I've been remiss in posting news to this blog because we have been off traveling in France for 3 weeks in June and July. While we were traveling I left my garden and pumpkins mostly unattended w/ the sprinkler programmed to water it while I was gone. More on that in another posting....
But let's talk about gardening in France here.
One of our adventures was to visit the Chenonceau chateau in the Loire River valley. Besides the chateau being gorgeous, they had a huge vegetable garden demonstration, similar I'm sure to when people occupied the chateau in the 16th century. I think I spent as much time in the vegetable garden as I did exploring the chateau.
Their growing season has to be much longer than ours in Boulder and their vegetables and plants seemed to be at least 4-5 weeks ahead of ours. Plus, I'm sure they get much more rain than we do. Many of the trees I saw around there were ones I remember seeing in Louisville, KY, magnolia trees for example.
There were glass cloches (like our 'walls of water') sitting around that had been used earlier in the season for frost protection and beautiful bamboo trellises, ornamental flower gardens, shrub mazes, and, of course giant pumpkins growing. In many of the rooms of the chateau they had beautiful flower arrangements which I'm sure were composed of flowers that had come from the surrounding gardens.
In the kitchen there was a centerpiece on the table that was made from at least a dozen miniature tomato plants with baby red tomatoes on them. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture to share.
So to tempt my fellow gardeners who are reading this blog, here are the pictures from that fabulous visit to Chenonceau.
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