Getting the plot ready for a new growing season

Winter is a time to catch up and to get everything ready for next year. 

Last year's failures and disappointments can be left in the past as we optimistically plan for the year ahead, a year of bountiful sunshine and rain in perfect proportion, a year where we finally keep up with sowing schedules, remember to keep seedlings watered but don't drown them, keep on top of the weeds, keep up with harvesting and even keep on top of succession sowing and planting.

And that will all start with getting the beds prepared in plenty of time for spring. For some that will mean digging over so the frost can (allegedly) break the soil down or rotavating to start the year with lovely, clear beds. The conscientious will work in manure or ample compost. 

None of that for me though. I want to keep the soil covered to protect it from being beaten down by the worst of the winter weather. It won't be turned, but protected from the elements it will emerge from the winter with a crumbly surface. Most of my annual beds are currently covered with homemade compost or, when there wasn't enough of that, for there never is, a deep layer of straw. This was a choice which was made for me thanks to the cheapness of straw in this area - we should always aim to use whatever is locally available. If it's not sufficiently rotted down by sowing time, I'll rake it off the surface and add it in to the compost piles. 

Rhubarb is already coming up, though it may get nipped back if we get anouther cold spell

In the forest garden, most of the herbaceous plants have retreated under the surface for the winter. But as the rays of spring sunshine hit the ground strong, fresh shoots will appear. For the moment I am keeping the perennial beds well mulched. For this I use woodchip, which I now have in more than plentiful supply. 

Plenty of woodchip and logs to be getting on with!
Can you spot the robin?

Under the fruit bushes I am actually using freshly shredded leylandii. It's still producing a lot of heat, but this will quickly dissipate once it's spread out over the ground. The primary purpose of this is to suffocate the weeds, starving them of light and stealing their nitrogen as the decomposition bacteria get going. Keeping on top of weeds, especially grass growing up through thorny gooseberry bushes would be a nightmare without mulching. 

Woodchip makes an excellent mulch for the raspberry beds.

It will decompose quite quickly and put its goodness back into the ground. I won't need to dig it in, for the worms will do that and its nutrients will be made available to all my plants by the magical processes which are allowed to go on in the soil when it is not repeatedly turned and disturbed by constant upheaval. I'm talking not just worms and minibeasts, but fungal mycelia and bacteria. For the cycle of nutrients, with a little encouragement from us, is much more efficiently handled by nature. No need for simplistic additions of fertiliser backed up with liberal dowses of herbicide and pesticide to eliminate all 'competition'. Nature achieves all of this in a much more complex way. I don't even need to completely understand everything that goes on, in the same way that I don't have a clue how my car or this computer actually work.

Logs and woodchip are now being delivered to the smallholding with alarming regularity! I don't want to turn it away and have plenty of use for it, especially the woodchip, but it is keeping me busy redistributing it around the whole smallholding. It might help me with my resolution to shed a few pounds.

The logs will of course be handy for heating the house, but some are just too big to handle so they will be left for wildlife. Much of the wood needs to season too and I am not keen to use the leylandii in the woodburner. It needs at least a couple of years of seasoning otherwise it's guaranteed chimney fire! Given the amount of wood now coming in, I won't need it for this, so we have multiple woodpiles appearing all over the smallholding. The wildlife will love it. 

I've found another great use for the leylandii logs though. It makes a great edging for perennial beds. It's not too formal but does just enough to define the areas so they don't seem too messy amd random. I don't really do formal, but a degree of organisation and layout is necessary to aid tending plants and harvesting. 

I have decided to create some beds which come somewhere between annual veg beds and forest garden. These are my beds for perennial veg. Here will live Jerusalem artichoke, Turkish rocket, herbs, perennial kales, 9-star perennial broccoli, Chinese artichoke (crosnes). Many of these don't need the intensive input of labour demanded by annual crops, but they don't really fit into the randomness of the forest garden, especially as the canopy closes over and sunny edges become more limited.

The only things that stop me getting more done during the winter are the limitations of my ageing body and the frustratingly short days. 

But as you can see, I've been a bit busy. Before I know it though, the sowing schedule will be ramping up. At the moment it is mainly perennial seeds which are stratifying, the process by which they are sown early enough to experience a protracted cold period. In nature, they need this before they germinate. It is nature's way of making sure that seeds shed in the summer and autumn don't germinate too quickly before spring arrives.

My seed potatoes are arriving this week, which is a sure sign that the main sowing and planting season approaches. Fortunately hours of light increase roughly in line with the amount of work which needs doing... thinking about it, it's probably the other way round, it's the increasing light which heralds the need to prepare beds and get sowing seeds.

And so 2023 is under way!

Good luck everyone.

Magic Oca Tubers

At the back end of 2020 I purchased some oca tubers.

Oca is a South American tuber crop. They look a bit like small potatoes, but they are in a totally different family. Whereas potatoes are in the same family as tomatoes (hence the susceptibility of both to blight), oca grow like an oxalis.

I'm not going to pretend oca is a perfect crop to grow. Firstly the tubers are stupidly overpriced, often around £1 each for tubers an inch round if you're lucky. Who is going to eat something worth that much? No, I'd rather grow them on and sell them for 50p each! But come the day when I end up with too many to sell and everybody else has had the same idea, then I will start to treat them more as a crop to be eaten.

Those first tubers I purchased could not have been more of a disappointment. They had been either harvested too late or not stored frost-free after harvesting, causing at least half of them to just wither and rot away. The rest I tried to store over winter but by the spring they were just empty shells of decomposing skins.

And therein lies one problem with oca. It doesn't form tubers until late in the year but they do not survive a heavy frost, so it's a tuber on the edge of its range. But as with wild birds, insects and plants, that range is creeping ever further north as our climate changes.
In fact it is this climate change which drives the need to rethink some of our crops. It's an unusual year now when my potatoes aren't hit by blight due to our warm, wet summers.

Anyway, back to the point. Not to be put off, I found some reasonably priced oca tubers on ebay. I am still experimenting with how to store such tubers overwinter. Since oca are so small, I don't want them drying out. My standard storage for potatoes is in a wardrobe in the garage. This keeps them cool and dark without exposing them to frost. The wardrobe offers protection from rodents too. I just store my potatoes in thick paper bags. I decided to store the oca in a mix of coir, perlite and sharp sand. For an insurance policy, I also stored some in a tub of peat-free compost in the fridge. I occasionally had a rummage around during the winter just to check their progress - all was fine.

I don't want to wait till May, when we are frost-free, to start my oca tubers growing, so instead my plan was to pot them up indoors to give them a head start. Besides, it would be difficult to stop them sprouting of their own accord if I waited too long into the spring.

So in mid-March I released my stored tubers from their hibernation. They had all stored really well. No softening of the tubers and no rot. The ones in the fridge were more ready to go, probably because there is more humidity in there, even if the temperature is more controlled.

What amazes me about tubers is how such a tiny, insignificant ball of plant material can throw up so much growth and replicate itself so efficiently over a year. Just take a look at the emergent growth from these tiny little tubers!

Coming up for mid-April now and oca plants seem really strong. A couple have shot away but most are throwing up really strong young shoots. They are in an unheated conservatory so that I can check their growth until they can go into the ground outside. That way we get sturdy plants.

The original plan was to grow the oca in with the perennials on the edge of the forest garden. However, the soil is still a bit too clayey in there which makes for difficult harvesting. So instead they are going into some of the conventional vegetable beds - these are more and more becoming a mix of annual crops and perennials anyway. 

Hopefully by November I'll be pulling handfuls out of the ground a bit like this hill farmer I witnessed harvesting his Oca recently in Mexico.

Maybe I'll even have enough to eat a small plate full.

I'll keep you updated.

Good King Henry

A ground cover plant which grows in the shade, is edible and perennial. It's a forest gardener's dream.

What about one whose local name is Lincolnshire Spinach, though I've never knowingly seen it being cultivated here. It's more commonly known as Good King Henry. What it tastes like I'm yet to discover. I've read that the stems are a bit like asparagus - how often have I read that! The leaves are unsurprisingly supposed to be like spinach, though some people report bitterness. It has obviously gone out of fashion, but so often that is because crops don't fit in with modern mechanised farming practices or easy one-pick harvesting and storage requirements.

Good King Henry can be tricky to grow from seed, though one problem seems to be that there is no consistent advice. I had a few false starts and tried various approaches. It seems to do best sown into modules or trays outside. In fact, the best results I had were from a packet of asparagus! Goodness knows how but I must have somehow mixed up the seed packets. I think the asparagus got discarded in the belief that it was unviable Good King Henry. 

The asparagus was slow to germinate but turned into Good King Henry! I must have had close to 100% germination!

The seedlings were very, very slow to grow. Eventually I took the plunge and planted them in the big wide world of the forest garden. They continued to grow extremely slowly until, one day in late autumn, I couldn't find them any more.

I clung to the hope that, as they are perennials, they would be strong enough to survive the winter in a dormant state, but I really was not sure they would.

But look what I found today. The photo does not quite betray how small they are, but look how healthy and strong they look, nothing like the spindly weedlings I last saw. Hopefully it won't be too long till I get to do a taste test.

Springing up

On a similar note to the previous post, giants are stirring below the ground and stretching their leafy arms to reach the sky, revelling in the first sunshine of the year.

These are THE HERBACEOUS PERENNIALS, a remarkable group of plants which basically hibernate. At the end of the year, after flowering and producing seeds, their leaves and stems wilt, dry up, rot down, and they disappear for the winter, dormant just below the surface. But their strong root systems, which increase year on year, are a remarkable store of energy which is unleashed when they sense lengthening days and warming soil. Through the soil poke the most luscious of leaves, nothing like the weedy and vulnerable seedlings produced by annuals.  Herbaceous perennials are ready to go. 

So as I walk around the smallholding, particularly the forest garden where young perennials were planted last year, every glimpse of an emerging strong plant brings joy. If they survived that first winter they will be here to stay. Every few years they can be divided to make more plants and in exceptionally cold winters I might mulch them as protection, though most are selected for their hardiness (and my laziness!)

So here's a quick gallery of what's coming through.

From top left, Globe Artichoke, Wild Strawberry, Garden Sorrel, Red-berried Elder, Dock (baddy), Caucasian Spinach, Babington Leaks, Lupins, Day Lily, Crocus, Bronze Fennel, Angelica, , 

 

2021 Week 4 - My Perennial Project

We'll start with the weather.

It's been a week of fluctuating conditions, beginning with snow and early morning temperatures down to 5 below. But this was followed by a warm and very wet weather system. A couple of nights of heavy rain have seen water levels rise back to annoying levels. The seasonal lake and various ponds have reappeared and it is pretty squelchy underfoot. 

This was my week to be in school rather than teaching from home, so combined with the weather I have had limited opportunities to make significant headway on the smallholding.

Seed sowing steps up
My growing year has stepped up a notch with a gradual trickle of seed sowing. I've pushed everything a little earlier this year and purchased an extra heat mat to help persuade the seeds into germination and keep the tender young plants warm and snug. 

Some of my onions have germinated very well. As they germinate they come off the heat mat to give room for others. They just move to a different shelf on the staging which is currently in a warm spare bedroom. As soon as things warm up a little most of this will move into the conservatory which offers much improved light, but for the moment it's a bit cool in there and damping off of seedlings might be a problem.

All my aubergines have germinated. These need a long season to produce ripe fruit as I grow them outside. Of all my crops these are the most susceptible to red spider mite when grown in the polytunnel and I don't want to risk giving it a foothold back in.

I've started off my indoor tomatoes too, ten different varieties. I'll concentrate on these in a future post.

Strong lupin seedlings
but one seems to have
given up the ghost.

On a more decorative front, some of the seeds I collected from a gorgeous lupin plant have germinated strongly. Hopefully I can look after them and raise them into perennial splashes of colour around the smallholding.

Potatoes
As we move towards February, potatoes loom on the horizon. It won't be long till I pick up my order of seed potatoes for the year and set them to chit. Because of lockdown I saved some of each variety from last year just in case there was a problem with supplies this year. I put them in a spare fridge which seems to have held them quite well. This is just an emergency measure as it's best to start with fresh stock each year.

I have however planted the Arran Pilots which I saved through. These early potatoes have gone into a polytunnel bed with a heavy compost mulch and should give me new potatoes way ahead of the outdoor plants.

Perennial Hope

The week's main excitement has been a steady stream of deliveries of growing supplies. Thank goodness for the internet during lockdown. and this year is seeing a flood of experimental new crops - the product of too much time on my hands during lockdown. The idea of trying a few trendy perennial crops such as oca and Caucasian spinach has rapidly expanded into developing a major new area of the garden. 

I'm no artist, but this sketched plan opens a whole new can of worms

So here are some of the crops which will be in this area:

Fruit and nut trees already present - apples, pears, plum, almond, hazels, sweet chestnut, mulberry, fig. Also small-leaved limes which can be used for fresh leaves and tilia tea.

Soft fruits already present - gooseberries, red, white and blackcurrants, Japanese wineberries, loganberries, blackberry, raspberries, strawberries, chokeberry, Japanese quince. There's also a huge mahonia plant and an area of buddleia and flowering currants.

Other crops already present - rhubarb, asparagus sorrel, horseradish. There's also the elephant grass I planted last year for biomass which has developed strong rhizomes.

Up till now these have been grown in quite separate areas, but a redesign of where pathways go should help link it all together. I plan to introduce more layers to include climbing plants, herbaceous perennials and perennial tubers.

I'll be adding in some herbs too, such as rosemary, oregano and creeping thyme. Comfrey too.

So here's a list of the new and wonderful additions which will pretty much turn the area into a fully blown forest garden.

Good King Henry - Also known as Lincolnshire Spinach. I am currently trying to germinate the seeds.

Caucasian Spinach - Hablitzia tamnoides - If I can get this growing, it should be a vigorous climber whose leaves can be used as a spinach substitute. If this works I won't need to bother trying to grow annual spinach each year, which always bolts ridiculously quickly.

Oca - Tiny little tubers. I've not tasted them before and at almost a pound a tuber I'll eat some of the produce and sell some for growing. Some of the tubers I received were frost damaged (should be safe outside if well mulched) but I have enough left. They are currently sitting in dry compost in a tub in a wardrobe in the garage. They are actually a type of oxalis and will provide a very attractive summer ground cover.

Yacon - I tried this once before but lost it over winter. However, the taste was great and the harvest huge. If I had saved the growing points properly in a frost free place I could have multiplied it a hundred times. I've started this off in pots in a warm room and they have all thrown up fresh green foliage. They will need potting on before they go outside later in the year.

Mashua - A perennial nasturtium whose tuberous roots apparently taste radishy. I'll probably just use this as a decorative climber to come back year after year.

Chufa (Tiger Nuts) - Actually the bulbs of a grass. These are harvested and dried for eating or replanting. I've tried a couple of the dried 'nuts' and love them. They are sweet and nutty, turning coconutty.

Day Lilies - Edible flowers and young shoots. They'll probably be a very occasional harvest, but will add splashes of colour in the understorey of the forest garden.

Perennial Kale - Taunton Dean Kale, Daubenton's Kale and Portuguese Walking Stick Kale. One survived from last year but the ducks or turkeys have demolished a couple of others, which is an expensive lesson for me to provide some overwinter protection. I'll make cages out of willow. I have ordered a couple of replacement cuttings of Daubentons which will hopefully root successfully. The walking stick kale will be raised from seed which came all the way from The Azores. In our cooler climes they shouldn't set seed so easily so will stay perennial.

Wild Garlic - I've purchased seeds. If they germinate, these will be going under trees as lush ground cover.

Wild Strawberry - the seeds have just gone in the freezer to simulate a winter. if successful, these will be used for ground cover to provide tiny jewels of flavour explosion!

Skirret - A very old-fashioned crop. A bit fiddly to grow and harvest but it will be interesting to try.

Babington Leeks - I purchased six tiny bulblets last year and five have come back over winter. These have gone into the new perennial area and should grow much more substantially this year. They start growing midwinter and will have died back down by June, thus offering a leek flavour at a completely different time of year to traditional leeks.

Bamboo - I discovered a couple of lost bamboos at the back of my herb patch. They've been there since we moved in and have just started to thrive. I have taken cuttings from a golden bamboo which grows really tall. This was something I found on YouTube but I had no hope of the woody stem sections throwing out new growth. But lo and behold one of them has. The other bamboo is much thinner but considerably denser. It has gradually expanded into a large clump hidden by a large bay tree. So I have been dividing it, not an easy task. 
I will harvest the bamboos for sticks and canes and might give the fresh shoots a try too. But really I am growing them mostly for their statuesque appearance and for the rustling of their leaves and stems in a breeze.

Siberian Pea Tree - I've just sown seeds so this is a long-term project. Siberian Pea Tree is a nitrogen fixer and will be an important addition to the forest garden.

Sorrel - non-flowering. I already have a large patch of sorrel, but it is quick to go to seed every year and looks messy. So I have purchased a non-flowering form which should give fresh leaves over a much longer period. If it grows well I'll propagate it and dig out the old stock.

A sorrel root division and perennial kale cuttings

Mushrooms - I cant wait to get going on these. I'm planning on growing shiitake, oyster mushrooms and winecaps. An exciting new venture and just perfect for the forest garden.

I am also trying some more exotic perennials which will get their own area in the polytunnel. I'll still have to lift and store every winter probably. So I am trying ginger, galangal, eddoe, apios (groundnut) and Madeira vine. 

The delight of perennial plants is that, once they've got a hold, they can easily be multiplied (sometimes too easily!)

Next week: Pruning the orchard fruits

2021 Week 2 - Bubbles, glitching, edible perennials, shallots and pilates.

Lockdown
Surely no-one can write a blog at the moment without mentioning lockdown. 

Covid-19 has become scary again. If I could I would be happy staying here on the smallholding sheltered from the rest of the world. But schools remain open. We have over a quarter of our pupils coming in daily along with the added complication of teaching the rest on Zoom and furnishing them with enough learning activities to keep busy and engaged.

To reduce the number of 'bubbles' within the school, we now have the school split into two halves. Teachers are physically in school every other week, teaching from home on alternate weeks.

If I hear the words "Mr Pegden, it's glitching" one more time...

The zoom classroom.
There's a problem on the board for you to solve!

 

We've had a couple of foggy days this week

A bit of sun, a bit of snow, a bit of fog, a lot of rain
And no English conversation can proceed without being preceded by the weather. The week started wet and the water still takes an eternity to drain away so we have puddles the size of small lakes. We are still in the middle of winter though, so temperatures haven't strayed too far from zero. At least the ground is not so slippery when it's frozen solid, but by midday it has usually thawed. This is the time of day when I can work most comfortably outside though I have now adapted to the cold and don't really feel it as long as I wear a few layers.

The dyke is full again and the puddles are back.
The hardy Shetland sheep don't really mind.

My Edible Perennial Patch
The big project in the veg patch at the moment is an edible perennial garden. The postie has been bringing me strange tubers and new seed varieties and I have been moving some of the existing perennials around. Now is a good time to move or divide them while they are dormant.

Many of the tubers I have received, such as chufa, apios, oca and Madeiran vine, need to be stored awhile before they go in the ground. Others, such as yacon, eddoe and galangal have been potted up and I am hoping they will begin to shoot so they can get a headstart for the year. I'll write more about these unusual food plants as the year progresses.

The perennial patch is starting to take shape. I have a basic plan so that it can incorporate the asparagus plants already there (I spent three days hands and knees weeding these to restore the bed to vitality) as well as sorrel and horseradish. An existing greengauge tree and  cider apple tree are at the centre of the design. The aim is to create a small forest garden. 
We shifted a rhubarb to the base of the greengauge, where I also intend to cultivate mushrooms later in the season. We dug up and moved quite a few of the elephant grasses too, filling gaps and creating a tall, swishy backdrop for the garden - the savanna bordering the forest! Dividing a bamboo was a trickier job than I had anticipated. There were several attempts by the bamboo to poke out my eyes!

Chinese artichoke
about to be transplanted

I also dug up my existing bed of Chinese artichokes which were sited where my greenhouse is going to go (I have put off constructing this for longer than I care to remember). They had been long forgotten and invaded by couch grass and willowherb, but the tubers persisted. I selected out the strongest tubers and replanted them in the gaps where the asparagus has failed.

The perennial patch will become a regular feature of this blog as it develops throughout the year.

Early seed sowing
The annual cycle of seed sowing has started too. Just a few crops for now and mostly those which will end up in the polytunnel. Mangetout and coriander are the first. But patience is required as there is no point starting seeds too early in the year. They will struggle without sufficient heat and light and will be held back waiting for correct conditions outside.

Seed sowing has begun!

As usual I am super organised and have now received all my seeds for the year. Many people don't even think about this until early Spring, but they may well be disappointed for a second year in succession. One of the good effects of lockdown is a renewed interest in growing your own which has resulted in some seed companies having to stop orders or limit quantities. Of course, staff sickness and fewer staff due to space is affecting the suppliers too. So if you're still with me and planning on doing some growing this year, best get onto those seed purchases without further delay.

Shallots
The shallots have been planted out this week too. I save the bulbs from year to year but I am never quite sure when to set them out in the soil. I think any time between January and March is fine. Some were beginning to rot though as I failed to give them enough air flow in storage, so it seemed a good time to sort through them. On average each bulb should split into between four and nine shallots. That's not a bad return. I know that with garlic a period of cold is supposed to help make sure they divide and don't just grow into one big bulb, so I wonder if the same might be true of shallots.

Pilates - an unexpected New Year Resolution
Finally it's back to school again. We still have a dance teacher come in for the children who are attending school - we also zoom the lesson into homes for others to join in. This week part of the routine was pilates. I had always dismissed this without knowing anything about it. But as I watched I was struck by the elements of yoga and some similarities with tai chi. I have been vaguely considering both of these as a bit of gentle lockdown exercise and mindfulness.
As I have gotten older, despite leading quite an active lifestyle, my body has started to seize up. I am about as flexible as a gnarled, stubborn old oak tree! I have been having back problems too. I have found myself having to limit what I do to accommodate the preservation of my body. My mind finds it frustrating.
But as I watched the pilates I began to notice how it focused on strength through the core of the body. I used to have very strong stomach and back muscles until some major internal replumbing when I was forty. Even watching from the sidelines I could see how pilates might just be the form of exercise I needed.Then along came an exercise which was exactly the same as one the hospital physio had given me to do.  When I got home I looked up pilates on Youtube and was in for more surprises. The second clip I watched was a perfect match for the first set of physio exercises I had been given for my back troubles. The physios had just nabbed everything from Youtube pilates!!!

So there is my new year resolution. Sue is keen to join in too so that will make it all the more enjoyable.

Anyway, I can't put off feeding the chickens any longer. We've had a little snow overnight followed by rain so the ground will be treacherous outside.

Next week I'll show you my latest seed storage solution. We'll be sowing spinach, lettuce, onion and aubergine too. And hopefully my kaffir lime seeds will have germinated.