Fête des Mères or Mother's Day in France

It has been a long and busy weekend for me. Since Friday I have shopped at our local market, made two visits a day to a friend's cat (one daily visit where I have to administer drugs), run an English conversation class at Ed's school, had a meeting with our insurers, done a supermarket shop, attended a local council meeting, walked the dog, baked two cakes, swept the floors, watched Ed perform at the music school annual concert, been to dinner at friends, fed our animals, done a two hour stint at the village polling station for the European Elections, picked cherries, collected and started delivering 400 Living Poitou Magazines and assisted with the vote counting for the elections. But today is also Mother's Day in France. I may have been up and out of the house before Ed was awake, but when I did see him at lunchtime I got a lovely card and some chocolates that hit THE spot! It was also a lovely privilege to have the time and weather to spend this afternoon in our much neglected garden.

First plantings in our potager

We've had many issues with our poor potager this year, notably a lack of time to prepare the soil and get on top of the weeds, but finally it is looking promising. I started the beans in our mini greenhouse and they were desperate to get going outside and now they can. However all our tomato and courgette seedlings are looking quite poorly. The weather hasn't been great - cold, wet and not enough sunshine, but we also think the soil we used in the pots has been lacking in something and they are quite stunted. Thankfully our generous friends in the village have donated some of their spares so today we planted out over 40 onion plants and 20 tomatoes. Now it looks like a potager I'm certainly feeling more relaxed about actually getting some produce this year. We have also started picking the cherries and the raspberry plants seem to be planning a takeover. If the foliage growth has any relation to the fruit we'll be jamming with raspberries very soon.

I hope you have all had a great weekend, whether it was relaxing or productive or both and Happy Mother's Day to all Mums wherever you may live.