My French Garden in Summer

Hello & welcome to my chats about my French garden and France in general.

Having been gardening here for a few years now, I feel I am able to judge what things are best grown in my soil, what will suit the climate in the Limousin and with regard to growing vegetables in our part of France, what is worth planting and what is not.

The first piece of advice I was given when I first started gardening in France, was to check out what my neighbours planted.

This also turned out to be the best piece of advice that I could have been given & it has stood me in good stead each season & saved me quite a bit of money.

It's really easy to get carried away in the garden centres, especially in early Spring when the shelves are loaded with all sorts of tempting flowers, bushes & veg plants. Why then, don't we consider that these things have been growing happily in heated greenhouses, watered & fed regularly and have probably never, in their short lives, encountered a biting East wind blowing in from the French Alps.

It's too easy to hand over the cash, stick the purchase in the part of the garden that will please us more than the poor plant, and, over the next few months, from a nice warm vantage point within the four house walls, sit and watch it gradually wither & die.

Mmm, it's too easy isn't it!

So, hopefully, I will be imparting my little pearls of wisdom about gardens and gardening in France, and I hope they will be, in some small way, a help to you when you arrive at your longed for French House.