Polyculture, the way forward?

There follows an in-depth philosophical overview of the nature of vegetable gardening. There is a lot of detail about the principles I follow. It undoubtedly poses more questions than it gives answers. For this I apologise, but I am feeling a bit confused when it comes to how to manage my vegetable plot. It is time for a re-evaluation. Not that anything is going dreadfully wrong.

Every time I visit the Green Backyard in Peterborough I come away inspired. When we were last there making our rocket stoves, I looked around the vegetable garden and it looked nothing like mine. Notwithstanding the amazing sculptures and willow weaving which emerge every time you turn a corner, the vegetables themselves looked different. There is clearly a plan of sorts in effect, but it looks all cottage gardeny. Love-in-a-mist and salsify dot themselves around, along with marigolds, nasturtium, rosemary, sage, poppies. Every space has been filled, but just as often it would seem accidentally.









This is close to the image I had in my head of what I wanted my veg plot to look like, but I've strayed a long way from it, lured by neat lines and rotavated empty spaces. One bed in particular caught my eye. For just a few months ago it was a strawberry bed, before we did this to it!

Digging out the clay for the cob oven

But now it has been backfilled and planted up with black kale, peas, chives, courgettes, French beans, lettuces, potatoes. The plants still had plenty of room to grow into and nothing had yet self-seeded into the bed, so this was just about the only bed with visible bare earth.
But hang on a minute! What's happened to the rotation? I see plants from all different groups in the same bed.

Rotation is the keystone of organic gardening. The basic theory is that similar plants take similar nutrients from the ground, while others actually enrich the soil. So if you rotate your crops then you can control the soil to the benefit of each plant group and the soil will not become depleted. You top up the goodness with plenty of compost and manure before the spuds and the brassicas (green, cabbagey things) go in. The root crops go into soil which is not too heavy in nutrients, as they don't need them. The beans go in before the brassicas, as they fix nitrogen in the soil.
That's the theory.
A further benefit is that pests and diseases don't get time to establish in the soil, as each year they find a different type of crop in their patch. This is especially important when it comes to the brassicas.




With a bit of planning, this system is nice and straightforward. Crops go in, crops come out. And every year you dig and rotavate the whole lot, add your organic nutrients and let the chickens in to clear the ground of creepy crawlies and to further enrich the soil. Almost as simple as it sounds.

As well as rotation, there are other gardening principles which I have tried to embrace, most notably companion planting. Some plants prefer the company of others, but most importantly, some plants deter and confuse pests. Herbs are good at this, as are marigolds (calendula and tagetes) and nasturtiums.

A lone tagetes tries to protect the surrounding turnps

There are other principles which I don't follow, such as no-dig gardening. In this version, you don't dig! Sounds ideal! Instead you just keep adding oodles of compost to the surface, so never treading the soil down and never bringing all the weed seeds to the surface, which can be a big problem when you have just rotavated the ground in spring.
I can understand this, but think it works best on a very small scale garden with maybe just a few small beds. Even then, I don't actually think many gardens would have the capacity to produce enough compost to sustain this system. I suspect you either need enough land to bring in compost materials from elsewhere or, in urban gardens, people end up spending a small fortune on bags of compost, which somehow feels wrong to me.

Anyway, as much as I can I avoid treading on the soil - hence a system of small beds so that much can be reached from the grass paths. But gradually I have joined the beds, as the effort of mowing and edging the intricate system of paths became unmanageable and there is no way I can afford or desire to turn all my paths over to bought in aggregates. I must admit though that the volume of weed seeds dragged to the surface by the spring rotavation is a problem and they often overwhelm the emerging crops as they race ahead of them. There's only so close to your crops that a hoe can go and only a certain amount of hand weeding that my back can take.
In general, if the soil is dry, I hoe. If it is wet, I pull.

So, that's the theory over and done with.
Now for the practical. And I'm afraid it begins with a list of problems I have encountered, which have led me to slowly move towards bigger beds with neat lines of crops with bare soil between. It's all very ordered and, if you leave enough space between rows, you can get down them with a small rotavator which makes the large scale part of weeding a doddle.


I originally started out trying to combine gardening by rotation with companion planting, but found that it was tricky to hoe between the rows, or to get the companion plants to mature in time to do their job. If I planted marigolds in with my potatoes, they got between the rows and stopped me cultivating by any other method than by hand, which is just not practical on a large scale. Worse than that, maybe they kept certain pests and diseases at bay, but they stopped the airflow between plants which is so important in the battle to stave off blight, a pestilent fungal disease which carries a much greater threat than all other diseases and pests put together. One further problem, the calendulas needed to get going early so that they were healthy plants bursting with flowers in time to have a positive impact on the spuds. But the easiest way to get the spuds in the ground is just to rotavate or dig the whole patch in preparation for the seed potatoes going in. You just can't be working around small emerging marigold plants.



The potato patch. Pretty much bare earth for up to 9 months of the year

Another good idea for growing potatoes is to grow a couple of horseradish plants in with them. Just a couple will do. I tried this, taking cuttings from my horseradish patch, but they only really got going in their second year, when the spuds had moved on! I decided to leave them in the ground so they would be there next time the spuds came round, in a couple more years. But most of them got rotavated in the winter, as they had retreated below ground. Even if I had marked their location rotavating around them would have been a pain. And besides, I would need to plant one in every bed, as eventually every bed would be host to potatoes.

So I have decided to abandon companion planting in the potato patch. It looked prettier and felt right, but it was just not practical. Shame.

Calendula marigolds are excellent companions for most plants

I tried growing carrots mixed in with annual flowers too. These are supposed to confuse the carrot root fly and I figured it would look very attractive, a wild flower patch which also yields carrots. Trouble was, the flowers outgrew the carrots, which are slow to get going, then crowded them out. Besides, I ended up being more confused than the flies when I couldn't find the carrots in amongst the mass. At the end of the year, when the flowers had died down, I found carrots in the ground when I was rotavating. Most of them got shredded as the tops had died down and I couldn't find them before the blades of the rotavator. I could have followed the original lines, but the crop was too scant to do this as the young carrots had been overwhelmed. To make matters even worse, they were riddled with carrot fly!
I tried some more practical companion planting, growing my rows of carrots between rows of onions and garlic. This had more effect keeping the carrotfly away, but I have still found it easier to grow my onions separately, in their own bed each year. I just rotavate their patch to a fine tilth, plant the sets, keep it all well weeded and, come late summer, pull them all out again leaving a nice neat patch of bare earth ready to be worked in the autumn and left bare in the winter, for the chickens to pick over. Last year I decided to let self-seeded nasturtiums grow in amongst the onions. They grew too well! The onions got lost underneath and many of them ended up rotting off. Lesson learned. So now the onions grow on their own and the carrots grow in neat lines behind the protection of netting. Besides, the onions and garlic need fertile soil and the carrots don't, so growing them together does not really work in that sense. Except that I am now reading that it is not fertile soil that makes carrots fork after all. It is hard and stony ground, which mine is not. I must say, it is very rare that a carrot forks on me. A lot of the parsnips did last year, but I think that was because I didn't prepare the soil deeply enough. Mind you, I read so much contradictory advice that I never really know what to believe. So many of the old gardeners' ways are now superseded by modern methods, but I'm really quite confused over how much of that old wisdom was just wrong advice handed down from generation to generation and how much was the incredibly valuable benefit of experience. I'd like to think the latter, but then you look at the over reliance on nasty chemicals which I guess comes from the post war years and you begin to wonder.
I have read too, that the best way to maximise the nitrogen collected by bean plants is actually to uproot them and put the whole lot on the compost bin, in which case you can then eventually return the nitrogen to whichever part of the plot you wish. So bang goes the idea of leaving those nodules in the ground to give nitrogen to the brassicas which follow the beans.
It's fair to say I am feeling more than a little confused. I think I have read too much!

Companion plants get in the way... Brassicas don't need to follow beans... Carrots don't split in fertile soil...Small beds are unmanageable on a large scale...Are all my principles going down the swanny????

On the other hand, I am getting good potato harvests. For the first time this year I am getting success with my carrots. I am (almost) on top of the weeds thanks to straightforward rows and an annual winter clearance of the soil.

Yet something feels wrong. Much as the OCD part of me likes the neat rows and clean ground between them, the creative, nostalgic part of me yearns for that cottage gardeny look and the radical side of me wants desperately to believe that there is merit in companion planting and working with nature rather than constantly fighting to stave it off.

Feverfew growing up against the polytunnel

On the one hand, I don't want the soil so full that there is no ventilation. Also I don't want to be weeding by hand all the time. But on the other, it feels as if the soil is bare for half it's life and that having nothing between neat lines of crops is just allowing the soil to dry out and become sterile.

The vision I had when I was planning everything was one of vegetables accompanied by herbs, fruit bushes and perennial flowers, as well as self-seeding colonisers such as California poppy, nasturtium, love-in-a-mist, angelica. And I wanted comfrey and horseradish and lovage dotted around. I wanted to let plants go to seed and surprise me the next year.

But as soon as you put a rosemary bush, a redcurrant, some horseradish root and some flowering bulbs into a veg bed, it becomes impossible to rotavate it. And with that it becomes impossible to maintain a well-ordered rotation.
I've never managed to be organised enough to grow green manures properly, but this year I am planning to. Imagine trying to dig or rotavate these back into the soil whilst trying to avoid various plants dotted around the bed. Impossible.

So where is this blog post going? Is it here just to confuse, to pose questions and highlight obstacles?
Don't worry. There is an answer coming up, of sorts.

I came upon a system which sort of gets the best of both worlds. I would continue with the rotation and rotavation. But the new, bigger beds and efficient rows of crops have meant that I can spare some beds for other purposes.I toyed with the idea of leaving some fallow, onto which all my compost would go throughout the year. This is a component of no dig gardening and I may incorporate this to some extent in the future.  But instead I decided to allow myself the luxury of having whole beds bursting with colourful flower mixes scattered around the veg plot. One in each quarter of the rotation.

Last year's bee mix which I have
allowed to come back naturally

This would allow me to have neat, ordered rows of vegetables but the appearance of the whole would be much more aesthetically pleasing and more wildlife friendly too, especially for pollinators.
It worked quite well last year, but I still have large amounts of bare soil. By the time the early potato beds are being cleared, the bean beds are only just getting going.
There was none of this bare earth at the Green Backyard. As the potatoes were coming out, the beans (or something else) would grow into the vacant space. And what about those mixed crops? Surely not the product of complete gardening ignorance?

So I asked. And in the reply I heard words like "polyculture" and "successional growth".
I got home and started looking these up and, to be quite honest, I found very little information on them. Polyculture seems to be an area of permaculture, which I have never really got into. It seems to me to work best in warmer climes.
Anyway, I eventually found titbits of information. The principle is that you try not to grow any plant next to another one of itself. That way there is no obvious target for pests, which are confused by the array of colours and shapes. It is also more difficult for diseases and fungal threats to jump from plant to plant. That all makes sense, but what happens to your rotation, that integral principle of organic gardening? And how do you stop the weeds taking over? And how do you protect your peas and brassicas if they're dotted all over the place?

brassica bed - the whole rotation system seems
perfectly designed for growing brassicas

I understand all about working with nature, but I have come to realise that the ideal is not always practical. I actually don't really want to find caterpillars in my caulis or slugs in my lettuce. Nor though, quite definitely, do I want my food or garden polluted with nasty chemicals. I suspect that when it comes to it, even with my current system, I am actually working with nature a lot more than most gardeners.

I eventually got hold of a book with a couple of pages devoted to polyculture.The answer to my question on rotation was simpler than I thought possible. It basically said that, if you dot plants fairly randomly (even if there is a planting pattern in each bed), you are unlikely to end up growing the same type of crop in the same place year after year. Simple! Okay, you may (will) get some crops going into the same ground, but it will not be on a large or long enough scale to create any significant problems. You are far more likely to attract pests and diseases by growing monoculture clumps. If you're still really hung up by wanting a strict rotation in place, you could always go to the effort of planning the whole plot out square foot by square foot. Depends how much spare time you have on those long winter nights, I guess.
I think, though, that I am more attracted to the former. That way, plants can be allowed to self seed randomly too. If there are too many, they can always be taken out, or moved to where you want them.

Polyculture also has a unique approach to controlling weeds. Firstly, it's basically a minimal digging system, which means that your perennials and self-seeded waifs and strays can escape the ravages of the rotavator. Instead, you scatter the ground with salad seeds (lettuces, radishes, mustard) mixed in with some seeds of plants which take longer to mature. You then cover it with a layer of compost. The idea is that the salad plants mature quickly and fill the ground. As you pick them, other crops mature to fill their space. Successional growing. (Not quite the same as successional planting, which is where you sow a crop every couple of weeks so they don't all mature at eh same time).
Now, I am not quite so convinced by this. Firstly, I would have enough lettuces, leaves and radishes to feed a small army. Secondly, even if I didn't turn the soil, my fenland soil is so fertile that I really don't think I could hold the weeds at bay. In a small vegetable plot, I could hand weed, but on a larger scale this would not be practical.

Anyway, apart from that, I really like the idea of polyculture. It is sort of what I was aiming for in the first place, except that it introduces the idea of mixing the crops.
So I have decided to experiment with one bed, where all my spare seedlings have gone. I have even scattered some salad seeds in a small area.
My suspicion is that I will end up with a mix of growing methods. Each quarter of the veg plot, which is arranged like a wheel, will still have sections devoted to roots, spuds, brassicas or beans 'n' peas. I will keep the beds devoted to flower mixes. They can stay there from year to year. But I will introduce a few polyculture beds too.
Hopefully the systems won't clash. That way I can continue to experiment and the best system will, eventually, make itself apparent.

Herby Crackers

Fresh turnips and beetroot from the polytunnel
and a selection of herbs plucked from the herb patch

Sunday was Veg Group day.
On the menu was a propagation masterclass by Steve, including the dark art of grafting, as well as a barbecue lunch. Top of the crops this month was strawberries. The sun hadn't shone enough yet on my own strawberry patch to rustle up something strawberryish to take along, so instead I concentrated on the discussion topic for the gathering which was herbs.
I started the veg group at the same time as the blokes baking group, under the general umbrella of the Fenland Smallholders Club. Over a year later and both groups are still going strong, which pleases me. The idea of the veg group is that we gather once a month at someone's place and discuss growing. We usually end up going off topic and discussing all sorts of other things, but one aspect which I am keen we hold on to is how we use our food once we've grown it. We all bring something along for the table and I encourage people to incorporate the Top of the Crops.
But with no strawberries, I was damned if I was going to go out and buy some, especially knowing that within a couple of weeks we will be facing a glut of the things. Not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the pavlova which somebody brought along.
But I opted to go down the herb route. I knew that somebody would bring along a herb bread. The cheesy herby scones that I made for the last blokes baking would work, but for some reason I got into my head the idea of making herb biscuits, each with a different sort of herb to try.
I eventually settled on a recipe for herb crackers, which I started making at 8.30pm on Saturday evening. If they didn't turn out well, I would be up late thinking of something else to make!

I adapted the recipe I found quite a lot, so here's what I came up with.

To make 1 small ball of dough, enough for about 20 small crackers:

75g flour
1/4 tsp salt
about 3 teaspoons of your chosen fresh herb, finely chopped

Mix the above ingredients together in a bowl.

Add 1 tbsp. oil and 35 - 40 ml water.
Quickly mix up with a wooden spoon until it forms a ball of dough. Knead very briefly to bring it into a ball, adding more flour or water as necessary to make it the right consistency for rolling.

4 different versions ready to be rolled and cooked

Roll the dough as thinly as you can on a sheet of silicone or parchment. Dip a knife into flour and score the dough to make individual crackers. You can go right through to the silicone.
Finally prick each cracker several times with a fork to stop them puffing up. Sprinkle with coarse salt if you wish. This gives the crackers a pretzelly taste, but the salt does mask the herby taste a little.


Rolled and scored, ready for the oven.

Place the silicone / parchment onto a baking try and bake at 180C (fan oven) or 200C (non fan) for about 15 minutes, until lightly browned.

Et voila!
The end result was so tasty that, by the time it occurred to me to take a photo, there was just this one cracker left!

My favourites were the rosemary crackers, but the others were popular too. This time I made mint, sage, lemon balm, sweet yarrow (English Mace) and oregano.
How much herb you add to your recipe is completely up to you. It's a ridiculously cheap, easy and quick recipe, so feel free to experiment.

Rocket stove

Rocket stove kits

No, I have not entered the world of rocket engineering.
A rocket stove is a small but powerful cooker which runs on small sticks. Astonishingly it can reach white hot temperatures, despite its simplicity. And because it burns so hot it is incredibly efficient, burning everything in the wood which is combustible and leaving very little waste indeed.

The rocket stove was invented back in the 1980s and looks deceptively simple. It's basically an elbow shaped tube, which can be fairly simply knocked up out of tin cans, which sits in a bigger can full of insulation. The ratios though are important. Without boring you with the measurements and engineering theory, the airflow and height of the flue need to be just right to ensure that just enough oxygen is supplied to the fire, not too much and not too little.

The rocket stove has big implications for developing countries. Wood is a precious and declining resource across much of the world, so the more efficiently it can be used the better. Every move towards making wood sustainable is a move in the right direction. Cut the amount of wood needed for fuel, cut the time and energy used in collecting it. The fact that only small sticks are required is a bonus too.
The rocket stove is now used extensively in disaster zones. It is cheap, easy to produce, portable and green. A triumph of alternative technology. The central flue, the most important part, can be cheaply manufactured from ceramic, which is the best material.

So when the chance came up to make our own rocket stove at the Green Backyard in Peterborough, for free, well we jumped at it. I am not pretending that we will replace our gas cooker, electric oven, microwave and kettle all with a rocket stove, but I find the Green Backyard an inspiring place to go and if I could come back with my own rocket stove, all the better!




We arrived to find out that we didn't need to improvise the whole thing out of baked bean tins, which need regularly replacing as they disintegrate under the phenomenal heat produced within. For we were getting specially made stainless steel elbows. Posh ones! - which should hopefully last several years.
Our tutor for the day, Bob, clearly knew more than we needed to know, but he kept himself to giving us a very interesting history of the rocket stove and just enough technical information to be of interest.
I'd never used metal nibblers before, but I want some now. They made short work of cutting holes in the outer can to fit the flue. A few adjustments and we were ready to fill the void with vermiculite. The three bolts coming out of the top are for the pot, kettle or griddle to sit on. They are adjustable but basically need to sit about an inch above the top of the flue.

Anyway, enough of the technicalities.


Renee from the Green Back Yard
chats to 2 of the course participants
as they head home, rocket stoves in hand.

Enough to say that we had a lovely day and came away with not one but two rocket stoves. I feel some outdoor cooking coming along.

Shorn!

Mutton inspects my new haircut

Shetland sheep are supposedly self-shedding. This means that their winter coat drops off leaving them nice and cool for the summer. That's the theory. However, most of our Shetland sheep have shown very little sign of this happening. They have rubbed against whatever they could find to rub against but still most of their long winter coats stay attached - which means that they have been starting to get rather hot. Not only that, but long wool, especially at their back end, can get a bit messy. With more and more warm muggy days on their way, this leads to a severe risk of flystrike - maggots! At best, this makes a sheep very ill. It is often fatal if not caught early.

Rambo and Doc, pre-haircut

One of last year's lambs is sporting its summer coat after virtually all it's fleece came off in my hands in one go. The ewe who had twins has turned into a patchy mess, which can be a problem with self-shedding breeds - this sometimes leads to misinformed calls to the RSPCA from well-meaning members of the public. Finally, Rambo has enjoyed me plucking his wool from his neck - a practice known as rooing. However, most of his wool is just not ready to come off yet.
But the rest were showing very few signs of losing their coats.



Last weekend was the Fenland Smallholders Club sheepy day. We enjoyed a demonstration of shearing, dagging, foot-trimming, injecting (I looked away) and applying flystrike chemicals. There was a great turnout, with many new members which was encouraging.

I felt totally inadequate as the two shearers turned the sheep onto their rumps and the sheep just became totally docile, sitting there as if in a comfy armchair. Whenever I handle the sheep, they have a habit of kicking and squirming, which makes it quite a tiring process for both them and me!

Sue had arranged for the shearers to come over to our smallholding later that same day, so at 7 in the evening I found myself driving the sheep up to the top paddock. Luckily this went smoothly, given that we were being watched by professionals. I was also encouraged by that fact that, in the hands of these experienced sheep handlers, our feisty Shetlands still kicked and struggled. It certainly made me feel better!

Anyway, after about an hour our sheep were sporting new haircuts. They also looked about a third the size.

I was so impressed that I had my roughly biannual shearing myself. So no flies on me!

After

Before

 
 

Tree Sparrows

 

When I was young, tree sparrows were still pretty common. Sadly they have suffered a disastrous decline in numbers and nobody seems to be doing much about it. Birdwatchers knew it years ago. Birds which we'd expect to see on a day out suddenly became missing items on our day lists. Places where they used to be no longer held them. Before we knew it, we needed to visit special sites to see them.
To the list alongside tree sparrow, I can add grey partridge, corn bunting, lesser spotted woodpecker, willow tit. The same happened to red-backed shrike a generation before, but that's gone now.
We all know it's been happening for decades but no-one in power starts talking about it until the decline is steep and no-one starts doing anything about it until long term studies show that it is almost too late.

So it was with some joy that, when we moved onto the farm, we discovered a small population of tree sparrows visiting the feeders during our first winter. That was, however, a very cold winter. We had up to 13 at one point. Over the next year or so, we still saw them, but in smaller numbers. After two years, we no longer saw them regularly. In fact, I only saw them on three occasions in two years, each time on migration and only briefly.

Then, four weeks ago, I was surprised to look out of the window in the morning and find a pair of tree sparrows on the feeders (I presumed it was a pair. Male and female look identical.) Even better, they were still there in the evening, and the next morning, and the next. Not only that, but they definitely seemed to be collecting bits and bobs of straw, grass and feathers. Could it be that they were building a nest somewhere close by?

A few days later and only one bird was visiting the feeders. (Or was it that they were taking turns?) I hoped this meant that the other was on a nest, but I had no way of telling until...

A couple of days ago there were FOUR tree sparrows at the feeders. Yes, mum and dad had brought their babies!

 



And the winner is... cuter than the goslings... cuter than the lambs...

BORIS!!!

Boris is the reason why there was a two week gap in posts to this blog, for he is pretty full-on! He has been in the occasional scrape and still doesn't quite understand the rules, but he is already proving to be a very good companion for me while I am beavering away in the garden, even if he does somewhat slow me down.

He is absolutely adorable and turns the toughest of old blokes into a complete softie. Boris has everything he could want. He is spoiled rotten, but his favourite toy is a black garden pot which is rather too big for him. He is rapidly acquiring a taste for sticks too, so the gale force winds of the last two days have brought a bounty of branches crashing to the ground. Today Boris made a major misjudgement, jumping through his doggy gate while holding a stick which clearly, to the trained eye, did not fit through said gap!

Anyway, the pictures say it all.