Swallows and Lambathons

The first swallow soaks up the early morning sun

There is excited chattering above the smallholding once more.

Yay! The swallows have returned. And with temperatures already having reached 24C there should be plenty of insects for them.
That was Sue's wake up surprise for me on Wednesday.

Thursday's surprise was that we have our fourth lamb, an adorable all black single ewe. She was the offspring of badger-face number 00009. This ewe always drops her sprogs without warning.



So the lambathon bit of the blog title is a bit (well a lot) misleading. We have had four lambs - oh, did I forget to tell you about the twins born two days previously to Number 0001.

All are doing well. All were born with no problems for mums or babies. There are three girls and one boy which is a very good ratio. They were all born within our Easter holidays, as planned.


And that's about it.

Oh. They are adorable as ever!

Chips with Everything ... and Mulch Mulch More

The turkey survived and recovered. I have blocked the offending gap between door and fence panel so she can no longer poke her head through and get stuck.

Before I continue on the main subject, here's a parasol mushroom I happened across today. Incredibly by late afternoon it was withered up and gone.

And here's a lovely picture of Gerry with his head in some catnip.

The new chipper / shredder has proved so popular that I have hardly seen Sue. She has slowly chewed her way through piles of thorny hedge trimmings, prickly roses, willow cuttings... In fact if you stay in one place too long you are likely to be picked up and thrown down the chute!

We have plenty of use for the chippings.

Firstly there is the comfrey patch. Last year's duck destruction meant that for once the comfrey was outcompeted by the grass. It is just poking back through again so a thick layer of mulch chippings will redress the balance.

It won't be long before the comfrey comes through and shades out the grass.

The chippings will give it a helping hand though.

The perennial beds suffer from grass incursion too, so a good few wheelbarrowfuls have gone into there.

And finally I laid fabric protection down for the new willow holt but I used cheap stuff, mainly because I don't like the plastic membrane which leaves long threads of unbreakable plastic in the environment. However the new stuff is thin and the grass has already started poking through. It does half the job, but is really designed to take a mulch - which is exactly what most of it now has. A mixture of grass clippings - a most convenient way of disposing of these right at source - and wood chip has been deployed to make sure the willow cuttings get a good start in life.

In fact mulching is the name of the game this year. But it is important to carefully select what you use to cover the ground and smother the weeds.
For the blackcurrant bushes, it was the bedding from the goose stables since they require a heavy injection of nitrogen.

Blackberries appreciating a heavy feed

The chicken escape committee

have decided that the paths should be mulched

as well as the raspberry beds.

It's easier just to go along with them.

For the raspberries it is grass clippings. Again it is a handy place to empty the mower. The mulch smothers the weeds, especially the invading grass and rots down to feed the soil. It saves hours of weeding in between raspberry canes.

The last two mulches I mentioned, straw and grass clippings, are also ideal for slugs. If I used them on my vegetable patch there would be no vegetables left, even with the help of the duck squad. But soft fruits seem largely unaffected by slugs and the ducks will keep the numbers sufficiently down so this wont become a hotbed of terrorist slugs making nightly incursions into the neighbouring vegetables.

For the vegetables I am mulching instead with compost. The weed-smothering action should again save hours of hands and knees weeding while at the same time the worms, newly encouraged by my no-dig regime, incorporate this black gold into the soil. The mulch will conserve moisture too and feed the plants.

The only problem is producing sufficient quantities of compost to cover all the beds. so I make sure that every single compostable piece of waste makes it onto the heaps. More than that though, I am growing short rotation willow to chip and bulk up the compost heaps. The sheep appreciate stripping the leaves and bark first and the extra supplement they get from this is worth losing a little compost material.
I also have, at great expense, a hundred rhizomes of elephant grass arriving soon. This is a non-invasive variety which is grown commercially to feed biomass energy systems. But I will be using the biomass to bulk up the compost.

If all goes well, we will have mountains of compost. My only worry is that we have too much carbon content and not enough nitrogen content for the compost to rot down sufficiently quickly, but hopefully the weekly addition of old chicken bedding will solve that one.

Smallholding - because it's worth it

Today was everything that smallholding should be.
It started with Sue letting the poultry out and doing the morning feed while I finished off some rather rustic protection for my broad bean bed. I wanted to finish this before the escape committee got into the veg beds and scratched up all the Poached Egg seedlings I planted last night to look after the broad beans.

We started early, for the plasterers were due to arrive at 8.30am. We need some remedial work doing in two downstairs rooms, so we shall be spending the next few days in improvised living quarters squeezed between all the furniture which now fills one end of the kitchen and the conservatory (aka the potting shed).

The dogs are quite happy with the new living arrangements

We have been trying to arrange to have this work done for well over a year and have come to the conclusion that plasterers easily beat estate agents. lawyers and even politicians in the charlatan stakes! Not the one we are using I hasten to add. So it will be a great relief to finally get this work done.

Once it is all finished we will be repainting and turning one of the rooms from a bedroom into a communal room for our next exciting plan, hosting volunteers on the smallholding.

We have our first volunteer coming to stay at the end of this month and it now all seems very real.

With the plasterers set to their work, it was back into the garden where I was preparing the bed for some pea seedlings  to grow. Meanwhile Sue was busy with the new chipper shredder which I finally got round to using at the back end of last week (I am scared of power machinery and it often sits quite a while before I pluck up the courage to use it).

Sue was so enthusiastic about this new machine that she totally didn't notice the arrival of our next guests.

And so to our second appointment of the day with the caravan man. We bought a caravan off Facebook a while back in preparation for this venture to give the volunteers a space of their own but had not really worked out all the practicalities of actually using the caravan. But it was all good news. Solar energy won't be a problem, we can use a big gas bottle to power most of the appliances and the caravan man was quite impressed with the caravan.
Not only this, but he is going to look out for a second caravan for us. We don't do things by halves.

It wasn't yet midday but the weather somewhat reflected our day so far - a very foggy start had turned into a gloriously sunny day. All five bee hives came out to make the most of it too.

Sue and I busied ourselves on the smallholding until Sue decided to go into town to stock up for visitors coming later in the week. That plus the fact that the plasterers were getting through quite a lot of coffees and we needed more milk! (We don't yet have a cow)

But Sue's shopping trip was cut short.

I picked some old cabbages and took them down to the ram paddock - the six boys are being very laddish at the moment, full of the joys of spring. They spend most of their time chasing and leaping and butting.


But it was the ewes which caught my attention. One was lying by the hay feeder looking decidedly close to labour, but then I looked at the other of the fat girls to see her water bag hanging out the back. Lambing was upon us!
I don't want to boast, but this was perfect planning. We try to introduce the ram so that lambing happens during our Easter holiday and this was just about perfect timing.

I called Sue to come back in case assistance was required, but ten minutes later I was WhatsApping her a photo of the newborn lamb.
I would have put my life's savings on this ewe having twins but I was wrong. Instead it was one very sturdy ewe lamb.

All the other sheep came over to introduce themselves, but it was the other heavily laden ewe's behaviour which was interesting. She licked the lamb just as if she were its mother and spent the next couple of hours trying to adopt it. Fortunately the lamb, although occasionally confused, bonded with the right mum and was doing all the right things to get its first feed.

For now we have brought mum and lamb and heavily pregnant aunty up to the stable. There was a chilly north-easterly blowing this afternoon and it is easier for us to keep an eye on things if the sheep are inside. I'm sure they would rather be outside though.

So that was pretty much the day done. Just about the perfect smallholding day.

But it's never that straightforward. A strange noise mid afternoon turned out to be one of the turkeys with its head stuck in the gap between the gate and the heras fencing panel. This has never happened before and fortunately the girl managed to free herself when I approached. But half an hour later I heard the same noise with the same result. This time the stupid turkey appeared to injure its neck in its efforts to free itself.
It is now looking pretty sorry for itself. Whether it survives the night or not I wouldn't like to bet.

And there you have it. The many highs (and occasional lows) of smallholding.
I'm sure that with more lambing there will be plenty more ups and downs in the next couple of weeks.

No dig gets off the ground

The Easter holiday comes as an annual life saver for me. It is a chance to catch up with everything (including writing my blog!!!).

For once I am actually pretty well on top of everything at the moment. There is a steady flow of seed propagation from the conservatory to the polytunnel. The basic rule is that once the conservatory is full, whichever tray of seeds is most advanced goes out into the polytunnel.

From there, hardier seedlings go into the coldframe before being planted out.

The no dig beds are taking shape - it really is bringing an exciting freshness to my growing. Already I have broad beans, onions, shallots, garlic and parsnips in the ground, as well as half of my potatoes. 

I am trying quite a few new crops this year, at the forefront of which are Spinach Rubino and Bull's Blood Beetroot, whose seedings are already in the gorund under fleece alongside mixed lettuces. With regular picking these should provide a steady flow of mixed salad leaves well into the summer months.

One major problem with no dig is that nobody sent the memo to the chicken escape committee. Cocky and the two Cream Legbar girls jump the fence every morning and spend the day looking for freshly laid compost mulch to shift. Even better if this involves dislodging a few onion sets or freshly planted seedlings.

A few rustic sticks and some old scaffold netting protect the young broad bean plants

This has necessitated a little more crop protection than usual. I'm sure after I've chased them off a few more times and lobbed a few more clods of soil in their general direction that they will give up with their vandalising behaviour and find somewhere else to hang out.

The new ducks on the other hand are much more considerate, spending most of the day hoovering for slugs. They even stick mostly to the paths.

Parsnips - the low down

Parsnip basics

• The seeds are like miniature paper plates, so don't sow on a windy day!
• There are many varieties. They all taste like, well, parsnips! I go for Tender 'n' True. It's cheap, no frills and does the job. I've tried other varieties and found no real improvement.
• The seeds are slow to germinate, so make sure the ground stays well-weeded or you'll lose the parsnip seedlings when they finally emerge.
• The seeds only stay viable for a year. Any longer and you'll have a high failure rate.
• You can sow parsnips much earlier than most other seeds, but there's not much point bolting the gun too early. You won't be needing a harvest until after next year's frosts anyway. No seed enjoys trying to germinate in cold, wet soil. 

• When you've done all that, don't forget to thin out your seedlings. I completely neglected my parsnips last year and as a consequence I now have lots of very puny parsnips. Schoolboy error!
• Parsnips are at their sweetest after the first frosts.
• Parsnips will stand in the ground all winter. No need to lift and store, though you may struggle to get them out if the ground is frozen.
• Parsnips have very few enemies, but they can attract carrot fly. However the damage is never anywhere near as severe as can happen in carrots.

• Leave some parsnips unharvested and they will grow into majestic plants next year.
• When they flower in their second year they are an invaluable attraction to hoverflies, which are excellent predators for all sorts of bugs which you don't want in your veg garden. In my trail last year, my collected seed fared much, much better than two year old bought seed.
• You can collect the seeds from these plants and use them next year. This way you never need to buy parsnip seed again.

What it looks like on the ground
Yesterday I harvested some of my puny parsnips. I will leave some unharvested to grow and flower this year.

The sign says Parsnips, the plants say garlic.

But there will be parsnips... eventually.

And today I sowed this year's seed. It is going between rows of garlic which as you can see has already grown well after I planted the cloves back in January. I find these two plants to make very good companions, and the garlic will be out of the ground and harvested before the parsnip plants grow big.

Another lesson I learned today - don't store your collected seed up on top of a bookcase with no lid on - mice will find it. Luckily my parsnip seeds were lidded, but I can't say the same for the fennel or coriander, which have been greedily devoured, just husks and mouse poo left as evidence!