the walls outside when the sun shines brightly.  The buzzards, as usual, circle high above the house with their slightly unearthly cries having fun on playing on the thermal currents or chasing away the kestrel who normally lives in the hedge surrounding the "Clos" - the field below the house.  The messanges (blue tits and coal tits) continue to enjoy the use of the new bird feeder and are getting used to the changes in the vegetation in front of the dovecote (coloumbier).

The daffodils are out and lots of little blue flowers which we haven't identified yet are also making a lovely carpet on the ground especially in areas which we have cleared recently.  Various fig bushes are showing the signs of new leaves starting and even a few little bulbs of figs are now growing.  Most of the hedgerows have got lovely white blossom growing on them and the cherry and plum trees have their blossom coming out too.  We have been watching carefully for the first signs of buds on the apple trees which we spent a long time pruning last autumn as they had been quite overgrown.

 On Sunday morning we started work on clearing back the vegetation from the edge of the top field, trying to recover the line of the fence.  We were joined by our neighbours who are going to use the field for their two horses later in the spring.  Between us we had quite a collection of weapons for dealing with the invading scrub and trees: three strimmers, two pairs of land-handled snips, two bow saws, two pruning saws and two chainsaws.  The trees etc didn't stand a chance!  It was also a good opportunity to try out our new heavier duty chainsaw - really makes such a difference using the right tools and ones which are properly sharp!

Still lots to do, but it was quite impressive what we managed to achieve between the five of us in the space of a couple of hours and finish before the rain started.  Also a couple of gates need to be constructed.  In any case it is good to see the field being put to good use and it's a great way to meet the neighbours...