May Special Offers

Posted by Rosie

During May 2011 we are able to offer guests coming to the gite midweek change-over days and thus the chance to benefit from cheaper Channel crossings if you are coming from the UK or Ireland. This also includes the week after Easter, over the May Bank Holiday.

The following dates are available:

The week after Easter:
Change-over days available - Monday 25th April, Tuesday 26th April, Wednesday 27th April.
Price for the week - £325/€390

May
Change-over days available:
2nd Week of May - Wednesday 11th May, Thursday 12th May, Friday 13th May
Price for the week - £325/€390
3rd Week of May - Wednesday 18th May, Thursday 19th May, Friday 20th May.
Price for the week - £325/€390
(Saturday change-overs are also available in May but exclude the extra special offer below)

EXTRA SPECIAL OFFER:

If you book any of the above weeks, get an extra night totally free of charge - 8 nights for the price of 7 or 9 nights for the price of 8.
Prices for the week - £325/€390 for 7 or 8 nights
and £375/€445 for 8 or 9 nights.
Offer subject to availability.

Click here to go to our website

April/May is a wonderful time to visit Calvados. On the many local footpaths the wild flowers are at their most magnificent, the swallows and cuckoos arrive in May and generally the weather is very pleasant. Here at Eco-Gites there should be plenty of young animals to see: last year we had chicks on the 14th May and ducklings on the 21st My. If the weather is kind between now and then there should be fresh organically grown vegetables coming from the garden. For entertainment you can take advantage of shorter queues, less crowds at all the local attractions and the fact that France has a lot of Bank Holidays through May so there are extra events and activities to go to.

Don't forget our other earlier special offer - Special Winter Offer for Couples visiting between now and the first week of April. Click on the link for further details.

Home Alone

Posted by Rosie

No - we've not gone off and left one of the boys behind - it's the boys (all three of them!) who have gone and left ME home alone. They've headed off down to The Alps (Les Deux Alpes to be precise) for a week's skiing and I'm here minding the fort and thoroughly enjoying the peace and quiet. Well if you can call it that with 13 piglets who become very vocal if I am at all late with their meals ...... oh and 5 dogs here ...... 5 LARGE dogs!

I had planned this week to have a garden digging blitz but heavy rain has put paid to that idea. I could start moving the trailer load of manure the farmer delivered a few days ago ..... or I could leave that for Simon and his digger. I can however, get on in the polytunnel and today I went to the garden centre for seeds that I can get started with. It may not be Spring yet but my fingers are itching to get muddy.

Then there is the house. Housework is something, as Simon will vouch, that does not come naturally to me. It is however, considerably easier when there are not other people sneaking up behind me making a mess of something I have just tidied up. So it is the house which is getting blitzed this week. So far the bathroom, tv room and boys' bedrooms have had my attention and it is lovely knowing the will stay that way at least until Sunday. One would hope considerably longer but I am a realist and know the boys both inherited my lack of natural tidiness genes.

It's not all work though and I know once I have fed and shut in the animals, the evening is all my own - I've taken some films out of the library, opened my favourite bottle of wine and have, 2 squares a day, been enjoying the extra dark chocolate Simon got me for Christmas. I'm reading a very trashy book and I know that if I spend far too long in the bath no-one will be hammering at the door needing the loo! This may not be a conventional holiday but I am savouring being just me for once - not a Mum, not a wife, not a taxi, not a cook, not anything except .... just Rosie ;-)

I'm off dancing

Posted by Rosie

Once a fortnight a group of French and English people get together at the local organic farm for an evening of folk dancing. It's great fun and generally not taken too seriously which is just as well for me: not knowing my left from my right in English, let alone French can sometimes hamper the smooth flow of a dance. There is also often less men that women so some of us have to pretend to be one of them for a dance or two before shifting back to our own sex for the next dance. Confused? So are we all too often!!

Fishy Stuff

Posted by Simon

I watched the Hugh's Fish Fight last night and although I was aware of fish stock problems and eating sustainable fish plus about the discard, I did not realise the true extend of the problem. What a staggering amount of fish was thrown back into the sea - DEAD. I know fish stocks need to be sustainable but don't these people who made this policy actually realise that dead fish cannot breed!

Plus the small fishermen, in the likes of Hastings, are 75% of the UK fishing fleet but have less than 25% of the quotas. Even more ludicrous is the quota amounts - I think it was approximately 13 kilos each of cod, haddock and plaice per week. These are the main fish they catch in the English Channel. On the plus side they are allowed to catch 10 tonne of pollack. Well apparently the English Channel is not a place for pollack! Need I say more. Well the fishmongers in Hastings have to get there cod from Norway to sell in their shops whilst the fishing boats that land directly in front of the shops are throwing dead cod back in the sea.

I could go on about the programme because there were many interesting facts of policies gone wrong or not right in the first place - not only affecting the livelihoods of fishermen, but also the fish stocks and the waste. So if you do feel that this fish fight should be supported please click on the link in the side bar and read the facts for yourselves.

And for us the one problem of being in land is that we cannot produce our own fish but for the last 18 months we have been lucky enough to swap with our neighbour - his freshly caught trout and for some of our meat. This was working well until late last year when they decided to move down to Brittany to be nearer the sea for fishing. Most inconsiderate of them! So I'm planning to take up fishing - which with my lack of patience should be an interesting pastime. And I can hear my mother saying now - 'he wont sit still long enough - he's got ants in his pants'!

Bored? Not when there are board games to play

Posted by Rosie

We do enjoy playing board games here, especially when it's horrible outside. What we choose changes with our moods (and the ages of the boys) but there are always some perennial favourites; Tom and Simon love Risk and Monopoly (Ben and I don't!) but we all like Frustration, Coppit and a clever little game called Labyrinth. Our most recent addition is a game called Ingenious. Actually, we have had it nearly a year but have only just got round to playing it. It's fiendishly simple (once you've worked out one ambiguous rule) and seems to be slightly addictive. Yahtzee has just made a re-appearance after a few years languishing on the shelf; a word of warning though, if you are playing against Tom, he definitely has the luck of the dice. We also have a new word game to play thanks to friends in England - In a Pickle. Hopefully it'll be good. At other times Scrabble and Boggle have featured highly between Simon and myself and on clearing the loft last week we found Simon's ancient Cluedo. I loved that as a child.

We are always on the lookout for something new, so have you any others you could recommend to us?

(There's a good selection of board games in the gite too ;-))

Sheep Update

Posted by Rosie

Just before Christmas we had a bit of an animal reshuffle and whilst many headed to the freezer others headed off for pastures new, namely our two in-lamb ewes. 2010 was a very difficult year for keeping sheep - a long hard winter followed by a hot, dry summer meant there was virtually no grass and we only managed to keep our mini flock going by selling some lambs, slaughtering one ewe and our castrated lamb and feeding the others in what-ever way we could. Various friends let us cut grass for the sheep to eat whilst another friend let us graze the mums and lambs in his orchard - until that was all eaten and they kept escaping - grass is greener on the other side of the fence and all that.

With so little grass the farmer's hay crop was greatly reduced and he was unable to supply us hay; we found some elsewhere but it turned out not to be very good quality and the sheep wouldn't eat it. Rammy was less fussy and being a bully managed to pinch all the best bits at the expense of the pregnant ewes who quickly began to lose condition. We separated them off to give supplementary food which Rammy was decidedly unhappy about, demonstrated by the fact he bashed the gate to pieces and would have had a go at me had there not been a second gate in the way - Grrrrrrrr.

No grass, ewes who wouldn't eat the hay and a ram who had no friend (we had out him in the freezer earlier in the year) and who was in the mood for bashing gates or me, depending who or what was the closest forced us to make a decision - the sheep would have to go.

Luckily not far though, just a few kms away to the friends who we had been in pig-share scheme with. They decided they didn't want to keep pigs over the winter but had the grazing for sheep so we did a swap - our two sheep for their share of the pigs.

This does not however, mean that we will not have sheep - we still have Rammy and would love to find him a new home and we are trying to find him a castrated ram lamb as a friend. Come the spring we will do a swap with our friends again - piglets for lambs and we may even look out for a bottle-fed lamb - they may cost a bit more to feed but what could be better than offering guests in the gite the chance to bottle feed a lamb. At the moment this method suits us best - we have no need to source hay, no shearing to do and it will give our limited grass stocks a bit of time to recover. It'll also be a bit of a relief not to have to go through lambing which last year I found rather stressful. Now I can have all the fun of the lambs and let my friend have the late nights!

Special Winter Offer for Couples

Posted by Rosie

Eco-gites of Lénault comfortably sleeps 5 people but is equally cosy for a couple wishing to have a quiet country get-away in the beautiful Calvados countryside. As Simon said in his previous post, the wood-burner and high level of insulation keeps it beautifully warm and what could be better than a country ramble along one of the many footpaths that start at our back gate before heading back back for a glass of mulled wine/cider and slice of home-made cake. To make your winter break even more appealing we are offering a special Winter offer for couples from now through to the first week in April (excluding Feb 19th - 26th 2011). Any couple booking the gite for 3 nights or more will be eligible for the following discount:

Normal Price per week - £225 (270€) -
*** Couples Discount Price - £180 (215€) ***
For short breaks - £32 (40€) per night (minimum stay 3 nights).

Click here to go to our website

These prices include the rent plus electricity up to 8kw/day, logs for the fire, bed linen (but not towels) and a welcome pack. All other terms and conditions apply and can be read here.

Gite

Posted by Simon

I've just let the dogs out and discovered that it is, albeit lightly, snowing again. We will see what the morning brings. And now that the festive season is over we are pleased to say that we have had some interest in the gite for this coming year.

We already have four confirmed bookings and have a couple of queries outstanding. This has been a great boost to us especially as the four bookings were all made last year whilst we were not really expecting much to happen until after Christmas - one of the clients is, also, a return booking.

Over the New Year weekend we had friends staying in the gite and we were (as I'm sure they were) really pleased at how warm it was. We have heavily insulated the gite and our hope was that the wood burner would provide enough heat - well it certainly did, although we did have some other heaters ready just in case! In fact we used the gite for a New Year get together plus we had dinner round there the next evening and on both occasions had to let the fire burn down as it got too warm.

Giving the gite a winter heat testing again pleased us as the area here is great for an 'out of peak season' holiday and nice warm accommodation certainly helps. Lovely for sitting around with a glass of mulled wine and a good book or playing a game. Plus there are lots of walk and cycle routes - and I'm working on producing an information pack on these -and other tourist things to do.

On completion of the gite I had in my mind a target number of lets for 2010 and considering we did not open, nor start to advertise, until mid-July we met this plus had couple of long weekends lets. We thought we might get a booking over Christmas but taking into account the weather conditions and Christmas day being on the Saturday we were not surprised we didn't get one.

Well we are now into 2011 and our first proper year of having the gite open - so we are quietly confident of meeting our targets for this year.

So, here's wishing everyone all the best for 2011 and once again we'd like to thank everybody who helped, and supported us, with getting the gite up and running.

Simple Woman's Christmas Daybook

Posted by Rosie

I saw this idea on Our Front Plot's Blog and thought I would add my answers for today so readers can have a sort of instant view of life here today without having to come and visit.

Outside my Window - it's getting dark and the Christmas lights have just come on.

I am thinking - that I really must get and cook the boys some dinner. It's back to school tomorrow so an early night is needed.

From my kitchen - I can smell nothing because I am on here rather than cooking the boy's dinner!

I am wearing - jeans, a T-shirt and zipped top that really do not match and my comfy but rather threadbare slippers.

I am creating - nothing at the moment but I have lots of plans and ideas.

I am going - to cook the boy's dinner in just a minute.

I am reading - L'étranger by Albert Camus (In French she says smugly)

I am hearing - the boys playing a board-game.

Around the house - there are loads of things that need to go in the loft but can't until I have first sorted the loft so Simon can then get on converting it into our new spare bedroom.

One of my favourite things is - the wood burner - it heats the whole house, I can cook on it, it heats the washing up water, dries our clothes and breathes life into our house.

Here is "picture for thought" that I am sharing - Ben and Tom with their good friend from the UK. Is it just me or do you think they are plotting something?

Did I make it .....

Posted by Rosie

......... 52 new recipes in 2010 ........ a recipe a week on average. Did I manage? Yes (Just). Here's my final update:

38. Ciabatta - OK - so it was made with a packet mix in the breadmaker but it was new all the same
39. Moroccan Lamb - made with our own hogget (1 year old lamb) and delicious.
40. Chickpea Curry - eaten with the lamb if I remember correctly and also yummy.
41. Pear and Ginger Upside-down Pudding - the HelpX volunteer who was here when I made this said this was the best pudding he had had in ages so it must have been OK!
42. Oven Baked Trout - I have always grilled my trout before but baking in foil in the oven is so easy I now always do my trout like this.
43. Mayonnaise - neighbours taught us how to make mayonnaise although I have to admit that mine has always since failed and Simon is chief mayonnaise maker at Eco-Gites!
44. Fruit Leather - This is a fruit purée that cooked in a very cool oven for about 18 hours to produce a fiendishly sweet fruity sweet that really does have the texture of leather but tastes divine.
45. Potatoes and Ceps - a simple but effective recipe made possible by my mushroom foraging.
46. Soda Bread (a la Simon) - baked in the embers of the woodburner - a little overdone of the base but otherwise perfect.
47. Bay Boletes and Chicken Soup - another recipe thanks to my foraging
48. Slow Roasted Mutton in a Wine and Onion sauce - a wonderful way to make a leg of mutton meltingly tender.
49. Lemon and Elderflower Marmalade - made from the lemons I had frozen after making elderflower cordial. I made this on a really wintry day and made the house smell like May!!
50. French Onion Soup - perfect for the cold spell
51. Stuffed Breast of Lamb - when you slaughter your own animals you get all the the cuts of meat you rarely see in supermarkets and Simon cooked this recipe to use up the breast that previously we have just turned into mince. It was a little overdone thanks to our evil cooker but was very tasty all the same and will be repeated.
52. Roast Brined Turkey Breast - A friend was very sceptical when I said I was going to brine a turkey breast in the way you brine a ham but this is apparently a popular way of cooking in the US so we thought we'd give it a go ...... and are very glad we did. It made the meat so moist that even I would eat it cold and the salt was not over-powering. In fact we said another time we may even brine it a bit longer.

So - 52 in 2010 - it was a great idea (Thank you Colour it Green) and I made me search my cookbooks for a few different things that otherwise I may not have cooked. Most of the recipes worked, a few failed, one exploded and one nearly caused me to set the kitchen on fire. However many more have been cooked more than once and are now regulars at our table. I have just noticed Colour it Green is thinking about doing it all again - do you know what, I think I may well join her. So - before I dive into one of my many cookbooks there is just time to say:

Happy New Year and all the best for 2011.