Shefer Family

  • Someone likes the heat!

  • And my first go at growing garlic!

  • The Oregano Harvest. I’m running a little late this year, or maybe the oregano is ahead of schedule, I’m not sure. It’s June and I’ve just caught it before going to seed.

  • Just because I love it.

  • Empire style chandeliers

    After 4 years - our big chandeliers finally arrived! What a ridiculous journey. Ordered in 2022 May. Built in China, shipped to Europe in 23. Stollen by Hungarian customs. Rebuild in 2025 after years of insurance and manufacturing negotiations. Shipped in March 26 and arrived in June. The boxes were beaten up but miraculously the glass beads and metal frames seem completely fine. I’m still digging through the boxes to confirm, but so far so good.

  • Tilleul flower season. The flowers are inconspicuous but their scent isn’t. It’s gorgeous. All the way down the driveway.

  • This weeks potato harvest

  • Bomby’s chestnut bomb Alaska, flamed in Grand Marnier for good measure.

  • They grow up so fast!

  • Baby chicks. 14 and counting

  • Auch cathedral over the Gers River.

  • Evening light.

  • Wisteria season

  • This year the Irises have done particularly well.

  • Our California poppies love the Gers

  • Veggie bins: I had no idea that lettuce could survive a minus 9 C winter. This year we had an unusually harsh frost that killed all the citrus and avocado trees, all of the bananas and damaged the olive trees… but the lettuce came through it just fine! Who could have imagined, frost hardy lettuce!

  • Dawn to dusk burn barrels. We put them on the tree stumps that we want to get rid of. It usually takes about three days to burn one out. Tough work, but it gets rid of all of the windfall branches and sticks, and gives me some purification time with the fires.

  • Last spring we started a little project to clean up some fallen trees that had been overgrown with blackberry and blackthorn thickets. We were hoping to clear what we thought to be a flat area about 8x8m to use as a storage area for gravel and tile. As we cleared we found that the flat area of thorns and deadfall was a bit bigger than we had expected. 120mx9m

  • Big storms and downed trees last week. The wind came in from the north, which is totally unheard of here. It took out a bunch of lovely old trees, mostly the ones with unhealthy or diseased root systems. So sad.

  • Spring springing.

  • Chapel

    In the process of creating a new gite above the chapel, we have taken down the old (structurally unsafe) beams and will be redoing the floor both upstairs and downstairs. This mid way stage though gives us an opportunity to see the lovely old 9thC chapel as it would originally have looked, before it was cut up into separate rooms.

  • Building a new toilet block for the event space at the old orangery.

  • The chapel is getting a new life. Built 1400 years ago this Romanesque chapel used to be the village church, until the village outgrew it. It has had many incarnations over the centuries. a chapel, a forge, a store room. In its new life it will be meditation, yoga and dance studio. ✨🪈🧘🏼‍♂️🪩✨

  • I picked up these nice old chairs on marketplace. Here they are drying after a couple of coats of anti rust treatment.

  • Lovely visit from the kind of old family friend that feels like family 🤗✨Please come back soon dear Liz and family.

subscribe via RSS