Switched on to the Seasons

A glass of white wine by the pool this week, watching the swallows swooping overhead and listening to them chatting to each other on the tv aerial, prompted some reflection on how much closer we are to the seasons than we were in our previous existence. OK, so Godalming station was much more pleasant at 07:23 once the clocks had gone forward, and we did enjoy the odd evening meal outside if we got home in time, but enjoying the summer and moaning about the grizzly winter was about as close as our lives got to the changing seasons.

Now we’re ending our third year here in southern Champagne, where even the local newspaper follows the seasonal rhythm, it's impossible not to be completely tuned in to the seasons. Even Jonathan, who’s desk-bound five days a week, is driven by the changing seasons. From about October, his main job (apart from the gainful employment, of course) is making sure there’s enough chopped wood on hand to keep the stoves stoked up. Off and on during the summer he cuts the wood which is delivered to us in metre lengths but the main effort is from Autumn to early Spring when he spends quite a bit of time lugging logs about to make sure the baskets by the stoves are loaded.

This week, though, as if by magic, the seasons flipped when the ‘piscinistes’ came to open the pool for the summer. Now Jonathan’s in pool mode. That means his main job until sometime in late September or early October (apart from solving his clients’ database problems, of course!) is making sure the pool is crystal clear, chemically balanced and free of nasty floaty things like bits of leaf or dead spiders.

This seasonal demarcation is a bit more complicated now the new wood boiler is heating our hot water all year round, requiring a load of logs every three or four days and meaning wood duty carries on all year. However, he’s definitely in pool mode now and is very excited that the recently-installed solar panels have already got the water temperature up to 19 degrees.

As for me, the chief washer woman, cook and gardener, I’ve always got at least one eye what’s going on outside. The first sign of spring is probably Circé’s fur starting to come out in handfuls and then once the clocks go forward the days are long enough to dry at least three loads of washing outside (provided it’s not raining of course).

Here in France even the most Tesco-like supermarkets don’t sell strawberries in February so it’s not difficult to develop a deeper understanding of what’s in season when, even if you don’t have your own vegetable garden. Since the end of April, and hopefully for a few more weeks yet, we can buy local asparagus from a farm a couple of kilometres away and it really won’t be long before I’m buying trays of fresh peaches, grown in the south of France, from my favourite fruit and veg shop.

Next week we reach the days of the three ‘Saints de glace’ , one of whom, coincidentally, is Saint Pancras. This marks a real milestone in the calendar of French gardeners north of the Loire. After these days, the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th of May, the story goes that anything planted out in the garden or the veg plot will be safe from frost. Everyone here who grows their own veg, me included, will then be off the blocks and racing to get everything planted. I can’t wait, as it’s standing room only in the greenhouse at the moment!