It’s good to be home

We’re home again after three weeks away. We’d planned just a one-week break but had to leave unexpectedly a fortnight earlier because of a sudden death in the family, so after a sad time it’s very cheering to come home to a wonderful harvest of aubergines, peppers and tomatoes, thanks to our neighbour who watered the garden for us. We’ve got a busy weekend ahead now making tomato puree to store for the winter because the Roma tomatoes are just waiting to be picked.

and two delicious salads

A Greek salad, left, made with cucumber, tomatoes, peppers, garlic and onions from the garden and feta cheese and black olives. On the right, tomato, Red Marconi pepper and basil salad.

La Fête vigneronne at Faugères

Sunday morning wine tasting in a village of balconies and bunting:

 

A theatrical entrance to the old village whose narrow streets were filled with the stalls of wine producers, cheese makers, biscuit, cake and honey sellers, charcuterie producers and throngs of people tasting all this in the heat.  We found and bought some familiar produce – goats’ cheese from Mas Rolland – and tasted wines we’d not tasted before from Domaine du Météore at Cabrerolles and  Domaine Alquier at Faugères and bought rosé from Domaine Ballicioni at Autignac and Chateau des Peyregrandes at Roquessels (next door to Chateau des Adouzes where we buy wine regularly, but we’ve never ventured here before).  A completely new discovery, to us, was the Saffron syrup from the Tarn region of south-western France, which can be added to white wine to make Saffron kir and can also be used in cooking gambas or duck.  The kir we tasted at the stall tasted wonderfully spicy.

 

Crowded narrow streets and, right, a traditional still making fine de Faugères.

Our own harvest, and promise for the future

From the garden this morning:  Aubergines, a bell pepper, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet onions, courgettes and beans.  And, right, a small pumpkin on a huge plant, just beginning to grow.  Aubergine and courgette slices fried in olive oil and sprinkled with thyme and chopped garlic went well with Mas Rolland goats’ cheeses for supper.

Nearly there ….

The sea is warming up and we swam at Portiragnes-plage today.

I think this Languedocienne tomato will be the winner.  Will it be ready to pick tomorrow, or the day after ….?

Our one Kandil dolma pepper plant (the others didn’t germinate) has five good-sized peppers on it.  We picked our first Bari cucumber (from seeds given to us by Kate at Vegetable Vagabond and that came to us via Australia and south-western France from Bari in Italy).  It was wonderfully crisp and crunchy.  There are lots more coming and we’re looking forward to them.

Lunch in the garden while the tomatoes ripen ….

It was too hot to do much apart from water and eat lunch in the garden today – up to 35 degrees C.

Cucumber, Longues des Landes peppers, arbequina olives and Catalan fuet

Grilled courgettes and aubergine

Goats’ cheese from Mas Rolland with thyme and olive oil

Some of our Languedocienne tomatoes are showing signs of ripening.

A swallowtail butterfly

		It was hard to photograph as it flitted from one lavender flower to another.

 

A conversation about a locust

Chaiselongue: There’s a locust – I’m going to photograph it and then I want you to kill it. Click, click. Lo Jardinièr: It’s only a small one…. Chaiselongue: And how do you think they get bigger? Lo Jardinièr: By eating our aubergine plants. Chaiselongue: Exactly. Crunch. I’m so glad he can kill them, as I don’t like doing it – they’re very crunchy!

Garlic harvest

Most of our garlic crop for this year (the bulbs we haven’t eaten fresh). We’ve made a drying rack out of two fruit crates and put it under the shelter so that the garlic doesn’t get too much sun….. or rain! When it’s dry I’ll plait it into tresses for keeping, but not for long as we’ll get through this amount quite quickly. Passing through Lautrec, the centre for l’ail rose, this long-keeping, pink-skinned variety of garlic, in south-western France, we once saw barns full of garlic bulbs drying like this on racks .

Tomatoes, a cucumber and a locust

The locust was enjoying our habas leaves – I don’t mind so much if it eats those as they are nearly over and I picked most of the last beans from them today, but I didn’t want it eating the aubergine plants (which they love), so this one was crushed between two rocks by Lo Jardinièr. There will be others, so we’ll have to watch for them all summer.

Home again!

We’re home again after a wonderful week visiting family in Wales.  We had hot weather in Wales and we’ve returned to hot weather here.  Luckily we’d asked our neighbour to water our garden and everything has grown well while we were away, especially the tomato plants.  The lettuces we planted in between the tomato rows are ready to eat now, having benefited from the water given to the tomatoes.

There was a thunderstorm just after we arrived home yesterday evening and there is still plenty of water in the stream running down from the spring at the top of the hill.

	The tomato and cucumber plants have start to flower, and need a lot of work, tying them to their supports and removing the sideshoots on the tomato plants.  The olive trees are covered in tiny flowers, many of which we hope will grow into olives.

The courgettes are also flowering – only male flowers so far as usual at the beginning of the season, so we made fritters with a few of them.  A delicious treat with salad leaves from the garden and a glass of rosé from the Domaine des Pascales in the village.

 

We’ve picked far more broad beans and mangetout peas than we can possible eat, so we’re putting a lot of them in the freezer.  Unlike some other vegetables – courgettes especially – peas and beans freeze very well.  We at some of the mangetouts, and for supper I made a chilled broad bean soup, my version of a recipe in Frank Camorra and Richard Cornish’s Movida Rustica: Spanish Traditions and Recipes.  It’s made with raw broad beans liquidised with garlic cloves, olive oil and some bread soaked in water.  I added a sweet onion because we have so many in the garden now.  After chilling, the soup is served with a garnish of cured ham, a few peeled broad beans and some herbs.  Frank Camorra suggests mint, but I used oregano because I’d forgotten to pick the mint.  Any fresh herbs would give it a good flavour.  It was wonderfully creamy and a good  first course for a hot evening.

Plane trees update / Les platanes - mise à jour

At a meeting in the village this week the mayor and the technical staff involved in the project to cut down the plane trees seemed willing to compromise at least. They are willing to consider keeping the trees on one side of the road, while felling those on the other side so that there is room for a pavement and a central reservation in the road. This last 'improvement' is said to be necessary to slow down traffic and protect cyclists, but some of us think that there are other, less destructive ways of doing this.

À un réunion cette semaine il a semblé que le maire et les responsables techniques étaient prêts à faire un compromis - de garder les platanes à un côté de la route et d'abattre les autres pour faire un trottoir et un terre-plein au centre de la route pour faire ralentir les voitures.bien que quelques uns entre nous pensions qu'il y a des autres moyens moins destructifs de faire ça.

It will be sad to lose half of the remaining trees, but better than losing them all. Although some say that they are dangerous because speeding drivers crash their cars into them sometimes, I would say that is not the fault of the trees. In fact it has been found that when the trees are felled drivers go faster because the trees provide an illusion of speed which makes drivers slow down.

Plane trees are not native to the Mediterranean region, but they do adapt well to the dry conditions and shade the roads in summer.

This plane tree at St-Guilhem-le-Désert not far from here is said to be the biggest in France. I took this photo a few years ago when we visited the village. / Le plus grand platane en France à St-Guilhem-le-Désert.

This whole project of road 'improvements' and tree felling will have to be watched carefully to make sure that no more trees than is necessary are destroyed. We need to keep these old trees which were planted over 100 years ago - for the sake of the environment and the character of the village. It is an old village and some of the older inhabitants have long memories of these trees. Most of us do not want a 'suburban' look imposed on a rural wine-making village.

Summer harvest / La récolte d'été

We're harvesting a lot of tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers and aubergines now. We've made ratatouille to preserve for the winter. / On ramasse beaucoup de tomates, courgettes, concombres et aubergines maintenant. On a fait de ratatouille pour garder pour l'hiver.

The biggest courgette in this photo was hiding under the leaves so we'd let it grow too big - it was almost a marrow, but still sweet and tender. Lo Jardinièr cooked it this evening: cut it up and roasted it with sweet onion, roughly crushed the pieces, added thyme, garlic and cubes of feta cheese and put it back in the oven until the cheese browned. We ate it with tomato and basil salad. A delicious supper!

Courgette, cuite au four avec d'oignon doux et du fromage feta et du thym, et servie accompagnée d'une salade de tomates et basilic.