gardening

Une mouche noire dans mon Chardonnay

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Some things are so predictable that not only should we see them coming, but we don’t really deserve much sympathy if we don’t. One of those is Louis Catorze doing the ONE THING that we don’t want him to do. And, yet again, he has delivered.

The little sod has managed to slalom his royal rump between Cat Daddy’s barricades and is sitting in the tarragon trough again. Yes, I know you told me so. And, yes, I know I was stupid for thinking it would go any other way than this.

Bastard cat.
Insouciant royal rump.

Cat Daddy, as you can imagine, is enraged beyond belief. He has now jabbed even more shanks into the trough, at various forbidding criss-cross angles, in an effort to discourage Catorze, and only time will tell whether or not this will work. We have to hope that it will. Otherwise, what next? Poison-tipped razor wire? Motion-activated toxic gas sprinklers? Garlic and a crucifix?

I often talk about ear plugs to block out Catorze’s screaming. However, right now, it’s the Unrepeatable Expletives that are battering my eardrums. Between them, the males of this household are doing me in.

La saison de la citrouille

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It’s autumn! And I swear I can actually feel Louis Catorze’s powers growing with the new season, quite possibly because it’s peak visiting time for pilgrims and his creepy kitty sixth sense knows this. He has one visitor coming all the way from the west coast of Ireland at the weekend, and two more, who have been before, are returning in October. (Cat Daddy: “Really? Most people who’ve seen him once don’t bother coming back.”)

Catorze is at peak energy at the moment, gallivanting all night, chasing squirrels, guzzling down Orijen, screaming (in his new, post-surgery voice – more about that another time) and I don’t suppose it helped that we gave him a steroid shot the night before the full moon, but it’s too late to do anything about that now. His fur is thick and shiny and, for an old boy, he seems in fine form. No doubt part of it is due to the drugs, but at least 83% of it is him being a bit unhinged anyway. I dread to think what he will be like on Hallowe’en.

Speaking of which, this year, against all the odds, our lone pumpkin plant survived. The flower that I photographed in early July was a largeish tennis ball by the time we came back from holiday. Cat Daddy was a little disappointed that it was green and not orange – neither of us realised that pumpkins changed colour – but, towards the end of August, it had begun to turn. I would have been grateful for any pumpkin at all, whatever the colour, but the fact that it’s an orange one makes me very happy indeed.

Now all we have to do between now and 31st October are to nurture it and pray for no unfortunate incidents (doable), and to get Catorze to pose beautifully next to it for this year’s Official Hallowe’en Portrait (somewhat more challenging).

Here are some pictures of its progress (with a 20p coin for scale, which was later removed when I realised it was leaving a mark), plus one of my warm-up photos with Catorze. The final masterpiece really won’t be much better.

Tennis ball.
Smallish football.
Just starting to turn.
Oranger.
Oranger still.
For goodness’ sake.
More orange than not.
Hallowe’en-ready.

La citrouille

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It’s a Hallowe’en miracle! (Yes, I know that it’s July, and only JUST July, at that. But it’s never too early to dream of Hallowe’en.)

Just as I thought that our one and only pumpkin plant had been suffocated by Cat Daddy’s murderous potato plants, it turns out that IT LIVES. You can just about see its orangey-yellow, pointy-petalled flower peeking out from behind that big leaf (below). It could be that, far from smothering the life out of it, the potato plants have actually protected it from the likes of the squirrels and Foxy Loxy and, with any luck, they will continue to keep it safe from harm until it’s ready to harvest in October.

Perhaps this is a good omen. After many attempts over the years at Louis Catorze’s Official Hallowe’en Portraits, which have almost all been dismal failures, maybe this is an indication that, this year, it will go according to plan?

I am excited beyond measure at the thought of little sod posing alongside a home-grown pumpkin. However, I hope he will adopt a prettier facial expression than this one:

Put that tongue away.

La fougère maléfique

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We have a lot of bracken in the garden, and we have always rather liked the look of it.

However, when it started to grow out of control, Cat Daddy decided to research the best way of keeping it in check. That’s when he discovered that virtually every horticultural website in creation seems to regard bracken as a hideous toxic invader and best destroyed. Absolutely none of them suggest cultivating it or even controlling it; the advice is pretty much “Cut it down, burn it and also burn the tools that you used to cut it down”.

Naturellement, the moment that Cat Daddy discovered this was also the very moment that Louis Catorze decided that bracken was his favourite thing in the world. And, no, he has shown no interest in it until now. Absolutely zero.

He’s also been scratching himself on the sharp branches of the planted-out Yule tree with the Blood-Letting Needles of Death. And this may just be a coincidence, but his skin is looking ropey, even though he usually starts to look BETTER around this time of year, so we have had to increase his steroid pills to two a day again.

Cat Daddy has already dug up and rehomed our distinctive, frilly daffodils, after learning of their toxicity to cats. But now it looks as if he has more digging to do.

Here is Catorze, resting against the worst thing in the garden and lying in the shade of the second worst thing in the garden:

Just making himself comfortable amidst all the poison and death.

Les oignons font pleurer

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Merci à Dieu: it’s half term. And what better way to round off the last week at school than with the second attempt at the French speaking tests that I’d had to discard the first time around because Louis Catorze did not respect the test conditions.

This time it was the kids who stuffed up the task for various reasons, so I ended up having to ditch these, too, and mark the previous test pieces containing the Catorze screaming as they were actually better. As I was playing them back, Catorze strolled in and meowed every time he heard his voice on the recording. YES, HE WAS REPLYING TO HIS OWN SCREAMS.

In other news, someone has been digging up Cat Daddy’s onion plants, and he’s not too happy about it. Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind have been used, multiple times.

Can you guess the identity of the number one suspect? I’ll give you a bit of time to think about it, as this is quite a tricky one.

Me: “Maybe it wasn’t him.” (I know, I know. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew how stupid this sounded.)

Cat Daddy: “Go and look at the hole.”

It was too small to have been the work of the foxes, and too neat to have been the squirrels.

Cat Daddy: “And before you blame the foxes or the squirrels, can you explain how they might have also dug up the chard that I was propagating INDOORS? Did they sneak in, dig around and then sneak out completely unnoticed?”

Oh dear.

Anyway, Catorze is the picture of innocence and says we can’t prove anything. What is your verdict?

“It wasn’t moi.”

Le figuier royal

~ iamthesunking ~ 6 Comments

People who plant new trees are good. But people who are nice to existing trees are also pretty good, non?

As if to make up for delivering us the devil-plant that is deadly nightshade, Mother Nature has gifted us a fig tree (pictured below when it still had leaves; at the moment it’s just a sticking-up twig).

Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: it quite literally just appeared one day, and I had no idea what it was until the delightful people on my social media tree group collectively Shazammed it. What a wonderful gift this is, and how very appropriate given that the human Louis XIV apparently grew figs at Versailles. That said, I am trying not to think too hard about the fact that the seed most likely fell out of a bird’s arse (and quite a middle-class bird at that).

Unfortunately it seems that the fig is toxic to cats. Not in a “sit downwind of it and you die” type of way, like the nightshade, but ingesting any part of it will cause vomiting and general malaise. And yet, in a world that is wiping out trees by the minute as if they are some sort of liability, I am determined to love this one and to find some way of enabling it and Louis Catorze to coexist happily. This is not going to be easy, given his penchant for doing exactly what we don’t want him to do, when we don’t want him to do it.

Anyway, as advised, we have moved the fig to a terracotta pot and are keeping it indoors until the spring. Can we trust Sa Maj to neither eat it nor turn the pot into les toilettes royales?

Le maudit hebenon

~ iamthesunking ~ 12 Comments

One of the glorious things about our garden is that plants just magically appear without us actually planting them. Neither Cat Daddy nor I know a thing about gardening so we very much welcome this, especially if the plants turn out to be particularly attractive or unusual.

A new and quite pleasant-looking plant recently appeared which we didn’t recognise. A family member thought it might be something called “tree tomato” and suggested popping a couple of the berries into our cooking. And merci à Dieu that we didn’t, because a bit of Googling – using the sophisticated and targeted search term of, erm, “plants with purple flowers and red berries” – revealed it to be … deadly nightshade.

As the name would suggest, every part of this plant is poisonous and if you so much as look at it, you die. This is the Hallowe’eny witch-plant of nightmares, the enemy-eliminating poison of every story book I read as a child, so frightening that I half-believed it to be of Shakespearean fiction along with hemlock (Cat Daddy: “I’m fairly sure that’s an actual plant”), mandrake (Cat Daddy: “I think that’s an actual plant, too”) and wolfsbane (Cat Daddy, tapping on his phone: “You’ve just named three ACTUAL PLANTS”).

I even asked a friend to name “the worst plant she could possibly think of” and, despite not having much horticultural experience, she said “deadly nightshade” without hesitation. (Well, her first guess was “cucumber” but I disqualified that for silliness.)

When we first moved into Le Château we were very strict about the plants we kept, because of Louis Catorze’s medical issues. But, as we started to realise just how many seeds were unstoppably air- and bird-borne, and how often Catorze pitter-pattered into other gardens with less desirable plants, we gradually became less strict. And it seemed that Catorze, despite not being blessed in the brain department, was cleverly able to ascertain which were to be avoided, such as the spiny butternut squash which he would clear with a flying leap when it strayed across the path. That said, knowing that we had the worst plant in the world in our garden – OVERLOOKING LE ROYAL NAP SPOT – didn’t fill us with joy. The little sod has shown no interest in consuming toxic matter in the past, but we know, don’t we, that if I assume or tell people that he won’t do it, he will. The deadly nightshade had to go.

So, whilst taking great pains not to dislodge any pollen, Cat Daddy snipped off the branches and dug up the roots. We can now relax knowing that the most lethal plant ever to exist won’t be shedding death-dust onto our precious boy as he sleeps. However, we feel somewhat less relaxed about future dinner invitations from that family member who told us to eat the berries, and we are drafting our list of excuses already.

See below for an indication of the the terrifying proximity of Sa Maj’s nap area to the devil-plant:

Je suis venu comme un boulet de démolition

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D204A87E-B936-48E7-BD3F-F254CE20741BCat Daddy is furious because someone or something has been into the Forbidden Greenhouse and trashed his precious chilli plant seedlings. I asked if the motive for this heinous crime had been toilet use, but this just made Cat Daddy more angry as the garden provides more than adequate cat toileting areas. He snapped that he didn’t know and wasn’t prepared to dig in and find out, but that I was welcome to do so myself if I wanted to. (I didn’t.)

The sliding door of the Forbidden Greenhouse had been left open the tiniest amount, which means that the culprit was either a largish rat or Louis Catorze (although Cat Daddy has just muttered that there isn’t much difference between the two). This, along with Catorze’s penchant for sneaking unnoticed into places that he has no business being, makes him a highly likely suspect for this crime. 

The other piece of evidence in the case of Cat Daddy versus The Crown is the curious set of pawprints seen in the picture. Bizarrely, they lead INTO the scene of the crime but there are no prints leading out. This would appear to vindicate the defendant, as it’s not possible to cavort about in soil and leave with clean feet, but unfortunately Catorze has previous when it comes to this; in the past I have found muddy paw prints in the centre of our bathroom floor but none leading into, nor away from, that point. The only way of doing this would have been to levitate in, gad about on the floor with dirty paws and then levitate out again.

Cat Daddy: “If I ever catch him doing anything like this again, he’ll be levitating for sure: right off the end of my foot after I kick his arse.”

Oh dear. No further questions, Your Honour. It’s not looking too hopeful for the defendant, is it?

Anyway, Cat Daddy is now on a mission to protect the rest of his plants from further destruction: the seedlings in the Forbidden Greenhouse are now under much better protection with the door fully closed, and the outdoor salad leaves are secure behind a mesh barrier. 

So, what say you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Do you find the little sod guilty or not guilty?

Attention aux courges butternut

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Beware of butternut squash, Mesdames et Messieurs. No, not marauding street ones wearing hockey masks and carrying chain saws, but the innocent-looking seeds that you unsuspectingly toss into the compost heap.

Thanks to the amazing richness of the soil around our compost heap, Cat Daddy and I have managed to grow a butternut squash without even trying. This is good, right? Well, the bonus dinner ingredient is quite a result, but the plant is an absolute beast, sprawling everywhere like a flesh-eating triffid and suffocating everything in its path. And nobody seems to tell you this, but both the stems and the leaves expel tiny, invisible barbs.

I should have guessed that it was a nasty plant when, instead of stepping over it or brushing past it, Louis Catorze would clear it with a massive leap (which won’t be helping his knee one bit). I thought at the time that he was just being dramatic but, if an idiot like Catorze is prepared to take such pains to avoid this plant, there is obviously a reason. Even a cautious cat absentmindedly brushing past could find itself speared but, should your cat have a more gung-ho temperament and be inclined to frolic around in your vegetable patch, this could spell very bad news indeed.

Given all the health issues we already have with Catorze, we really didn’t want to be picking painful barbs out of his skin, too. So Cat Daddy got to work destroying the evil plant and sweeping the barbs off the path (which was quite some feat given that they are invisible), whilst I chopped up the monster tendrils into more manageable pieces for the garden waste bag. All that is left now is the main stem bearing the single fruit.

And Le Roi sat and slow-blinked at us throughout these measures intended for his protection, watching us get painfully skewered and disembowelled. It would appear that he is not as stupid as we thought.

Here he is, snuggling up to the butternut squash and continuing, inexplicably, to remain a barb-free zone. I’m prepared to bet Le Château on the fact that he won’t sit this nicely with the pumpkin I have bought for his official Halloween portrait.

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Le petit coin, Partie 2: cette fois-ci c’est personnel

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The vegetable patch is fighting back. Or, rather, Cat Daddy is, after catching Louis Catorze digging around yet again. The sweetcorn plants were eventually salvaged – you can spot the dug-up, flung-around ones straight away as they are much smaller than the other ones – but, this time, one of the passion flower vines has gone. And by “gone” I don’t simply mean “been uprooted”: I mean utterly vapourised without a trace, as if the plant never existed.

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As you can see, Cat Daddy has taken his role of Defence Minister very seriously indeed. And, yes, those are plastic forks. One of Le Blog’s lovely followers recommended them as a protective measure, so I passed the tip onto Cat Daddy; and whilst I had somehow imagined them being placed the other way up in the earth, handles pointing upwards, I can understand why Cat Daddy chose this way, for maximum pointy surface area to threaten la derrière royale.

Will it work? It’s not looking promising, I must say. Even during the impaling process Louis Catorze was ever-present, slaloming between the sticks and forks like a prize-winning Border Collie at one of those sheepdog competitions, not even deterred when Cat Daddy tried to jab him in the arse with a stick of bamboo. So his chances of staying away now that the sticks are static, are slim-to-zéro.

So now Cat Daddy and I need to agree on our next steps should the bamboo and forks not work. My idea: citrus peel and netting. Cat Daddy’s idea: inhumane bear traps and poison-tipped barbed wire.

Le petit coin

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Thanks to Cat Daddy, Le Château now has a vegetable patch. Or, as Louis Catorze calls it, “les toilettes”.

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Now, I am not one of those people who panics at the thought of the slightest germ, but I have a particular aversion to the rear ends of cats. So, the less I have to do with them, the better. The thought of excretory solids, liquids or gases is grim enough, but the prospect of such substances coming into contact with FOOD is absolutely the worst thing in the world.

“Relax! It’s fine! Animals poo and wee on crops all the time,” said a friend of mine. Maybe. But there’s a huge difference between an incidental bit of bird plop or horse manure in an arable field, and a demonic little beast repeatedly using your vegetable patch as his outdoor latrine just to annoy you. The sweetcorn plants that my mum gave us lasted less than 12 hours in the soil before they were decimated. Cat Daddy didn’t mince his words in his text to me that morning: “Little shitty boy has dug up one of the sweetcorn plants to shit. He’s a shitting pest.”

“At least his poo will put other cats off using the place as a toilet,” said another friend. “Your own cat’s poo is far better than the poo of a thousand random cats, isn’t it?” Erm, not really. Poo is poo, irrespective of which cat arse expelled it. Unless we’re talking quantity, of course, because a thousand cats would obviously produce rather more than one.

Anyway, the sweetcorn problem is now halved because Catorze has dug up 3 out of 7 plants and reburied them so deeply/far away that we don’t even know where they are anymore. I think we need an electric fence for Catorze. And maybe Valium for ourselves.

Le renard

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Seigneur Dieu: Cat Daddy and the Virgin Media man have just seen a fox jump over the 5ft fence between Le Château and Bert the dog’s place – yup, actually OVER the fence – and disappear through a gap in the fence that separates us from the school at The Back.

Louis Catorze was in the garden at the time and, luckily, Le Renard walked straight past him, clearly not thinking him a worthwhile snack. Catorze was left unharmed but all puffed up and affronted, as if to say, “Quoi? Excuse-moi?” He isn’t scared enough to come indoors and is perfectly happy to remain out there, but I daren’t leave him unsupervised in case Le Renard comes back. The poor boy wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight against any other creature or object, never mind one several times his size. He once had a fight with a leaf that was blowing in the wind, and still lost.

Fortunately, Louis Catorze isn’t the wandering sort and likes to be wherever we are, so I don’t think we need to keep him under house arrest at this point. But I might call him in at night – or get Cat Daddy to call him, since he ignores me when I do it – just to be sure. And I might also message Oscar the dog’s folks and warn them to check their lawn, because Oscar has been known to do things with fox poo that really defy belief …

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La patrouille de France

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Ever since Le Jour du Rat, rather than snuggling up with us all evening, Louis Catorze has been spending increasing amounts of time outdoors. We initially didn’t pay too much attention to this, assuming he was relaxing on one/both of his outdoor cat thrones. However, a few days ago we discovered that he is not sleeping, nor even horizontal, but upright and wide awake. And he sits staring for hours at the same spot (a gap under the fence that separates Le Château from the school at the back).

I know that stance; I recognise it from the Luther administration. It turns out that Louis Catorze is not being lazy, antisocial or whatever: in actual fact, the little sod is on Rodent Duty. Although I have not (yet) seen him haul any (more) rodents through the gap, I know that this is what’s going on.

Oh Seigneur.

His big brother Luther once brought in a mouse and it lived happily in our kitchen for months; this meant many, many nights of duty, with Luther sitting patiently, eyes glued the spot under the kitchen unit. Friends eventually started placing bets on when he would catch Mousey – yes, actual bets with actual money – with one person believing he wouldn’t do so for THREE YEARS. Luckily it wasn’t quite as long as that (although it felt like it).

The only thing that distracts Louis Catorze from his sentry post is me getting my phone out to photograph him; as soon as he sees it he runs towards me, chirping and trilling. So the photos that you see are actually of Luther, cool and resolute, thinking, “You’re going to have to come out sooner or later, Mousey. I’ve got time.”

And, eventually, Mousey did come out and was caught. I hope Catorze will not have the same success.

Les fleurs du mal

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Our plans to buffer Le Château’s perimeters have hit a bit of an obstacle: the patch where we had intended to plant the prickly shrub consists of just a few inches of soil on a base of solid concrete, plus it’s curiously boxed in by a mini-wall of concrete. Planting anything substantial there just won’t work so, for the moment, it’s become the new home for our mint plant, which was starting to stifle our other herbs faster than Louis Catorze could eat it and puke it up.

And, just as we set up our outdoor furniture, the weather turns to merde. Typical. Luckily this hasn’t prevented us from enjoying a few snatched moments of almost-warmth outdoors, wrapped up in jumpers and blankets and with Louis Catorze pitter-pattering around us. But, yesterday evening, in the half-light, we caught sight of his stupid little silhouette flicking an object around, diving onto it, then holding it with his front paws and doing that really fast bicycle-kick with his back ones.

The thing, whatever it was, was motionless. But, as we focused our eyes around the garden, more and more of them – also motionless – came into view in the flowerbeds. It was like that internet meme: “The harder you stare, the more zombies appear.” Saint Jésus. We had a massacre on our hands.

“What ARE they?” asked Cat Daddy. There must have been ten, fifteen, maybe more, of these rodent-shaped lumps strewn around our garden, and we were not looking forward to attempting to identify them. Mice = not great. Rats = worse. The pet hamsters of various neighbours = sell up, move house and don’t leave a forwarding address.

After several minutes of procrastinating, we took a deep breath and switched on the main outside light.

And so it was revealed that our dear little boy is the mass killer of …
…
… [drum roll and fanfare] …
…
… the dead heads of camellia flowers.

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Ok, so the object in the photo looks far more like a flower head than a dead rodent but, when you’re a couple of glasses of Cava under and in semi-darkness, it’s an easy mistake to make.

Phew. So Louis Catorze isn’t in the dog house after all. It still doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten MouseGate or SlugGate, though.