A quick spring update

At the end of a busy week of family visiting and work, this is just a quick update on spring in the garden.

The mangetout peas (left, above) are growing well and starting to hold on to the supporting netting we put up last week.  The broad beans are flowering, but I can’t see any beans yet.  Strangely, the first October and November sowing don’t seem as advanced as the later (December) sowings.  They did suffer more from the cold weather, being taller when the frost came.  We picked some of the young top leaves to go in our salad today.

The Banksia rose is budding, but not flowering yet.  It’s a bit late this year, as it usually flowers in early April.

The lettuce seedlings we planted last month are nearly ready to eat and the first tulip is flowering.

A salad of leaves from the garden – lettuce, broad bean, oregano, lamb’s lettuce and sorrel – which we had for lunch today.  And (right) the apple tart we’ve made for tonight when our Occitan group has invited a theatre group to perform in the village hall, followed by a meal of ragout d’escoubille (Languedocien stew) (made by a caterer), wine, cheese and desserts provided by the members.

Indoors and on the balconies: tomato and pepper plants are all doing well, as are courgettes, cucumber and basil.  Today is the first hot day we’ve had and it feels as though we’ll be busy keeping up with the gardening over the next few weeks!

Fideua

Sunday lunch in the garden, with family here for the Easter weekend. Fideua is paella made with pasta rather than rice. We made it with cuttlefish, prawns, red and green peppers, clams and some of our own olives. I’ll put the recipe on the Mediterranean cuisine blog. The colours were wonderful in the sun.

The view from Faugères

Snow-topped Mont Canigou, 150 kilometres away

and the rest of the eastern Pyrenees, looking small in comparison.

A capitelle (left, above), one of the stone shepherds’ or goatherds’ huts which are dotted all over the hills around Faugères.  They were used for shelter.  This one, near the cave cooperative, has been restored by a group of local people who rebuild the stone walls and old buildings around the village.  Down in the valley of the river Orb, the peach trees were in flower near Hérepian (above, right).

Spring flowers, Lezignan onions and wild asparagus

There’s a partridge hiding in the shadow under these olive trees, and a colourful mix of grape hyacinths and dandelions in the foreground.

It’s the time for planting oignons de Lézignan, the variety of sweet onions which come from the village of Lézignan la Cèbe near Pézenas (ceba is the Occitan word for onion and the village has taken the French version of this word as part of its name).  I wrote about this last year on this blog.  Last year our neighbour went to buy them for us from Monsieur Lucas, one of several producers in the village, the one he says is the best, and this year it was our turn to go. 

M. Lucas has a website, advertised in the photo (left) for orders by post: plantsdoignons.free.fr

I liked the onion sign attached to a rubbish bin!

As M. Lucas’s website tells us: ‘La Cébe des Lézignan es douça coumo lou pan’ (Occitan for ‘Lézignan onions are sweet as bread’.  Last year we enjoyed them raw in salads until the grew bigger and stronger-flavoured when we barbecued them and cooked them in sauces.

Lo Jardinièr planted them today in a double row, cutting off the tops of the leaves and putting them not too deep and lying slightly against the earth beside them.  Once they settle into the ground they straighten themselves up.

While he was doing that, I sowed the first haricot beans of the season.  According to one of our friends and gardening neighbours, St Joseph’s Day, 19 March, is the time to start sowing haricot beans, but although we’d prepared the ground for one reason or another I didn’t get round to sowing them until today, which according to the Gardener’s calendar is a good phase of the moon for them.

And it’s asparagus time!

Looking back at my blog posts for this time last year, I noticed that when I wrote about Lézignan onions I also wrote about wild asparagus.  So, it’s not surprising that today we’ve picked the first wild asparagus of this spring.  We didn’t have to go far – when we first took over our garden it had been unused for many years, so wild plants had taken over.  When we found wild asparagus plants we either moved them to somewhere convenient or left them where they were in some of the wilder areas of the plot.  Today we picked a bunch which made a tasty first course for our lunch, cooked in boiling water for about 10 minutes and served very simply with olive oil, chopped garlic, salt and pepper and bread.  They have all the flavour of fresh cultivated asparagus but intensely concentrated into thinner spears – wonderful!

Jasmine flowers too …

 

 

The jasmine we planted a couple of years ago is flowering for the first time.

Spring in the garden at last

The path to the garden

strewn with a confetti of almond blossoms from our neighbour’s tree.

Anemones de Caen	Aubretia, daffodils and grape hyacinths
bees on the apricot blossom	and a lizard in the sun.

Look how they’re growing!

I can hardly believe how much our tomato and pepper seedlings have grown in just over a week since I last posted photos of them.  In the daytime they’re out on the balcony in the mini-greenhouses (where the temperature can reach over 30 degrees C in the sunshine), but we bring them in at night.

tomato and ……

pepper seedlings today.

and a flashback to eight days ago:

They’ll need potting in bigger containers in the next day or so and we’re not sure where we’re going to put them all!  But it’s a nice problem to have.

Sunday lunch

We treated ourselves to a pigeon for lunch, cooked with figs which we preserved in Armagnac last autumn, and a sausage meat and cep (boletus/porcini) stuffing.  It was delicious, with the last of this winter’s leeks from the garden.  The recipe is on the Mediterranean cuisine blog.

No swimming, but plenty of water

The reservoir at the spring above the gardens is full for the first time for a year, and the stream running down from it is rushing with water for the gardens ….

The old building under the wall of the reservoir.
One of the mills half way down the hill.

The apricot blossom is opening at last, and it was 20 degrees C when we had lunch in the garden today.  Dare I say that spring is here?