Bessieres is a fairly small village alongside the River Tarn. There are plenty of small villages in this area; Buzet-sur-Tarn is only three kilometers down-river, and St Sulpice-sur-Tarn, and the trainstation, less than ten. It felt like another planet, with a Super-U across the street from the farm, and a train station within short and easy cycling distance. After a month on Corsica and a month in the Var, a bit far from everything, this was delux.
When I found the farm, I was a bit hesitant. A grand brick chateau at the end of a straight gravel road, fixed at the end with a locked gate, I was having flashbacks of my arrival in Sacy-le-Petit. That was my share of aristocracy, and I didn't want any extra! Once I got in, though, I was much reassured. The family that I was living with lived in the little farm house to the side; the chateau--and it was--was her parents. They'd bought the place in ruin twenty years ago, and have been transforming it since. It's quite beautiful inside, and as grand within as without. (The pictures I took were crap, and as I'm returning in a few weeks, I'll get newer and better ones to post).
This is the view out my window, looking into the woodlot beside the house. There were some beautiful nights here, and the trees nearer to the house seemed to be full of restless birds at night. The room I was in was unheated, which was not a problem, really. It was great for sleeping--since I like it colder--but it
was difficult to get out of bed in the morning!
Berangere rents land a few kilometers from Besseres. Her father is renovating a space for WWOOFers, which will have a kitchen and whatnot, and we spent a couple of days filling up the trailor and taking the broken bits of wall to the field, where we smashed up the bigger bits to fill the potholes. What fun...
Me...doing something in the greenhouse. There are two greenhouses in the field where we worked most of the time. She was doing produce baskets when I was there, once every two weeks, so we got to harvest what winter crops there were--a lot of radishes, blete (which might be Swiss Chard--and tastey with a cream sauce!) spinach, manche, salad. Harvesting tends to be satisfying work.
The blete in question.
We also did a lot of transplanting--seedlings to pots, small plants into the field or the greenhouse. When it snowed and was cold for a week, we did plenty of seeding, an indoor job we did in her kitchen with lots of coffee.
There was also a smaller greenhouse at the house, where all the seedlings were growing. It was quite beautiful and almost tropical inside.
This is Andy and I and Tegan, his two-year-old daughter. He and his wife, Helen, were travelling in France and Spain with Tegan for two months. Here we are preparing flats of potting soil for planting seeds.
Helen and I preparing the soil for planting leeks in. We were mixing potting soil, vermiculite, and some sort of organic fertiliser that stunk of chicken shit. Tegan got in there near the end.
The future home of WWOOFers! Andy and I spent a cold afternoon smashing out some of the cement, taking out the watering system that used to be in there from when it was a stable. I've seen it since, and it's coming along rather nicely. I'm expecting to get to live in it when I return in June.
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