Thursday, August 16, 2007

Still about the farming

Rita's bath-tub-horse-trough post demonstrates, as we've mentioned a couple of times in passing, that we live in what in the States we would call a farming community. But land use in Europe is so intensive that pretty much everything that's not city is farm (even the woods across the street is a small plantation of poplars), so really we just live in the not-city, which makes it farm. As Rita said, they've finished the haymaking, and they've also recently harvested the wheat and baled the straw from that. Besides corn, they also raise lots of beets and potatoes. Then yesterday we went to the commissary and say a trailer (an 18-wheeler sized trailer) full of green beans; it was on the air base because the farm itself is inside the fence. I hadn't even noticed the beans until then. They raise all manner of livestock: horses, cattle (dairy and beef), sheep, donkeys, deer, and goats, which seem to be kept mostly as pets. Oddly enough, though, we haven't seen any pigs, so I'm guessing that's a regional product, possibly raised in the west in the Ardennes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You need to get out to West Virginia more to see bathtubs in use like that!