Back in March, Craig, Alex and Philippe Chaud finished their sanitation work and then Jerome had the last job of spreading the earth with the digger and putting in castine for a driveway. Then there were bare stretches of topsoil and as he left Jerome told Craig and I to plant seeds quickly, "Plant soon or the rain will come and wash away the top soil," he said.
We went to the local Coopérative agricole Sodepacc the land and garden suppliers and bought Royalfleur Jachère Campagne en Fleurs; wild flower meadow seeds and grass seeds and sowed the seeds the same day on the bare earth.
The jachère is a field left fallow when crops are rotated, our pack had flower seeds for les Centaurées Polka Dot ( blue, rose and purple), le Souci (orange and yellow), Le Zinnia Lilliput, le Lavatère (mulitcolour) and Cosmos.
Throwing the seeds onto the ground we found it a bit unreal, standing on a hilltop, two city dwellers, having a go, throwing out seeds, not really knowing what we were doing.
So when the wind blew the next day we thought they were lost. I said to my neighbour I was sorry that they might have wild flowers growing in their lawn, but Jean-Paul said he did not mind, his elderly mother had always planted flowers everywhere when she could only now she did not have the energy.
But although the seeds seemed to have gone, life grew below the surface and the shoots came through, so that somehow, from one seed, whole plants sprouted and clumps of flowers opened with more coming every day.
Some are stunted but still there is usually a bee on one of them.
We do have lots of flowers, especially over the sand filter bed area where they are waist high. When I am standing listening to the buzz of insects going from one flower head to the next I am very happy to be helping the bees.
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