BeBe Bee Bee-atrice Born on #Tweehive day

I’m turning sweet on you, my friends, here in my untidy parc sauvage,

my feathered orchard, my alive-with-critters compound.

Honey, you are a busy growing part of my French world

and the food we grow to enjoy here at Camont.

Within one season of changing my garden habits, Camont has transformed from a tidy, neatly edged ‘ Two-acre Park’ to a home forager’s paradise.  A dynamic counterpart to the humm & buzz, bird twitter soundtrack of late summer, I now share Camont with chickens, ducks, cat, dog and honey bees as well as hungry students.   This is what I did ( or didn’t do…) to transform a tidy and quiet garden to a haven for wildlife and not-so-wild food.

• banished all use of weedkiller like Round-up
• bought a great long handled, open hoe to weed
• left the brush pile from late winter prunings instead of burning them. results: we welcomed a hedgehog into the rose garden.
• created a ‘no-go’ zone around Camont’s border- letting the nettles, dandelions, purslane & wild mint run rampant.
• seeded an old variety of deep red clover in fallow areas of the potager (I’ll do more of this next spring)
• stopped mowing the ‘parc’ area in favor of letting it naturalize. Results were a handful on new wild cherry trees and walnut trees sprouting up.
• bought a scythe- way quieter than a weed-whacker.
• planted a new entrance orchard by the drive with undergrowth of purslane and other ground cover.
• let everything in the garden go to seed in it’s own turn. Results: honey bees on the chives, lettuce and fennel seed heads.
• encouraged small groups of feverfew and borage to spread out.
• created a small pond for the ducks and bees to use. Result: every visitor got involved helping to shore up the banks and outwit the chickens heavy scratching.
• weeded less, enjoyed more.

I learned to see the garden as a process rather than a final outcome. When one of my well-meaning but clueless grown students suggested I might ‘hire’ someone to do it all for me, I just had to shake my head.  She just didn’t get that the time I spend mowing, weeding, wandering, smelling, planting, and harvesting comes back to me many fold in my uber-awareness of my home and how I live. Now when I see a patch of wild mint, I look for a working bee, and think of iced mint tea with honey. Before I clear a pile of branches, I make an ‘Andy Goldsworthy’ shrine to a possible nest for teh slug eating hedgehogs. And most of all I look… look hard to see if the bees have enough flowering for food and what I can let go or plant for next year to encourage my first honey efforts.

Fall is a wonderful time to ‘tidy up’ the garden…but not too much, please. For more tips on relaxing your garden…click here and support the #Tweehive swarming this Saturday sept 5th  in your own Bee-autiful way on twitter. Tweet me at @katedecamont.

This is the summer that was. Hot. Sultry. Summery. Not enough rain to keep the garden watered but the tomatoes are great! Hot enough to sleep with the fans on all night and drown out the aforementioned rooster’s night song.  A real rare hot Gascon summer where a good wet thunderstorm is what we need.

However, these dry days are perfect for harvesting the purple pod beans given to me by Robert Hammond at Honeyman Creek Farm. The little hand written package said that they came over the Oregon Trail in the 1850′s and now they are growing here at Camont in SW France. What seemed like an abundance of beans on the vine, now looks merely like one good cassoulet’s worth.  But that’s going to be a great Cassoulet- a l’Americaine!

When Vetou Pompele stopped by to sit in the shade, gossip and help me shuck beans, I dipped into ‘the piggery’ (the larder for those not used to Camont’s layout)  for a fast food lunch… French fast food. Vetou plucked some ripe coeur de boeuf tomatoes and three jars later plus one bottle, we were ready to schuck,  sort, and talk story the rest of the long hot day.

A Three Jar Lunch

1. pate de campagne ’09- this was a yet another taste test and yes, the was just enough salt and piment d’espelette.
2. estouffade or escaoudoune- a gascon version of pulled pork cooked with onions and sweet wine
3. confiture de tomates et chilis- my own potager version inspired by New Zealand friends. Hot, sweet and tangy!

After the lazy meal under glass, (actually it entailed hours of cooking but weeks ago!), I got down to business and nudged my faithful hound aside for another hot afternoon tradition- the Nap Attack. oh, these dog days…

a three bottle recipe

I am a fool. A fool for summer, for preserving… for anything growing within reach of the Kitchen-at-Camont. When walking Bacon down the towpath first thing on these French summer mornings or passing the Garden Shed on the way to feed the Flock, I have been counting the days to ripeness, sampling the wares for sweetness and getting ready to pounce on both wild and cultivated blackberries, as soon as there was enough to harvest.

A plate full was not enough to bother for confiture even with the extra raspberries. So in my usual Gasconne fashion, I turned to drink. Armagnac, specifically.

The ingredients on the bottle of artisan creme de mure sauvage calls for sugar and eau-de-vie. Nothing more. This is the simple life at its best! So I tipped the berries into a canning jar, added a generous scoop of white sugar, and covered the dark brooding berries with a bottle of eau-de-vie (simple clear brandy) and the remains of a favored bottle of Delord armagnac.  Cover and seal. Give a few quick shakes to break up the berries and melt the sugar. Eh voila! Now wait a month- the necessary patience until I taste test the brew.  Filter the fruit and seed out and decant the sweet dark summer liquor into a fancy bottle. Make a label. Write “Summer Fool ’09″

Preserving. These are the summer ways to remember a cool morning spent picking berries and listening to the quiet clucking of a new mother teaching her chicks to hunt and peck for a few stray ripe berries that drape across the chicken wire. This winter, after cursing the wet winter chores of mucking out the coop, I’ll remember summer ’09 better with a glass of Fool in hand.

‘Summer-under-Glass’ is a part of our

NEW  ‘Camp Camont’ programs at the Kitchen-at-Camont.