Mélèze 
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Whoops!
Hurrah! That’s my kinda gardening! I have small patches of grass divided up by paths with which nothing can be done except mow them or - in my case in my first year in this house - mow them, not.
I noticed that the bank along the length of the carpark at Leclerc [Vire] is covered with this stuff. A really useful way of dealing with an otherwise labour intensive but useless patch of ground, it seems to me.
The alternative is to just let it ‘rewild’ but I don’t want to end up with bits that look like the empty lots on Spanish building projects.
Any other 'ground cover suggestions? Heather? That green furry stuff that seems to grow horizontally?
As the son of a member of the R.H.S. and supreme plantswoman, I am a disgrace but then, I take after my pa, who learned nothing from my mother in 45 years.
Oh! This is music to my ears! Vinca …
I do have a notion to do something a bit more horticultural. I have a rectangular patch of ‘lawn’ - well, it’s green and it’s grass but not exactly champion bowls standard - about 20m wide by 50m long. It is on a substantial slope, facing dead south with a 5-6m high stone wall at the top end which is there to prevent the house behind it falling down onto my garden.
I have no use for 85% of this rectangle of ‘soft green concrete’ so, being in Normandy, I thought a small apple orchard might do well with a grape vine growing up the wall, which gets every minute of any sun.
What would be the best way to deal with the ground around the apple trees? Let the grass do its thing? The idea is minimal maintenance.
We had J knotweed in the UK. It was growing in the yard of a public building behind a wall at the bottom of the garden but it soon found ways through. But we did get rid of it in the end by literally feeding it with weedkiller. I’m shocked to see it on verges here in France.
The more expensive gates seem to be made of meranti wood. Meranti is a hard wood so from the advice given so far this is what we’ll consider first. The cheapest softwood is 450 and the cheapest hardwood 650. No larch etc We do have three plastic entrance gates but the other two we don’t need so I shall strip off all the plastic leaving an aluminium frame which I shall spray paint black or brown
I shall then add strips of wood to match the rest of the picket fence and just hope it doesn’t look too tacky!
I’m baaack!!! 
Why have 2 of my newly planted / sprouting potatoes got brown / yellow bits? Please don’t tell me they already have some awful disease 
The rest look healthy:
Cold. They’ll get over it.
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What the lady said 
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Oh thank goodness! Thank you 
Always useful to have some fleece to hand so you can throw it over tender youngsters on cold nights.
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If you know there’s a frost coming try to earth them up before. It needs doing at some point so …
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Last year we had just two pest problems moles and ants. The moles I’ve given up trying to blow them up instead I’ve learnt how to persuade them to go elsewhere. Last year we sprayed ant powder everywhere and we were pretty unhappy about it being unsure of the ingredients. This year we’re going to try cornflour. Apparently you sprinkle the flour around each plant, the ants eat it but can’t digest it so they die. Has anyone else tried it?
No not tried that but I read they hate cinnamon. We have a 1 kg bag I got on eBay to use as mould stopper on seedlings and rooting powder so can go mad with that if I need to!
Tamarix, I reckon… lovely tree/bush… 
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I think it’s a tamarisk 
Ooh I see Stella got there first - I’m happy she thinks that’s what it is too
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Very interested if you could impart your method for getting the moles to go elsewhere. I seem to be overrun by them in one specific area. They make an awful mess.
I just followed the instructions on the box more or less. We’ve got the traditional two patches of grass at the front each about 15m by 15m separated by a path each patch with a flower border. We have a neighbour one side and a field on the other so the plan is to push the mole towards the field, I don’t want to upset the neighbour. The mole always seems to go for the flower/shrub border. So I go along the flower border every metre I shove the spade down as far as I can push it forward and drop the modules or sachet into the gap. That does seem to upset him a bit and each time he pushes his soil up I shove down a sachet in the hole. After a couple of days of harassment he disappears. I’ve just done this for the second time this year. If you are persistent it does seem to work.
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Sounds like your strategy is working for you. The issue I have is that my property covers quite a large area so would be a little tricky trying to ‘herd’ them away. I must find a solution though, as now I’ve planted my veg I really don’t want them causing havoc in that area as well.
We used to have a mole problem before we got professional help in 
, two of our cats are fantastic at catching moles, they sit for hours waiting on fresh soil getting pushed up then spring into action furiously digging down till they get the little blighters and leave the carcass for me to pick up on the decking 
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