Konrad, Anika, and Josie had just just shown up to spend a few days kickin’ back and enjoying the French countryside. I didn’t wait long to put them to work cleaning one of the last of the ‘big messes’ that had been bothering me since we arrived!
A little background: The ‘house’ (if you can call it that?) was actually not a house originally… You could say it was a sort of a stable… where pigs lived. Okay, it was a pigsty to be exact. So, in the the front of the house is a small front yard which at one time is where the pigs ran around, and were fed. Along side the wall is a long, narrow feeding-trough made of giant granite stones sunk into the ground. Over the years this was filled with all manner of rubbish, plastic, rusted metal, a TV antenna, a mountain of rotten wood, and enough coal to fire a locomotive from Cannes to Caen. It didn’t take long for the expert crew to clear out all the mess, tear up the soil, uproot the nettles and briars, and turn a trash pile into our first garden at the new house…
It’s not much, but it’s certainly better than a pile of rotting wood covered in trash! We were able to plant a few flowers, and our master gardener Konrad set to work sewing our first crop- a batch of Lettuce. It was his first time planting lettuce, and when we told him he could actually eat it later, he was less than impressed. He tasted a leaf and said, “It tastes like grass!” before heading off to find more snails!
