Tuesday 25 September 2012

A far cry from peasant farming in France!


A friend of ours has just bought something wonderful!  It can’t really be classed as his new toy - it’s a 44 foot Lagoon catamaran with 3 ensuite double berths, kitchen, living room (all with a/c!) and an enormous amount of deck space and Tony and I were fortunate enough to enjoy a day on it yesterday - photos below....







As you all know, we miss our home in France very much but days like yesterday really do help to ease the sadness! :)

As for our farming adventures, we’ve started composting (results soon come in this heat I would imagine) and we’ve got cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, aubergine, rosemary and basil growing well in the planters Tony built a while ago (they’re all up but not yet fruiting with the exception of the aubergines so photos of our bounty to follow but a small crop of our aubergines pictured below on the bbq).


Hoping this finds you all well - we’re still in rainy/hurricane season here but so far no hurricanes just plenty of rain periodically for which our vegetables are very grateful.  Although with all the rain we’ve had lately, we must be diligent as they’ve just passed a new law out here and if you now splash a pedestrian by driving through a puddle you can get fined up to $500!

Happy week ahead - with love the ‘pretend farmers’ that weren’t pretending to do anything except experience how the other half live yesterday!

Saturday 1 September 2012

Oh What a beautiful morning.... (anyone seen the film “Oklahoma”?!)



The photo above was taken just moments ago - a truly spectacular morning here in Cayman - one of the many that I either take for granted or miss because I’m busy getting ready for work or on the weekends still in bed!

Although in the middle of summer here and with that, rainy and hurricane season too - the last few days we’ve had a little respite from the intense heat and due to lots of rain, we’ve had some cooler mornings and evenings which have been lovely if a little heavy with mosquitoes!  But we take the good with the bad and keep smiling :)

Today we have a couple of friends driving, as I type, down to ‘chez nous’ in France where they’ll be staying for perhaps a few weeks.  We’re both so pleased that the place is being used in our absence although a little nervous as the place is far from ‘guest ready’ - it’s hardly somewhere (yet) that one can turn the key and enjoy - there’ll be lots of unveiling - plastic sheets - throw cloths etc. to do as well as getting rid of the mouse and rat poison dotted around the place - but we’re hoping we left it in fairly good condition when we left in July and that they’ll have a really good time.

In order that our neighbours and lovely stonemasons aren’t surprised if happening by, we’ve written to them all and just got a lovely note back from the stonemasons this week to say that they’d hoped to strim the courtyard for our friends but have been unable to get round to it between too many work committments and the crazy heat they’ve had in August - so although there’ll be some yard work for our friends to do, we hope the weather will hold out and they’ll be lighting the bbq and not the fire inside!

On an ‘agricultural note’, Tony has decided that he’s going to start off the first of the tomatoes of the season.  Although it’s too hot right now for them to do anything, we think we can start them off indoors with the intention of transplanting them around early October so that we can have fresh vine ripened tomatoes once again and not pay over the odds for ones that flown in from goodness knows where - picked green and vine ripened by being sprayed with oxygen to turn them red in some cases!

Wishing you all spectacular sunrises or sunsets wherever you may be!  With love from us - the transplanted pretend farmers! x