News        

Spring/Summer 2005

Spring is well and truly underway here after a rather chilly winter!  Like most of Europe, we have had the coldest winter for 20 years, and temperatures reached minus 12 at one point. Thankfully that is well behind us know, all the fruit trees are out in blossom, the nightingales are singing every evening in the apple trees, and we’ve had to start wearing suncream again to work in the garden!

Our big project for this spring is to produce all our fruit and vegetables this year, in our organic vegetable garden. We have enlarged the old plot, and are busy creating terracing and pathways, and barrowing marvelous well rotted ‘fumier’ from the horses for all our vegetables needs.  There are a lot of deer around at the moment, and the coypu’s have come out of semi - hibernation in the pond, so it is possible we will have to protect our new shoots from nibbling visitors!

This winter we also started to work with a local estate agent, providing translation services, and generally looking after their English-speaking clients, and this is proving very interesting and enjoyable.  

Alongside this, we now offer a ‘Settling in France’ service, helping people with anything from car registration to property search, health registration to internet access, smoothing the way and handling any French communications needed for people who are just starting out here and need a hand finding their way through all the things you need to do when buying a house here. 

We’re still working on our farmhouse, with the renovation of the kitchen, and installation (for the first time in its 350 year old history) of hot water and a bathroom! 

We’ve been in France for 3 years now, and it certainly is home to us. Les Perdigots has sort of got under our skin, the ancient trees, the birdlife, the lovely old buildings, all give us a tremendous feeling of stewardship and affection for the land and its inhabitants, and we can’t really imagine doing anything else but this now - just as well really as I think there’s enough work to last us a lifetime or two!

   Sheralee & Ian