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Monday, September 5, 2011

Chestnuts are falling on my head!

Ouch, it's raining sweet chestnuts at the moment. I can't walk anywhere around the garden without running the gauntlet of these little green spikey objects that drop from the trees like round bullets and do they hurt if they happen to bounce off my head!
They are indeed delicious roasted, but by the time I have collected them, prised them from their barbed casings, made a cut in each one so that they don't explode in the heat, roasted them & then burned almost all of my fingertips prising off the shell, well, I'm done for and the taste of a freshly roasted chestnut has suddenly lost its appeal.
I actually buy them in a jar at the supermarket. I know it's not really the thing, living in the French countryside as I do, but to preserve my sanity not to mention my hands, it's what I do.



The worst part of having chestnuts in the garden, is the lawn mowing.
There are hundreds of the things on the ground when I come to do the last cut of the season and as they coincide with the leaf fall, they combine in a prickly hedgehog like ball and conspire to choke and clog the mower chute, making it impossible to do the mowing.
Still, it's better to live in this lovely part of France and have small annoyances than to be banged up in the prison that is a city.