Open Thread - Homesteading in France
Falling Into Winter
The weather is changing quickly. It didn't seem that long ago it was warm during the day and pleasant for drying clothes on the line. We had an extremely wet Summer, but the transition to Fall has been dryer and oddly, more insects, and an often high Petite Rivière.
This is the week all the cemeteries are full of Mums for Tous (all) saint (saints) Toussaint.
Village Cemetery
Mont Pernasse Cemetery
There are some Halloween type events, but it is viewed as an overly commercial and hyped holiday. Our encounter one of the first years we were here, was a group of kids going to merchants, pumping the fists in the air and demanding treats. It was more like a manifestation or a protest.
This is the time of year hedgerows are trimmed into neat squared off miles and miles of bushes. The government has asked farmers not to trim too early because the bird populations need them badly. This is also true in Spring for nesting birds. One of our favorite hedgerow bushes has beautiful berries each Fall.
The race of cows raised in the Charollais-Brionaise is the Charolais. They are raised for meat. Right now the Fall calves are about a month old. Unlike the US where artificial insemination is used, there are often bulls present at prescribed times with a small group or troupeau of cows.
They are still out in pastures but as the days and nights are getting colder and wetter they will be brought into big barns for the Winter.
Farmers work long hours and have an amazing array of equipment. Years they can hay fields multiple times for bails and silage are great for them. This has been a good year. Corn is grown for grain for chickens and pigs, the rest of the plant is for silage, a fermented goop they love.
This is the time of year when French people start their Winter hibernation. It is quieter and more homebound time, especially in rural France. Of course there are big interruptions for Christmas and other holidays.
We are still harvesting greens, lettuce, and hoping for carrots and more radishes in the next month. But even with covers now, it might be too cold at night.
Comments
Little did we know that lots of history in Europe and
probably elsewhere, took place between May and the end of September. Over Winter it was rainy, muddy, snowy, icy and cold. Hard to sustain an army without warmth of the sun.
It's become very clear, that much of the yearly activities are crammed into four months or so from Spring to Fall.
Finally, got this up. It didn't post on the hour, but later than the scheduler slotted. Sometimes it pops right up on the hour. Other times it comes up at an odd time.
Thanks again for all the help.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
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your photo of the country lane
with the meadow and sheep grazing
is a great mental image of rural France
the cow troupeau look healthy
bonne journée
question everything
Hey there, those are cows. I forget
the scale. When we were looking at the house, we were concerned that it is in the middle of a hillside in a valley. But the scale helps give a sense of distance.
We once saw a hillside pasture of white critters and thought they were sheep. They were chickens.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
oops
chicken, cows, sheep
the little things in the distance
grazing
it's what's for dinner!
question everything
Thanks for the news
and all the pictures from France. Love the hedgerow in flower, I imagine that's very pretty to see en masse.
I guess cows have a better life in France than they do in the States. We don't generally shelter cows in barns to overwinter. It sounds like a much nicer way to take care of them. When you run a large number of cattle though, they have to tough it through the winter outside.
Hope the upgrades and renovations are progressing well. It is interesting to read about how you tackle some of those various challenges. I hope to learn a bit from your examples. I have learned, and am now the proud owner of that new bit of knowledge about not bringing mums as a hostess gift for dinner in France. (Those are the kind of details that are fun to know.)
Our season changed abruptly last night from hot to cold so it's soup weather now. I'm glad about that. This coming weekend is daylight savings time and so it is 'fall back'. I'm looking forward to it not being so dark in the morning.
Hope you have a fine week and the new season ushers in good things.
The hedgerows are very diverse: beech, hawthorne, small
oak, something like an alder, holly, birch, ash, and many others. The diversity is good. Oh and chestnuts, walnuts and more.
The Charolais are a very French race and when raised for meat can be very heavy. They are probably less hearty than those that stay out over winter. The sustainable ag movement is slowly replacing cattle that need protection for more hardy races which can over-winter outdoors like Bison, and birth without aid. They actually add to the amount of grazers in any one area. The key is to move them around so they are on new graze more frequently and don't over chomp the grasses and low brush.
The little troupeau near us has been on the same few acres since early this year. It is an overgrazed area. The bocages (hedgerows as fenced pastures with gates in them) are set up for moving cows around, it would just be a change of practice and connecting a few more grass pastures.
Cows in barns for the winter is a crowding environment, and I would bet they need medication to get through it. They don't get to move much and created incredible amounts of amonia/pee and plops. The farmers do pile it up and then spread it on both hay and grazing pasture once it's dried just a bit. But it is full of medication which in turn kills whatever is living under the spread manure. We are so close to a closed loop system.
Pamela Tree in her book 'Wilding' describes how this can work and what they have learned over the years. It is a great read.
We are from the land of Douglas Fir and know nothing about stone, which is the building material around here. Some poured and tamped concrete, but old methods are still alive and well. The art of breathing walls especially now that we have two wood stoves and a long rectangular house, is making a lot of sense.
There are places in France where if you go deep enough into a house it backs up to caves which are still used and have been occupied for millenia (sp?).
Sandblasting (sablaging = sable is sand or a cookie, look for context) is the way stone walls are cleaned and made ready for choux (paste, mortar etc) which is a breathable render. Crepi is like stucco on inside walls or an outside wall.
Want a window or door, just cut your way out, put in a header of Limestone, frame to size and poser (place) your door or window. A good mason can do it in a day.
Glad the Mum issue caught your eye. I think back to the times we took potted Mums to people in hospitals, and now it sounds gruesome.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
I read a book
, called Cows Can Save the Planet. It was about how cows can preserve and improve soil health and fertility. It suggests there is a way to use resources without destroying the environment. It is a disposition that regards farming as an art and a science, a give and a take, a respect for the land and the animals, and enhancing the earth not depleting it.
It may be an overly optimistic point of view because of our precarious situation, but it seems to be a much better approach than the approach based on all extraction all the time. I like to think there are farmers in France who employ the techniques of good animal (and land) husbandry. It's a romantic idea and I don't want to give it up.
John Muir might have felt differently though. I read that as a boy he worked on his father's farm, but his father drove the kids to work so hard, even brutally, that Muir ran away from home at a young age.
For him, farming was definitely not romantic, it was just grueling.
Anyway, I like all the hedgerows you name. I imagine them flanking small roads and it is a pastoral, sweet vision. I hope actual chestnuts with the actual nut grow on some of those hedgerows. I love chestnuts and have memories of eating them roasted and hot from vendors on the street in Germany or Austria.
There was a group of Germans who settled in Central Texas in the 1800's or so, they built with stone (as did others I think) and the style is characteristic and looks to be from the 'Old Country'. I don't know much about it but it would be fun to learn a little more.
Thanks for the intriguing comment, all the best to you.
I can't resist....
Some encouragement for you: Isabella Tree's book 'Wilding' talks about how they learned to use bison-like cattle, pigs, deer, and many other animals to replicate and create a natural and producing system on their many hectares of land in West Sussex, Knepp Estate. It was marginal as a traditional big ag farm raising mono crops. But boy howdy they got so much more from farming sustainably.
Other regenerative/sustainable ag people are learning how to increase the fertility of soils while increasing hoof stock. It's a new/old way of doing things. It works. Farmers get rid of their large machines, do less work for more, and have better lives than the hamster wheel Monsanto has them on.
In our woodlands and in what people call parks, but are vergers, which are planted parts of a large yard that have fruit and nut trees. We have Chestnuts (Marronniers the tree - and Marron - nonedible nut; Châtaignier - traditional nut tree and Châtaigne is the nut), Walnuts (Noix - nut; Noyer is the wood/tree), Beechnut, Hazelnut (Noisette). Chestnuts, Oak and Beech are all in the same family.
The hedgerows are clipped so often, they rarely fruit. It's in the woodlands and vergers that we find trees that bear nuts.
Sustainable ag is odd in France. They almost do it already in areas with small farms and woods. But in the big ag parts, it's just like the US.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
The pictures of your part of France
are so lovely. And get those vegetables picked and ready for the table!
c'est la vie
Wish I were where you are.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Hi otc. So many parts of France are geographically
beautiful. The main part of the country is about the size of Oregon and Washington stuck together with the six points outside the square.
We are on the same latitude as Mount Saint Helens, so it's a familiar feel. Every ten kilometers the land forms, rivers, vistas change sometimes quite dramatically. For a small country, the diversity in ecology, geography and weather is rather extraordinary. A person can comb an area say fifty square kilometers for many years and not discover all its secrets. Many have tried and written about it.
Looking at maps, it is easy to see the number of river and large creek systems is abundant. Receding glaciers in the Alps will make a huge difference in the east but many systems are fed by the land slowly giving up rain-fed water.
We are covering our German beds with flexible ripple plastic panels, and keeping our greens going as long as we can. The Chard is very good as are the Mesclun that continue to slowly grow.
We are preparing a large rendered block bed for next year. All three of our beds are deep enough for permaculture, so we've scavenged rotting logs and branches from our woods for the first layer under native soils, then compost and topped with wheat straw. So far so good.
Those German beds came mail order and were up in a couple of hours. Gave us the kick start we needed.
Our main house-sized wood stove is keeping most of our house mighty warm. We are experimenting with when to use it and when to let it go out. We have tall chimneys so we want to be careful of creosote build up. We are high heating each new burn hopefully keeping creosote away or manageable.
Good to see you.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
Grass fed.. I hear that word
Grass fed.. I hear that word a lot. from my sweetie who buys the food for our family.
She is an unrepentant carnivore. And is now very into the popular ketogenic diet. As am I now, having lost more than 30 lbs.
Eat lots of delicious veggies!
So many farm animals in this part of France are grass
fed or raised en plein air: chickens, sheep/lambs, cows. What we don't see are the pigs. Pork here is so good.
There are great plains which are alluvial fans around Paris and east of the Saône, and down towards the bouche du Rhone. This is where big ag has its day. Hillier, smaller farm areas such as Burgundy, Midi Pyrenees and the Jura are more family-sized. Great cheeses come from some pretty small farms.
Yes, grass fed. The best eggs ever.
A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.
Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.
Hillier areas are really pretty.
Wherever you are.
And more fun to hike around..