On Being Green

This winter we are keeping warm by burning wood. The heating here is powered by a stove/furnace which can burn either wood or fuel (oil). We decided to burn wood because (a) wood is carbon neutral - there is no greenhouse effect, and (b) oil is 20% more expensive this year than last. Already oil was nearly twice the price of wood - for the same heat output.

However, burning wood is much more work. With oil, I turn it on and a thermostat does the rest. With wood I have to spend about two to three hours a week, with a chain saw, cutting metre length wood logs in two (so they fit in the stove), and bringing the wood indoors. Then each day I need to top up the stove roughly every two to three hours.

Winter is starting to bite now, with temperatures outside dropping to -5°C or less at night, and the house cools quickly overnight. Even with a full stove when we go to bed, the house drops to 15/16°C by the morning. It then takes most of the day to climb back to 18/19°C; not warm by most people's standards, but not cold once you are used to it.

So, I'm looking for a stove that (a) takes metre long wood without cutting, and (b) burns for 12 hours without intervention. They exist I'm told, but I haven't found one yet!

I've looked at other options such as wood-pellets, but the storage space for the pellets is big; we'd have to convert the garage!

Snow

It snowed last week. We were having one of the warmest winters in years, when along came the snow.

It started on a Monday afternoon, with the first flakes appearing at 6pm, and by 11pm the world was covered in a white blanket.

As we were sitting by the fire we heard strange cracking noises outside - like gunshots. We went outside and the most incredible sounds were coming from the forest - and our garden. We guessed it might be trees - but we had no idea what it really was.

As we went to bed the lights flickered, but came back on. The next day there was no electricity and no phone.

We then understood that noise was trees loosing their branches and falling over under the weight of the heavy wet snow. It was happening all over Limousin. Roads were closed and it took four days for them to bring the electricity back. In some parts of Limousin it took six days.

Lucky for us, our heating is a wood burning boiler. There was no pump to send the water round the radiators, but the boiler is in the basement, so the heat rose enough to warm the radiators directly above. So with a fire in the chimney we stayed warm.

A neighbour helped out with a generator for a few hours to keep the freezer frozen, but it was too late - we lost quite a lot of our frozen supplies.

Overall it was great to be snowed in with candles and a nice fire and a good excuse for an enforced 'holiday'!

We also managed to go cross country skiiing about 30 minutes away.

Tourists

First post in a while - I'm wonding if anyone will read this...

We had a very busy July and August. We were open 7 days a week, starting work each morning at about 9am and finishing at about 8:30pm. Needless to say, this was hard work!

We had an average season in a below average year for French tourism, so for a first year that is not bad.

Since then we have been catching up on paperwork, recovering and preparing the garden for next year.

Next main thing on my list is to pot honey ready for next season.

Its a year since we I found this place for sale. It all started when we went for a weekend camping in Purbeck and went on a 'butterfly walk'. When an 'insect museum' came up in a web search a few days later it seemed an interesting idea. It took a week or so to realise I really wanted to visit and take a look... Then there was 'Life in the Undergrowth' on the TV - I was hooked.

Here is a blog from someone who came to visit/work here for a couple of weeks... http://christy-adventures.blogspot.com/

More soon.

Latest arrivals

This is one of our latest arrivals - an orchid mantis. Not a good picture, but good enough to get an idea. It is small, about 1 cm tall, and it looks just like a flower.

We have two, a male and a female. They need to be kept apart until they are ready to mate, or they would eat each other. This was a bit of a challenge because we only had one empty vivarium. So I put one in a perspex container inside the vivarium - thats why the photo is a little fuzzy.

When they arrived I started to clean out the vivarium, thinking it was empty, when I noticed lots of little creatures in the debris at the bottom. I thought nothing of it for a couple of minutes until I realised they were the off-spring of the previous inhabitants - locusts! If just I'd thrown them in the bin who knows what might have happened... However, I now don't need to search for food for the mantis... until the locusts get a bit bigger than them - if any survive theat long.

The one inside the perspex tube gets an aphid covered sprig of something from the garden everyday.

Today the male was sitting on the outside of the tube - they were eying each other up - but whether they saw each other as a potential snack or as a future mate - or both - who knows.

We discovered capricorne des maison in some of the woodwork that makes the terrace. They are like woodworm, only about 100 times bigger. They're pretty serious if left untreated. So, what to do? The only cures are pretty nasty. I've been recommended Pentachlorophenol which, as it says in the report, is restricted to specialist use in the US. It is widely available in France. For now, I continue to look for a solution. There is around this situation a central issue in our relationship with insects and the wider environment. We can't kill insects without side effects - sometimes serious. On the other hand we can't just ignore them - unless we are ready to tear down the terrace at some point - and build the next out of metal and glass. Mmm, there's a thought!

An insect in the news: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5100950.stm). It doesn't seem very important at first glance - who's going to miss a beetle? Why is biodiversity so important? This article sums it up: http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec12/b65lec12.htm#Future_Options.

Comments

I just enabled comments from anyone (I didn't realise only 'members' could leave comments until now).

At last!

Once again I've been so busy there hasn't been time to blog.

I have now updated our web page (http://www.lacitedesinsectes.com/). Its now a little more than just our opening hours and location. Parts of it are still not well formatted, but getting it on-line before the tourist season starts is a priority.

I now need to work on stocking the shop. Its hard to predict what will sell, but we have to try to find out.

It is National Insect Week in the UK: http://www.nationalinsectweek.co.uk/index.htm

A new insect discovered in Scotland: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/north_east/5069508.stm - though I'm not sure about the claim that "Nowhere else in Britain, and some would argue in Europe, will you find so much diversity of wildlife in such a confined area." - I've a feeling this area might be a contender. The number and variety of wildlife in this area is pretty impressive - though I'm no expert.

Kittens!

I was going to write more about insects today, but that will have to wait... The cats have had kittens!

They were obviously trying to communicate something to us yesterday. The black cat (male) in particular was very vocal.

We had a storm last night - this area is renowned for electric storms apparently. This morning it was still raining, so I did a walk around to check everything was water proof. As I passed the four au pain (bread oven) I heard the squeaks of the new born. The cats had used a cardboard box (appropriately marked "fragile") on the top of a spare display cabinet. We gave them a basket and a better cardboard box. The weather has turned cold again, so we hope they will be OK. There are two black kittens - like the father (in the photo) and one grey like the mother. We can't keep them though - we will put up a notice for visitors.

Strange creatures

This is one of the insects we keep in the vivarium. It is a phasmid - the stick insect family. These are very easy to look after - they eat bramble leaves and generally hang around upside down pretending to be bits of leaves. When I open the door to feed and water them they sway a bit - as if in a breeze, but otherwise they don't move while anyone is looking. They have a tail which looks a bit scorpion like - to put off predators who see through the dead-vegetation disguise.

We have five - all females. Apparently they don't need males to reproduce, they can lay eggs which produce clones.

The eggs have a bit which is attractive to ants. The ants take the eggs to their antheap, eat part and discard the egg. When the egg hatches the lava look and act like ants! Once they leave the antheap they take the adult form and pretend to be dead vegetation...