Lifestyle: The food chain in action on our Dordogne property

They were the crunchiest, fattest carrots we had ever tasted. What made them even more tasty was that we didn't buy them and we didn't grow them ourselves. They were a gift. Not from a neighbour but from the birds that come and go in our garden. I'm afraid there's not much by way of update on the work on our property in the Dordogne in this post. But I have to tell you how we happened across these carrots. Throughout last winter and for much of the spring of this year we hung some fat balls for the birds until the weather started to warm up. We usually hang the bird feed from an ash tree beside the well in the garden. Under the tree is a compost bed that we had prepared for planting this spring. About a month ago I was weeding the flower bed when I noticed some "weeds" that just seemed out of place. On closer inspection I could see several little orange heads peeping out of the ground underneath their leafy green foliage. They were carrots. There were dozens of them. Neither my wife nor myself had planted them. So, where did they come from? Of course, there was a very simple answer. The birds that fed all winter and spring on the fat balls had "deposited" them while they munched merrily away. The thing is, I checked the list of ingredients in the fat balls. There were no carrot seeds in them. The birds had obviously raided somebody's vegetable patch for starters and moved onto ours for the main course. No doubt, there's a very frustrated gardener somewhere in the Dordogne scratching his head, wondering where his carrot crop is. Maybe it was the birds' way of thanking us for helping them through the winter. So, here's a top downsizing tip. Don't buy vegetable seeds next year. Instead, hang fat balls from as many trees as possible in your garden and make a bed of good soil a couple of metres wide from the base of each tree. Unfortunately, this won't work in the case of the potato. The poor things would choke on seed potatoes. So, these you have to buy. We import ours from the UK or Ireland. Don't get me wrong. French potatoes are very nice. But they're different. In France, potatoes are used in stews or sauteed but usually served in a sauce. Wet. We're used to eating boiled potatoes, for example, on their own with our meat and other veg. However, the French spuds don't make great boiled spuds. They just never seem to dry out. So, we grow our own imports and they're like balls of flower. The climate in the Dordogne means that we can grow dozens of fruits and vegetables that we could never have grown at home. For this we are truly grateful. But the French palette is quite different to most others. The French, in general, don't like to eat very spicy food. We do. Curries are a particular favourite. We love to make curry and for the most part ingredients aren't a problem. But I challenge anyone to find a good source of hot fresh chillis in the Dordogne. So, last year we ordered several packets of chilli seeds of different varieties and origin from a garden centre in England. None rated less than 900,000 on the Scoville scale. The nice thing about chillis is that the more you pick from the bush they more they produce and they grow like triffids in this climate. In fact, I heard talk recently of several cereal farms in the Lot-et-Garonne who grow chillis, not to harvest for food, but as, so called, green manure or fertiliser for their crops. When ripe the plants are cut down and left to compost. I'm not sure whether this is just a rural myth but I'm certainly going to have a go at finding them next year before they're hacked to bits. No curry would be complete with out coriander. Again, I challenge anyone to try and find a good, reliable source of this fantastic herb in the Dordogne. Ironically, you can buy coriander seed by the barrow load in any garden centre in France. Growing coriander in a kitchen garden is easy but you need to keep an eye on it. It always seems to want to bolt into seed after which time is useless. Other than these few simple pleasures we want for nothing.