Originally from Seine et Marne, we lived between the Seine and the Forest of Fontainebleau.
What started our life change was the arrival of our daughter, Éléa, who turned our lives upside down in 2007. Wanting a second child, we decided it was time for us to find the calm of the countryside. Arriving in Puisaye in 2010, we came to do “a return to the earth” following certain readings by philosophers advocating a return to nature. Visiting several places, we fell in love with Puisaye with its magnificent bocage and its loving land.
Passionate about gardening, autonomy and the knowledge of elders for 20 years, it seemed important to us to change careers. Permaculture has profoundly changed our vision of nature and opened our eyes to the importance of going with the direction of life rather than against it. This is why we started agricultural training and became market gardener in Organic Farming. So we created “ The Garden of the Thorains » in 2013 in Lavau. With us, it is Organic or not at all. Concerned about developing the rural environment, we sell on-farm sales to energize our countryside and hold events (open days) combining shows, conferences, activities, etc.
We produce vegetables that we transform into different products ranging from tomato coulis, to ketchup and including plant syrups and pepper or chili jellies,… Wanting working from seed to seed, we are producers of vegetable plants, aromatics and medicinal plants. Having already started seed reproduction, we are starting sales to gardeners this year. Not wanting to resemble the industrial model, we only do natural and reproducible varieties, and encourage gardeners to reproduce their own seeds. In 2020, we will have around 200 varieties of plants, including around fifty varieties of tomatoes, and around 200 varieties of seeds to offer to our customers. We want to present as much diversity as possible because it is the biodiversity that protects us and there are so many delights and delicacies to discover. After having learned the trade, it now seems important to us to transmettre, that's why we do workshops and events that feed our need for popular education. The idea is to put seeds in the heads of the public. We have a large clientele from the Ile-de-France region, we dream of making them want to leave the city, change careers to those in agriculture and necessarily organic and join the countryside and firstly Puisaye!
What can we do in the garden at the moment?
The important thing in the garden is tohave a vision a season ahead. We must anticipate and plan for thesetting up your garden. The first thing to do is observe! Look at what plant is growing in your garden, this will tell you what your land is like. Do not hesitate to buy a manual of bio-indicator plants or go on the internet (the permacultural bookstore on the internet or Pages 58 in Cosne sur Loire will be able to help you).
Once the location has been chosen, all you need to do is install the find straw, hay, leaves or wood chippings and dispose of it in the chosen location after removing the thin layer of grass and roots. Do not hesitate to put a layer of cardboard, before the straw, on your land to avoid regrowth, having taken care to remove the plastic tape to prevent it from ending up in your soil. If necessary, and in our rather heavy land of Puisaye, you may need decompact the earth. To do this, use either a spade fork or the famous Grelinette. Despite a mild winter and an early spring this year, you can plant trees until the end of March. It's time to take cuttings willow or wicker to make living fences or hedges. Live hedges and hedges are a wonderful reservoir of biodiversity and a refuge for garden beneficials. You can also go and train in the Morvan to make Plessis (Pléchie) which is an ancient technique for creating plant fences and keeping a hedge alive.
It is important when planting a tree or potted plants, to water well when planting so that startup goes smoothly. It is also necessary mulch around to avoid competition from grass and maintain a certain freshness for the installed plants. You can mulch to a thickness of 40 cm and a diameter of one meter around the tree. You can subsequently install aromatic or medicinal plants or flowers in this space. We encourage you to install as many different species and varieties as possible because we believe that it is diversity that protects us and allows us to increase life in the ecosystem. The bees, birds and other little creatures in the garden will be all the better for it. It would also be necessary provide refuge for his allies. Piles of branches or leaves serve as a refuge for hedgehogs or insects. At home, we no longer burn any branches and prefer to put them in a pile in a corner of the garden and let them degrade over time: several advantages such as shelter for the beneficials but also enrichment of the earth in the long term. We no longer return the earth to our home, this destroys soil life. The organisms (bacteria) which are in the first centimeters of the soil need oxygen, if we put them at the bottom of the hole we simply kill them. It would be better try to protect the ground, to avoid a crust of mud which prevents the soil from breathing and favor nourishing the soil and encouraging life, earthworms for example. If your soil is too heavy or too compact, decompact and cover it. You will be surprised at the result!
You can from the beginning of March start taking some cuttings, mint, thyme, or other perennial aromatics and medicinals. You can start the first seedlings, lamb's lettuce, spinach and first salads. The first carrots, turnips, radishes and leeks can be sown under cover or with protection against the cold. In mid-March, it is also the time to sow summer vegetables or “ratatouille vegetables” tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and chili peppers, but also parsley, chives, chervil and Chinese spring onions, etc.
The first life lesson that gardening gives us is: PATIENCE!
Don't forget an important date for the gardener that are “The Ice Saints” which theoretically correspond to the last frosts of spring. They are between May 11 and 13. You will only be able to plant “frost-resistant” plants (which freeze) from these dates. The large family of cucurbitaceae, zucchini, squash, cucumber, gherkin should be sown 3 to 4 weeks before the Christmas holidays, therefore around the second half of April.
And we encourage you to plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, etc. until after the Ice Saints. Don't be in too much of a hurry, we paid the price again last year when we lost around fifty zucchini plants due to a slight frost at the beginning of May….
