vegetables are boring

- or at least not interesting enough to keep posting photos of them on a regular basis.
The subject of kitchen gardens and sustainable small-scale agriculture, however, is endlessly fascinating.

We have just emerged from an intense two week Plein Air art course run by Diane Olivier from San Francisco. Cooking and cleaning and caring for fourteen Californians. Our potager just came ‘on-stream’ as they arrived, and provided a part of what we cooked – purple and yellow French beans, sweet peas, yellow and green courgettes, lettuce and rocket and spinach, plus a few tomatoes and red onions. The cool wet spring held things back this year.

Running parallel to our small  ‘histoire de potager‘  is Charles and Isabelle’s move away from wine-making to vegetable farming. They have many hectares lying fallow now, having taken the grants for uprooting their vines. Many of these ‘parcelles’ of scattered vineyards are too stoney for anything apart from olives. But their favourite lands at Lazagal are valley-bottom, and are very fertile. What was lacking  was water – or rather, a serious means of  irrigation, since there is a large well right there by the Lazagal stream.

This is the solution he came up with :

It’s a 206 cc Bernard side-valve single cylinder petrol engine, from the 50’s, coupled to an equally elderly pump for emptying wine-vats. It starts with one pull – and at tickover speed will pump 50 gallons per minute.

He has around 150 tomato plants,  perhaps the same of potatoes, plus many peppers, cougettes and aubergines.  It’s all a month behind our stuff – but he sees it as a warm-up for next year when his involvement with the AMAP organisation will bring in some much-needed money.

An association for the preservation of a peasant agriculture ( AMAP) is, in France, a close partnership  between a group of consumers and a local farm, based on a system of weekly distribution of the products of the farm. It is a  contract, based on a financial commitment of the consumers, who pay in advance the totality of their consumption over a period defined by the type of production and the geographical place. This system thus works on the principle of the confidence(trust) and the responsibility of the consumer.

going organic

The wine we drink at home and you drink on one of our mosaic courses or painting holidays, comes from Domaine Isabelle in the village. Charles and Isabelle have become our best friends in France – but in all the years we’ve known them I’ve never worked in their vines.

Mid-morning breakfast: Isabelle, her bread, their pâté, their wine – and Miga.

They have always practiced ‘ agriculture raisonnée’ – paying due respect to wildlife and conservation methods, and using the minimum of chemicals necessary.  Now they are going 100% ‘ biologique’ or organic – which involves even more work. And which involves me this week.

The rows between the vines – les sillons, as in Roussillon - get regular harrowing,  to keep down weeds and aerate the heavy clay. But the gaps (les billons or cavaillons) between the vine-plants themselves pose a different problem : how to deal with the weeds without damaging ‘ les souches’ .

Up to the ’50’s, the work was done by hand – with the hoe and the horse-drawn décavailloneuse. The tractor speeded up the process – but the work remained the same : careful ploughing around every vine. It was the advent of powerful chemicals in the ’70’s that changed the  ‘nature of the game’.

One man with a sprayer and a 5 euro bottle of glyphosate (initially patented and sold by Monsanto in the 1970s as Roundup) could do the work it took two men a day to do – in an hour. The double-bladed décavailloneuse above was brought out of retirement this week.

Below is a video of Isabelle and me, guiding the handles – with Charles at the wheel.

The trick is to help the curved bars in front of the ploughshare to strike – or stroke – the base of the vine. These guide-bars -  les tâteurs, literally tasters or feelers – are linked by lever and spring so that the shares are retracted – just in time . . . But a ridge of earth with tough old weeds has formed at either side which frequently spoils the neat movement in and out. That’s where you see Isabelle battling to push the blade back out, or me yanking the lever back in before it rips out a vine. It’s quite physical – and you really shouldn’t take your eye off the ground for an instant . . .

The trick for Charles was to keep a steady line precisely down the middle of le sillon – the slightest deviation of the little front wheels makes a big difference 4 metres back at the blades – quite nerve-racking.

Two regional expressions of this work: tirer le régou, from the provenςal rega, a furrow; and tirer le crépis, a wavy line. Where the weeds are thin and le billon not too humped,  le tâteur can be left to work on its own. But our second parcelle were merlot vines – fragile plants compared to the cabernet, which is tough and supple ‘comme le chewing-gum‘ says Isabelle. She hates this particular parcel of vines. It was badly planted from the outset by the neighbour they bought it from : too closely spaced, and not trained to grow straight when young. So now we are pushing and pulling, swearing and swerving around these bent stems – and occasionally ripping them out. Our score was even at the very end – 3 all – when she lobbed her last victim onto the bonnet.

And the undesirable américains? Here’s one we we uprooted -

It’s a stump of the late-19th. century root-stock that all French vines were grafted on to, to protect them from phylloxera. Its advantage was the thick bark that the insect couldn’t penetrate – its disadvantage the fact that its grape-buds never develope. Its a hardy root with a love of life – but also just another weed that has to go.

By coincidence we both own identical ’80’s-style shades : les Blues Brothers says Charles, or the Gondoliers.

Here’s a link to a short video of a horse-drawn décavailloneuse, from 2006 near Nimes, as part of a demonstration  by Jean Clopes, au Mas de Theyron à Boisseron (Hérault) – and to the blog of Stephan Przezdziecki writing about the same work, up-country en Pays de Layon, Anjou.