Spring Estate Maintenance Routine
Posted on
When I asked Beth to share her spring maintenance routine on her estate in the heart of the Occitanie region, I hadn’t fully grasped the scale of her property! Her domaine spans an impressive 415 acres, featuring a diverse landscape with various shapes and sections, countless trees to tend to, and many animals to care for. If you’re contemplating purchasing your own farmhouse or rural estate, you might be curious about the regulations, the types of land, and the amount of work involved.
Any seasoned property owner with land knows that the key to a successful spring lies in the autumn tidy-up, often dictated by the weather. Let’s hear from Beth as she shares her secrets; she’s been busy, and we’re eager to learn from her experiences!
“How’s your spring cleaning going? Despite virtuous thoughts about turning out drawers and cupboards and getting rid of unwanted items, most of my time this month is spent outside.
Our Garden
The weather has been glorious for the past couple of weeks and perfect for attacking the garden. It’s warm enough for the citrus shrubs to come out of the greenhouse. Grapefruit (pampelmousse – one of my favourite French words, kumquat, and lemons all live in pots, the latter heavy with citrussy fruit. They need a good feed, as do our roses, which are budding nicely. This year, I’ve decided to use pine bark (écorce de pin) on the rose borders, which will help cut down on the dreaded weeding.
I usually paint our wood garden furniture in April, but other jobs are demanding my attention, including those in the potager.
Le Potager
To be as self-sufficient as possible, we created a modest potager (vegetable garden) by reclaiming a chunk of meadow. I have four square borders lined with oak planks and gravel surrounds. This makes life much easier when working the soil and saves getting my boots covered in our heavy clay-based soil.
April is a busy planting time. I have a variety of vegetable seedlings sprouting in my tiny greenhouse, together with several annual butterfly-friendly plants, which will line the garden rose borders.
Outside, a mixture of garlic, haricot beans, butternut squash, onions and peas are brewing, and I have just seeded my latest experiment beds. Our soil is murder to work. It’s claggy in the winter and rock-hard in the summer. This makes growing root crops challenging because it’s almost impossible to harvest the vegetables without damaging them. To combat that, we have built a raised bed and filled it with compost and sand. Parsnips, carrots and beetroots love those conditions.
This is also the time of year when our vines and fruit trees are treated. If you visit France and wonder why many plants have a bluish-grey tinge, they will likely have been sprayed with bouillie bordelaise – a fungicide made from copper sulphate and calcium oxide. It has long been used primarily to protect vines, certain fruit trees and some nightshades (potatoes and tomatoes) against mildew.
Providing Forest
Akin to our self-sufficiency efforts, timber from our domaine forest is sold for firewood, which we also use for the home. The higher-quality cuts are used for fencing, and we have several pieces of garden/home furniture created from our wood. It sounds silly, but we’re pretty proud of them.
Our domaine extends over 168 hectares (415 acres) of mainly deciduous woodland. During April, our outstanding (positively amazing, actually) forester, Nathan, is busy cutting wood from fallen, aged timbers for this year’s firewood sales.
A legal requirement of all forest owners in France is to maintain their woodland properly. This includes the forest trails (chemins), of which we have several kilometres. During the winter, some are damaged by flooding and larger woodland animals, such as boar and deer, which have fun digging the surfaces. Inevitably, branches and trees sometimes fall, blocking passage. It’s now when Nathan begins clearing the larger obstructions and tows a levelling tool (it looks like a giant spade) behind his tractor to create an even surface. This happens several times a year.
Our domaine was a hunting estate with many hides – miradors and wildlife feeding stations. We now use the fenced section as an animal sanctuary for indigenous species, so those hides (hunting blinds) are great places to watch animals going about their business unobserved. We’re currently making repairs to the manmade structures. Having our wood makes these jobs far less pricey.
With over eight kilometres (five miles) of boundary fencing and streams running through, post-winter fencing repairs and freeing storm debris beneath bridges are ongoing jobs which involve us all.
The Animal Family
This year, our animal activities are a bit different. We brought a new Australian Shepherd puppy into our family last November. Pup Caesar is taking up lots of fun time. Mind you, he’s reaching that teenage stage now. If you’ve had the joy of managing puppyhood, you’ll know that this is when they conveniently forget everything they learned and behave like a hooligan, which, after all, is much more fun.
When I’m not puppy wrangling, I have ensured our penned birds have everything they need to start families.
We currently have a stock of chickens, quails and pheasants. In recent years, we have been working to create an environment conducive for the pheasants to breed naturally in the pens. We release their youngsters into the forest to live freely on our land. This year, we spent ages building a new set of nesting boxes, which our hens love but our Reeves’ pheasant girls ignore entirely. Hey ho, you can’t win ‘em all.
So that’s our life, in our neck of the woods. Less of the domestic cupboard cleaning and lots more of the outdoor work. Whatever you’re up to this month, I hope it’s fun and productive.”
At this time of year, every day brings something new to do, learn, or discover. How lucky you are to experience it all firsthand! Thank you, Beth, for sharing your insights and the beautiful photo. For more seasonal adventures in southwest France, don’t miss out on our excellent and best-selling books. And if you’re dreaming of your own private natural estate, get in touch, we might have the perfect wildlife haven waiting for you!
Search, Save and View
