Or so it seems…..

Why does the period of time between New Year and Easter feel so depressing? Maybe it’s the weather, the general cold, damp, greyness, and lack of soul sustaining sunlight. Just a few minutes of sun on your face never fails to lift the spirits, but it genuinely feels like France has had a monsoon season this year, those precious moments of golden glow have been few and far between. I’m taking my vitamins like a good girl to try and stave off rickets, but it’s just not the same is it?

These last few days have been 10 degrees colder than we’ve been used to, because at least the rain has meant cloud cover has acted like a duvet, preventing the bitterness of the winter. But, with this recent cold snap, has come blue skies and most importantly sun! We have to grab these precious days, in the Autumn and in the Spring, to continue clearing the neck high brambles and unwanted feral fruit tree saplings that have sprung up in our orchard garden. Once we get close to summer and everything starts growing like crazy again, we have little time before working outside becomes impossible due to the heat, so these precious days are when we are singly the most productive out of the whole year.

I read somewhere that when looking for a house in France, you should buy the house and land you need, and not the house and land you can afford. This I read about 3 years after our French house purchase and `I thought. Hmmmm. The perception is (was – thanks Brexit), that you have to be loaded to move to France. If you want to live in Paris or on the Riviera then fair enough. But property across huge swathes of rural France goes for an absolute song. So it’s very easy to be a little swept up in the romance of what you can get for your money. Heaven knows, this is exactly the camp we find ourselves in. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change anything now, but, having an acre of land which was initially left to go rogue for 48 weeks of the year while we were both working in the UK, was not just short-sighted, but downright stupid. It was this way for 2 years until we made our move permanent, but for 4 weeks a year, we’d arrive all excited, armed with paint and wallpaper, only to spend the week, strimming and mowing a basic path around the garden – and that’s it. You think it’ll just be grass and that’s easy right?! No! It’s rock hard ant hills, grass that grows in clumps and is so thick the strimmer just glances off it. All interspersed with ivy and brambles, looping and arching their evil way across and up and around everything, choking the trees, and tripping you over. Gah!

So now, 5 years after we made our permanent move here, we still have about 1/4 acre still to clear. I haven’t seen the bottom right hand corner of the garden since we moved in. Actual fact! We also soldiered on with just a petrol self-propelled mower for too many years until giving in to the allure of the ride-on we now have. If you have an acre, you need one. That’s it. It’s the most necessary purchase you’ll ever make, and even now it takes an hour and a half to cut the cleared areas. If you’re doing that twice a week in peak growing time, trust me, I would sell my actual soul for my ride-on mower.

The past few days have been spent, strimming, shredding and clearing, with great progress. I don’t know if we’ll finally get into that bottom corner this year, but by heck we’ll be close!

Only in the last few days have I started to spot the first green shoots of snowdrops in our front border. I was starting to worry that the wet weather might have caused bulbs to rot, but praise be, there they are. This gives me hope that the 600 crocuses I have yet to see any sign off are just waiting patiently to appear. Along with another 150 tulip bulbs I’ve popped around the bottom of the trees. I move any snowdrop bulbs that spring up in weird places in the front border, into little clumps in the orchard, so we are starting to get a lovely carpet of them in between primroses in the Spring. I love that! I’ll share some pictures of what all of this looks like once they’ve done their thing. Fingers crossed!

Hope your January goes by as fast as it possibly can everyone. This too shall pass.

TTFN V x