French Lamb

Homemade lamb tagine.

The main lamb meat production area in France is in Poitou-Charentes, to our south-west, and it is uncommon to see a flock of sheep north of the Loire. Poitou-Charentes has a European geographical certification IGP and about a thousand certified producers supply about a third of France's homegrown lamb. Most lamb on the supermarket butchery shelves comes from Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles, and it out competes the local product in terms of price and availability. The Poitou-Charentes lamb is less than a tenth of the total lamb sold in France. Certainly the national flock has declined by half in the last decade, consumption of lamb is down by a third and the price to the consumer has doubled. Surprisingly, France is the third largest lamb producer in Europe, behind Spain and the United Kingdom. France imports because it isn't self-sufficient in lamb.

 

 Lamb shank for lunch at the gigantic truckstop at Déol (Chateauroux). It was the menu du jour.

Sheep have been an important part of the agricultural sector in Poitou-Charentes since medieval times. Initially they were primarily grown for their wool, but these days no one wants wool, and the market for  meat is dwindling. By the 19th century, the plains north of the Loire in the Paris Basin had abandoned their mixed sheep and cereal production and concentrated solely on grain production. In contrast, the land south of the Loire and to the west, which was more difficult to plough and couldn't be converted to intensive farming techniques, primarily grazed sheep. But from the 1960s the land around Poitiers to the south and west was being ploughed up to grow wheat, maize and canola, and a third of the hedges grubbed up. The area of land in Poitou-Charentes that has never been ploughed has more than halved since 1960.

 

Ewes with a newborn lamb one very cold day in January at Chambon.

There is a significant percentage of the French national sheep herd that are dairy stock. Farmers breeding their dairy ewes need to be able to sell their male lambs for meat, and to do that they have formed a co-operative which markets the product. It is seasonal, available in late winter, and sold to discerning consumers at a good price in participating supermarkets.

 

 Sustainably produced bocage lamb from Poitou-Charentes at our local supermarket.

Sheep farms in France are often small, with an average of 200 animals in a flock. Flocks of twice that size are more common on lowland farms, and flocks of 1000 are not unknown. Mostly the farmer is working on his/her own. There are around 5 million head of breeding ewes in France, of which a quarter are dairy ewes. French people consume an average of 3.4 kg of lamb meat per year and the most popular cut is the leg (Fr. gigot).

 

 Lamb chops from our local producer.

The sheep are usually crossbreeds using various combinations of Berrichon de Cher, Ile de France, Vendéen, Texel, Charollais, Suffolk and Chamoise for meat, whereas pure bred Lacaune are the most popular for milk. Wool is not a significant market. The main lambing season is February to April (winter lambing) but about half of producers aim to have about a quarter of their ewes lamb in the autumn (September to January) and it is now common to aim for lambs throughout the year (known as aseasonal lambing). The autumn lambs can be sold in the first half of the year, when prices are higher (eg at Easter time). Lambs are sold once they reach 30 - 40 kg, from 2-3 months old and no older than 10 months.

 

Cooking lamb chops at home.

 

We buy our lamb direct from the producer, Charlotte Bottemine at la Ferme les Effes. She raises Chamoise and they are generally available sometime between November and January, depending on how the grazing (and therefore their fattening) has been. They supply one of the local Michelin starred restaurants too. We pay €16/kilo for half a beast (7 - 7.5 kilos of meat) and get some extra liver for free.

 

Homemade lambs fry (ie liver) and onions.

 

Pasture, or prairie, as it is generally referred to in lowland France, is one of the fastest disappearing habitats in the country. Sheep farmers point out that in the mountains sheep grazing can help prevent avalanches and wild fires.  In the lowlands of the south-west, they point out that pasture helps control and mitigate flooding. Sheep pasture uses few fertilizers and pesticides, and the system of fields and hedges traditionally used to raise lamb here prevents erosion and filters out excess nitrates, phosphates and herbicides. The sheep farmers are of course too polite to say 'as opposed to arable farming methods', but that is what they mean. I of course am too polite to mention sheep dip.

 

Homemade lamb kidney kebabs. This was a recipe given to me by my local specialist offal butcher.

I hope someone can come up with a reasonable use for the wool. At the moment farmers are stockpiling it, because as an organic waste they can struggle to get rid of it. I also hope that we see an increase in sheep numbers as flying flocks and grazing under photovoltaic installations becomes more of a thing. That should benefit everyone with any luck. 

 

 Homemade lamb shank (Fr. souris d'agneau).

Bin There

done that.

I think this is one of the best ways of making people think about where their litter goes.

It only works if you give them options

Both those examples are in Woy Woy.  Manly council do similar, but different.

Driving from the Coast

Australia is a big country. Sometimes you can drive for hours and feel like you've been driving in big circles around the same tree. The Pilliga scrub is like that, as I have mentioned earlier.

Sometimes, however, it's not like that.

Last year we drove from Pambula on the New South Wales south coast, to Canberra via Bombala. It's a road I've never driven before, but well worth it. Once you leave the coast it's a climb up the Great Dividing Range through temperate rainforest, with tall eucalyptus trees and tree ferns. We didn't have time to stop, but we got some half decent photos from the car. This forest has seen some savage fires over the last 10 years and is just starting to recover, but you can kind of see what it's supposed to look like.

Once you get to the top of the range it all changes. The trees don't thin out as much as stop as you cross the watershed. This is the Monaro Plains, and you don't need to be told that this side of the mountains gets less rain than the other side.

It looks empty, and feels it too. Which makes it more surprising that the white vehicle on the road ahead is a school bus.

News and La Touche

Regional headlines are:

Three cases of measles in Indre et Loire, two adults and a baby.

A forest fire near Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil yesterday that required 3 water bombers.

In local news: la guinguette Le Lavoir lancera sa quatrième saison le 26 avril 2025

And finally...

There are many places in France called "la Touche" or "la Touche *something*". I've often wondered why, but never got to the bottom of it. The usual response I got when asking a French person was either bemusement, or "just is". Looking on the internet never bought a satisfactory answer either - until last week, when looking up something altogether different I happened upon a reference to a "la Touche" in Basque country that said that the name was pre-celtic (ie pre 6th century BCE) and touche means a wood or small forest.

Some of the many Touches near Preuilly sur Claise

So there (hopefully) you go.

************

I wrote the above a bit tongue in cheek, because at the moment we really don't have much in the way of news. Six hours after I wrote it, I received notice that Louis Charcellay, usually referred to as "the aged one" or "the orchard neighbour" on this blog, has died at the age of 89 years.

Until recently he was a fixture in our local market, selling his excess garden produce by the livre (literally a pound, but actually more or less half a kilogram).

Wired

Sometimes I take a photo expecting it to be a good photo, and later realise it's slightly disappointing. This photo from last year may be one of them.

This isn't the first time I've had this problem. I had it 16 years ago, as well.

Walking Around Boussay

I have been ordered to walk at least 3km a day as part of my recovery. I was making fair progress towards that before we went to Australia, and then we returned home to winter and weather that wasn't conducive to going out. I have walked once or twice since, with varying results. Some days I'm good for 6 km (rare), some days I'm exhausted after 1km (more common) but I keep on pushing.

Yesterday Susan and I walked almost 3km around Boussay. Even the minuscule climb of 31 metres had me perspiring and breathing hard enough to need a break.

The Chateau of Boussay. It was nice and sunny.

Early spider orchid.

The colza (canola) is out.

I'm working hard at finding a range of flat 3km walks. Last year I did a lot of walking from bridge to bridge in town and it was starting to get boring.

What to do About a Swarm of Bees in the Touraine Loire Valley

The answer is short and simple: contact a beekeeper immediately and they will come and collect the swarm. A beekeeper in France is an apiculteur. You can find contact details for dozens in your area by doing a simple internet search. 

The sooner they are collected the better, for their own well-being, and for yours. If they are collected promptly it protects them from being caught out in bad weather (cold and/or wet), which is not uncommon in spring. It also gives them less time to become settled in an inappropriate new home, like your chimney or behind your shutters.

Swarming bees can sound and look alarming, but they are not really a threat to you. They are concentrating on protecting their queen, and finding a new home. Leave them alone and you will find that they will just peacefully attach themselves to a branch and hang there for some hours in a clump huddled around the queen to keep her warm. Scouts will come and go on their mission to find a new home and report back, but they can be safely ignored by you. Don't delay in calling a beekeeper to relocate the swarm though.

Honey bee colonies in the Touraine Loire Valley tend to be splitting up and on the move ie swarming from April to June.

Ginger Beer

We were delighted to discover recently that our local SuperU supermarket sells imported from Australia Bundaberg ginger beer.

Ginger beer in France, yesterday

Bundaberg ginger beer is a brewed ginger beer, using real ginger and a fermentation process that takes several days. The drink is non-alcoholic and comes in a glass bottle with a pull-off cap, and has done for about thirty years. It was really gaining traction in the late 1980s, and we would often use it for making Moscow Mules, once our cocktail of choice.

To make a Moscow mule, you must start by trying to freeze a bottle of vodka for at least two days. It won't freeze, it will go syrupy.

Pour a goodly gloup of vodka into a glass. In a tall glass about an inch (2 or 3 centimetres) will do it.

Add a decent squeeze of lime juice (fresh is preferable), and top up with ginger beer.

That's all you need. Be careful not to use ginger ale or fever-tree ginger beer. (To my way of thinking all fever-tree products make promises they can't keep and are disappointing.) Don't add herbage or (puke) pumpkin pie mix.

You can add ice at any stage, and you can serve in a copper mug (traditional, apparently). Both these will keep the drink cold for longer, but if you need that, quite frankly, you're not doing it properly.

These days we drink our ginger beer straight from the bottle, as evidenced by this photo, which isn't a photograph of Susan looking pleased with herself, or of excellent breakfast burgers. Just remember to invert the bottle for a couple of seconds (don't shake) before opening. The photo was taken at the Marulan Roadhouse (truck stop) in NSW.

As far as I can tell Bundaberg don't use a ginger beer plant. When we lived in Canberra we used to make our own ginger beer using a plant, feeding it daily, etc etc etc. This stopped not long after a number of bottles of made ginger beer exploded: not an uncommon event, but this time we had 2" shards of glass embedded in the solid wood laundry door.

Water, Water Everywhere

You may have heard about the current heavy rain and flooding in Australia.  If you haven't, this may help you comprehend the scale of the flooding (but the tldr is an area the size of Texas).

Of course many people besides those living in the areas where it rains have their lives disrupted by the floods. It can take weeks for the floodwaters to flow downstream, meaning that some towns have many weeks warning, but know it's inevitable that destruction will come - in a flat landscape there is no defence against so much water. It must be both terrifying and depressing.

Interstate (and intrastate of course) trade is being affected and will continue to be affected for some time. Some of the most important trade routes are currently cut, and these are also roads that we have driven every time we're in Australia.

Map of current (as of midnight last night) road closures due to floodwater in Queensland and NSW.

If you tried to take this photo today you'd need a boat

It was taken near Gurley, highlighted in the middle of this map. To give an idea of the scale of the flooding, the distance from Goondiwindi to Moree is 111km (as the crow flies), roughly the same distance as Paris to Amiens, London to Southampton, or New York to Philadelphia. (Click on the photo to find Goondiwindi and Moree)

Lake George II

In September 2019 I wrote about Lake George: how empty it was in 2017, and how I can remember it both full and flooding the highway, and so empty you could drive across it without getting your tyres dirty.

Last year it was full, but because the highway has been modernised, these days even when full it never floods.

Leave Fawns Alone in the Touraine Loire Valley

We are coming up to the time when deer does give birth to their fawns (Fr. faons) and I thought it was time for a bit of public education. The law in France is that your dog must be on a lead if you are walking through forest*, vineyards, open country whether cultivated or not, orchards, woods, marshland, the banks of water courses, dams (Fr. étangs) and lakes between 15 April and 30 June. There is a fine of 750 euros if you are caught and convicted.

Young fawns are left hidden alone in the grass or undergrowth for many hours during the day, from the time they are newborn to a few weeks old.  Meanwhile their mothers go off some distance away so predators are not alerted to the presence of the fawn. The does browse on the new spring vegetation that gives them the level of nutrition they need. It is important for them to keep up the supply of milk that the fawns require to thrive. 

A Roe Deer fawn in our orchard several years ago.

Newborn fawns are very small -- not much bigger than a rabbit -- so they can remain hidden quite easily. Fawns are famous for remaining completely still no matter how close you get. If you stumble across one, please leave it alone and move away as quickly and quietly as possible.

If you are walking through lightly wooded prairie at this time of year, please keep dogs on leads. The fawns will sit tight until you are within about half a metre of them. Startling them and causing them to run uses up their valuable energy and significantly reduces their chances of survival. Under no circumstances touch them or speak to them (the human voice, no matter how soothing a tone you think you are using, is extremely frightening to them).

A Roe Deer fawn hidden in long grass in the middle of a prairie in Vienne.

Roe Deer Capreolus capreolus (Fr. chevreuil) numbers in France are increasing, but the rate of increase is slowing. Fewer fawns are being born and fewer are surviving to adulthood. Careful monitoring of the does parturition dates reveals that they haven't significantly changed from year to year, even though the date of leaf burst in the forest is now earlier by about a fortnight compared to 35 years ago when the monitoring started.

This means that the deer are no longer giving birth to coincide with peak availability of food for the mothers, which impacts on their milk supply. Roe Deer are browsers, feeding mainly on coppiced trees,  and rely on the new shoots in their forest habitat. Fawns aren't gaining weight and strength as quickly as they should and as a consequence are more vulnerable to predators, disturbance and other stresses. The likely cause of death for most fawns is lack of food, as the deer locally in the Touraine are not subjected to pressure by hunters or predators.

Scientists have concluded that Roe Deer ovulation and conception, and therefore parturition, is linked to day length, not temperature, and that they are likely to be climate change losers in the long run. This is exacerbated because does all tend to give birth around the same time (May), and those few which give birth early will not be sufficient to cause an evolutionary change. All the fawns are vulnerable at the same time, which means that extreme weather conditions, for example, could wipe out an entire generation. Other studies have indicated that Greenland caribou (reindeer) have similar issues, but that Red Deer are adapting and giving birth earlier (interestingly, by reducing gestation periods).

The average springtime (April - June) temperatures have increased year on year and are now nearly 1.5°C higher than when monitoring these deer began. This rise in temperature is causing trees in particular to respond by bursting into leaf earlier. Thirty-five years ago Roe Deer gave birth exactly when the tender green shoots of many plants were available, full of nutrition before their energy goes into flowering and seed production. The mismatch between birth dates and peak vegetative flush has increased by about half a day a year. A fawn born on or before 12 May has a 50% chance of surviving to winter and adulthood. After that date, survival rates plummet, and one born at the end of May only has a 24% chance of surviving. (It should be noted that the number of days mismatch between birth date and peak vegetative flush in any given year is a better predictor of survival rate than birth date per se.) Older, heavier does tend to give birth earlier, so there is some natural selection mitigating the effects of climate change, but probably not enough in the long term, and the tendency to give birth earlier is not strongly heritable. 

*Technically the dog can be off the leash if you are on one of the marked 'allées de forestieres' but the minute your dog leaves the track and heads into the undergrowth you are breaking the law.

The National Office for Forests (ONF) is increasingly fed up with dog owners who can't control their dogs and don't understand that their pets are causing distress and even death to wild ground nesting birds, and to wild deer who have left their fawns cached.

A Coincidence

One of the best things my parents ever did for me was give me a love of reading. I have books I was given when I was three years old, and although I don't read them 5 times a day as I did back then, they are still in my possession.

When we kids were older, Mum and Dad used to give us enough money at the start of each school holiday to buy a Puffin paperback. My favourite genre was history based fiction, whether it be ancient, medieval, or even 1950's - which (with apologies to some of our readers) I also used to think of as the olden days.

Although I no longer have most of those books, I remember them fondly, particularly the books of Geoffrey Trease. One I struggled to remember the name of was "The Red Towers of Granada" which I found recently and re-read on the internet archive. 

This led me on a bit of a reading blitz, and it has to be said that the books have stood the test of time. 

However, that isn't really what this blog is about (or maybe it is, who knows). The books on the internet archive are scanned copies of ex-library books, and it's fascinating where the books come from. One of the books I read, "Escape to King Alfred" - the American title of "Mist over Athelney" (a cracking good read, btw) - had a stamp on the title page that is a fascinating and a remarkable coincidence.

Back in November 2019 we met Sally and Gary from the USA, who must have gone to the Châteauroux Dépendent School when their father was posted to the NATO Air Force base at Châteauroux.

I wonder if either of them read this book, which apparently made its way back to the US when the France withdrew from NATO and the American based closed in 1967.

The Sand Dwellers

Any patch of sand in a sunny spot is likely to have residents, especially if it is near a patch of willow. At this time of year, look out for solitary bees, which ironically, may form large colonies in suitable sandy habitats. You may spot these three species in particular:

Grey-backed Mining Bee nest.

Grey-backed Mining Bee Andrena vaga -- a large shining black mining bee with lots of buffy grey 'fur' on the thorax. Abundant and specialising in willow, collecting the bright yellow pollen to store away in its nest hole to feed its larvae. 

Female Grey-backed Mining Bees, with and without pollen loads.

Vernal Colletes bee Colletes cunicularius -- a large dark brown bee with dense tawny 'fur' on the thorax. They produce a waterproofing substance from a gland in their abdomen that they smear on the inside of the underground brood cells that they dig. Colletes can be identified by a distinctive S shaped vein on their wing.

Vernal Colletes.

Lathbury's Nomad Bee Nomada lathuriana -- a parasite of Grey-backed Mining Bees. They have a three coloured abdomen and tawny hairs on the abdomen. The nomad bee lays its egg in the nest of the mining bee and its larvae hatch first. They then eat the mining bee egg and its stock of pollen.

Lathbury's Nomad Bee.

All photographed in early April 2023 in the same few metres of compacted sandy soil on the island in the Loire at Amboise.