Life in the Polytunnel

Some things sit on my to do list until it's too late to do them. This I find is an excellent way of clearing the list!

Cleaning the polytunnel was one such job, but out of the blue last week I summoned up the enthusiasm to undertake the yearly task. Another week and it would be too late as there would be too many plants in there to get to the polythene walls.

The outside is quite easy, though reaching the top is a challenge. The inside is more tricky, particularly the roof as everything drips back down in your face. This is one reason to do this on a cooler day too so the drops are not boiling hot.

I use Citrox on the inside, a natural disinfectant which contains extracts of citrus fruit. It is antibacterial and antifungal.

The difference between cleaned and not cleaned.

The polytunnel is the ideal place to work when it's cold and raining. On the other hand it is not the ideal place to work when it is sunny, temperatures rapidly escalating to 40+ degrees.

It provides a unique climate.

Ideal for a dust bath but 

all poultry are now excluded

The challenges:

No rain, so watering must be done manually. Extreme temperatures, meaning that dehydration can be astonishingly quick in trays of seedlings. Low night temperatures. Limited ventilation.

The advantages:

Protection from winds. Protection from sparrows, pigeons etc. Warm soil. Excellent light levels compared even to a windowsill or conservatory.

The classic use for a polytunnel is to grow what I refer to as Mediterranean crops. Peppers, aubergines, melons and tomatoes do particularly well. In fact for some of these it is the only way to guarantee a ripe crop by the end of the season. These are high value crops which earn their allocated space.

Early mangetout just about to come into flower.

Turnips and early potatoes.

But the space is not required by these crops year round. In early spring there is time to grow some early crops which wouldn't be possible outside for another couple of months. I squeeze in a crop of early potatoes, mangetout, turnips and carrots. All of these are harvested before the Mediterranean crops can go into the ground. Once things heat up the polytunnel becomes too hot for these cool weather crops. This year some of my turnips are already bolting (producing flowers in response to hot conditions, which often makes root crops tough and woody).

Polytunnel Plan, rotation year 6.

This plan is flexible. I don't grow all of these plants every year. 

Another really positive advantage of the polytunnel is as a place for raising seedlings. As I've alluded to seedlings growing in relatively small soil volumes such as seed trays or modules can easily die if the soil dries out. But this challenge is more than outweighed by the warm temperatures and in particular the light levels. I find that all but the most tender of seedlings can cope with dips in night time temperatures. If necessary they get the added protection of a cloche or fleece.

Raising seedlings in the polytunnel.

Some of these are ready to go outside just as soon as we get some rain.

One final use of the polytunnel is to hold young plants overwinter which have been started in the autumn. When light and temperature levels lift in early spring, these plants have a huge head start.

With the polytunnel all cleaned I decided to plant my tomato plants. The literature says to only plant tomatoes in the soil when the first flowers have appeared. I don't really know why you need to wait, so this year I have taken the risk and planted them before that time. Sometimes you just need to get things done when you can.

I grow many varieties of tomato of many shapes, sizes and colours. Last year's experiment of growing them up strings worked well. I actually use baling twine which is never in short supply on a smallholding and has a multitude of uses. I loop one end under the plant plugs and tie the other to the polytunnel frame. The tomatoes are planted quite deeply, up to their first true leaves, as they are capable of putting out extra roots from the buried stem.

I always grow too many from seed, just in case they fail, which they rarely do! And I always struggle not to plant too many. Any spares get given away to encourage others to grow their own food.

I can fit a couple of dozen plants down one side of the tunnel (actually half of one side). This year I have carrots down the other side as they grow brilliantly in the tunnel and are protected from carrot fly. I decided to double the tomato capacity by overplanting these with tomato plants. Hopefully they will grow together on different levels.

An April Swarm

I generally try to keep my blog posts in order, often lagging a few days behind what is happening on the smallholding.
But today's main event warrants jumping the queue.

We had our first bee swarm of the year!

There is an old saying:

A swarm in May is worth a load of hay
A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon
A swarm in July is worth not a fly

It doesn't mention a swarm in April.
I am not definite of the comparative worth of the items in this saying, but the general idea is that the earlier the swarm, the more chance it has of building into a strong colony and producing honey before the autumn. So I guess a swarm in April is a good thing, though it did come from one of the hives which we filled with one of last year's 23 swarms! So maybe some of our bees are a bit 'swarmy'.

I was busy harvesting coppice willows when Sue came running past. "I've found a swarm", she panted as she ran past toward the bee equipment shed.

Fortunately Sue has had me putting new wax in frames the last couple of days. I wasn't quite expecting the brood frames to be put to use quite so quickly. Sue had only been inspecting her bees this morning. Of the two hives which survived the winter in the orchard (out of four, all from last year's collected swarms), both had queen cells at Sue's last inspection and both lacked eggs or brood (larvae) this morning, so something was obviously going on.

The swarm captured and being emptied out in front of the hive

Last year got us into a good routine for catching bee swarms. Sue collected all the parts to assemble a new hive, plus a sturdy box in which to catch the swarm. She bought up a white sheet too.
This would be placed on the ramp up to the hive entrance for the bees to march up.

I grabbed a handful of lemon balm, for its scent acts as a bait and helps persuade the swarm to move into the hive permanently.
I didn't don a bee suit, for swarms are relatively gentle, although being shook off a tree when you are clustered around your queen and then emptied out in a heap in front of a hive are probably not most conducive to keeping calm. But swarming bees have filled up on honey and unlikely to sting.
I remain wary though and retreat if any bees show too much interest.

I love to watch the bees marching up into their new home, but these didn't play ball. 

They thought about it a couple of times, but in the end Sue decided

to go for the more direct method of shaking them into the open hive.

Hopefully they will decide they like it and won't be gone in the morning.

The hives in their orchard setting.

More lockdown pottering

I was out on the bench in the dark again when Arthur decided to jump up on me and cuddle in for warmth. It turns out he is surprisingly good at hearing night-time bird calls and was particularly keen on the moorhen which flew around our heads.

Today's pottering involved erecting supports for the mangetout seedlings which are going outside.  I can only grow peas really early in the season otherwise they get afflicted by pea moth. I grow very early mangetout in the polytunnel but by growing outside too I can extend the season.

There's a conveyor belt going on now. We have just entered April Week 3 on my spreadsheet which means a new group of seeds to sow. With space at a premium, some trays of seedlings need to move to the polytunnel to make way. In turn, there are seedlings in the polytunnel ready to go out into the soil. As usual I've not managed to quite keep up so I need to prepare beds for them to go into.

The polytunnel is open during the day now as the chickens and ducks can't go in and destroy everything. This keeps the heat down a little and makes it easier to work in there in the heat of the day. The fine weather continues. It came with coronavirus and has stayed ever since. To be honest, we could really do with a decent day of rain now.

I thought I'd show you a few details from the garden today, little things I notice as I go round. The first is an amazing fungus which appears somewhere most years. It is metallic silver. I know it as moon fungus, but its real name is False Puffball. It is a slime mould. After a few days the silvery coating disappears to reveal a chocolaty interior of spores.
I couldn't remember why on earth I call it moon fungus so I looked it up. The Spanish for this is caca di luna, or something like that, which means moonsh*t to put it bluntly! It's a much better name.




I am trying to increase the perennial herbs that I grow in the veg plot too. I love this time of year when all the perennial plants erupt from their dormancy with lush fresh growth.
These two are bronze fennel and lemon balm. When they flower they'll be smothered in insects.

And finally we have the bee-fly (not to be confused with Flybe!). These seem to be having a very good year this year. They appear like a bee at first, but they are a dumpier shape and have a super long proboscis sticking out the front for drinking nectar. They actually parasitise proper bees. They lay their eggs in their burrows and the bee-fly larvae feed on the bee larvae.

Talking of bees, I got my first sting of the year today. A couple of honey bees had already collided with me and got stuck in my hair this week, but I waited until they disentangled and flew away. But this one seemed more purposeful. It bumbled around in my hair near the neckline for a while before painfully inserting its sting into my head! It got me good and proper, but fortunately I did not react to this sting. It just hurt for a while.


We have settled into lockdown life now. Today Sue held her first ever online meeting with some of the other headteachers in the area. Obviously computers cannot replace face to face contact, but at the same time utilising the facility when schools reopen would save a lot of travel time , petrol and road congestion. One way I deal with the worry of coronavirus is by looking for the positives which could come out of the other end when  people are forced to rethink things in such a big way.

Final news from the smallholding. The geese have gone into proper broody mode. There are two nests in the stable which we rob every day if we can get to them. But often both are occupied and today two of the Embden geese were sharing one nest.

Strawberries, brassicas, bees wax and hedgehogs

Strawberries are delicious, but they are not as easy to grow as it might seem. The problem is that the strawberry bed loses productivity over the years.
So I have abandoned our old strawberry patch which really hasn't been very productive for a couple of years. But I cannot turn over a new area to strawberries every few years.

The old strawberry patch

Instead I have come up with a cunning plan. I purchased three dozen new plants of three varieties to spread the harvest period and have allocated them three beds in with the roots quarter of my rotation. Next year they will stay there and I will use the suckers to populate three more beds in next year's roots quarter. Then the same the next year. In the fourth year, the first beds will come out and as the strawberries rotate around the beds I will change which beds they occupy.
Incorporating the strawberries into the vegetable rotation is an idea I got from the legendary Lawrence D Hills, founder of the organic growing movement.
There is a big potential downside. I have also read warnings not to do this as strawberries are susceptible to verticillium wilt, a disease which also affects other crops, notably potatoes. But it is a risk I am going to take. The rewards outweigh the risk.
I purchased my strawberry bare root strawberry plants back in January. This is a bit late so they may not produce fruit this year but that doesn't matter too much as Wimbledon is cancelled anyhow! I potted them up for the roots to develop and waited for the worst of winter to pass.
Today they moved out into the big wide world. Hopefully they will like their new home.

The rest of the day was spent preparing veg beds. Under the no dig regime this should just be a matter of a quick hoe then piling compost on top of the beds. It should have been done back in the autumn or winter. However, I was pretty much incapacitated due to my back. Also I did not at the time have sufficient compost to achieve this, though cardboard could have been used to block the light.
And so the most neglected beds are now well on the way to reverting back to grassland! The transition to no dig is a gradual one anyway. Although in theory you can eradicate nasty perennial weeds over time by continual covering and pulling, I find that it is better in the first instance to dig out the really tenacious ones like couch grass, dock and creeping buttercup. This takes a lot of time and effort when the bed has been neglected.
I spent too much time on it in one day and my back suffered as a result. I find I need to do lots of different jobs and avoid too much of any one task in a day, especially if it involves bending down too much. I am not very bendy any more!

A quicker job was hoeing the beds with easier weeds, such as feverfew, dead nettle, groundsel and chickweed. With the soil surface dry and compost not yet applied, this was an easy job with the oscillating hoe.

Before my body gave up I covered the new beds with a thin layer of compost.

Next morning it was time to plant up some turnips and radish plants. I sowed these a while back in modules. The turnips are Snowball and Purple Top Milan. I also grow Golden Ball but this is an autumn turnip. The radishes are a right old mixture, including a new variety called Watermelon Radish. Unfortunately these need covering as a physical barrier against flea beetle and turnip root fly. I was already using the turnip netting to cover my new plantings of onions, calabrese and spinach.

Erecting netting takes time, mainly configuring the limited selection of poles to fit the new space each year. I was very happy with the system I came up with this year. The turnips have a higher mesh which will give them space to grow underneath and give me space to weed, thin and harvest from both sides.



Where the turnip mesh was has become my brassica cage for this year. This covers four beds. The main purpose is to protect against cabbage white butterflies, though I have invested in a biological solution this year so it doesn't need to be quite so watertight. It does however provide good protection against pigeon attack too.
I use soft butterfly netting. It is slightly more expensive but much tougher and less prone to ripping. It's quite an investment so needs to last from year to year.

Today I evicted the chickens and ducks from the veg patch too. Their services are useful for slug control but they also have a penchant for soft young spinach and brassica leaves!
I have put all the poultry together in the big pen. Fortunately there was no aggro. The four ducks set straight to work snuzzling through the grass and the six ex free-range hens stick together and are more than capable of looking after themselves.

Moving them out of the veg plot also means I can leave the polytunnel doors open now, as temperatures soar above 40 degrees whenever the sun comes out.



While I've been starting to fill the veg plot with crops, Sue has been using her time to sort out her bee frames. The bees are starting to produce honey now and we need more frames for them to store their honey in. The old frames are pretty gunky with honey and wax and propolis. Sue cut the old wax frames out and melted down the mixture in a special vessel to produce clean wax. The cloth that she strains the mixture through makes fantastic firelighters

Next the wooden frames needed cleaning. Sue boiled up a washing soda solution in her cauldron  and in went the frames. With all the gunk loosened she was able to scrape them clean.
I've made this job sound simple but with so many frames it kept Sue busy for a couple of days.
Now I just have to help her put the new wax foundation sheets into the frames. This is a job for evenings.




Arthur has been busy too. He is obsessed with hedgehogs
Arthur rarely barks unless someone passes the front gate. He doesn't bark if he is stuck in somewhere or if he needs to go out. But he does bark at hedgehogs. So a single bark heard outside was a sure sign that a hedgehog needed rescuing. Arthur has learned to pick hedgehogs up without getting a nose full of spines so I was not surprised to find this scene on the back lawn.
Unlike our labradoodle Boris, Arthur rarely plays with toys or chases a ball. But there is one exception. Notice anything about his favourite ball?

Lockdown Pottering. Day...no idea

A very late start today.

I wasn't nocmigging last night, but our routine has been unsettled, especially our sleep patterns. Sue has been more unsettled by the whole Covid-19 thing than I and it is not unusual for her to get up in the middle of the night.
Last night she let the dogs out and Arthur disappeared. This eventually resulted in myself being rudely woken up at 3 in the morning to help in the search. Of course Arthur wasn't at all concerned by his absence and was found in the vegetable garden up to goodness knows what.

First job of the day was to plant the final bed of potatoes. Pink Fir Apple potatoes are the latest of lates. In a blight year we often get little to no harvest, but they are worth it for the good years when they produce sacks full of delicious nobbly pink tubers which store well into the winter.

Next up were the poached egg plants. I had raised a tray of these as companion plants to my broad beans. I sow this combination every year and have only once had a very mild attack of blackfly on the beans. Whether it's down to the poached egg plants or not I don't know, but they look pretty anyway and are great for the bees.

Calabrese seedlings. Brassicas like to be planted firmly and it is 

good to plant them up to the first true leaves, so the first few centimetres of

stem that you can see get buried.

Final planting for the day was my first batch of calabrese seedlings. Calabrese is what people often call broccoli. I use the word calabrese not to be pretentious, but to avoid confusion with purple sprouting broccoli.







Unlike most of the brassicas, calabrese is a relatively quick crop so I grow several sowings to give a longer harvest period. This year I am growing spinach in with the calabrese. I am hoping that the calabrese grows quickly enough to afford the spinach plants a little shade to discourage them from bolting too quickly.













While I was in the garden I discovered that the female turkeys have taken a liking to comfrey leaves. This is not surprising really, as turkeys are also the only livestock on the farm which are happy to eat nettle leaves and keep them down. The comfrey is well capable of outgrowing a couple of turkeys pecking at it and will be very nutritious for them. The main comfrey bed has come up well this year and I will soon be taking my first harvest of leaves for plant feed.

And now for a gratuitous picture of Sue and the dogs.

Personal Protective Equipment

against a chill night time breeze

Tuesday was capped off with an hour of nocmigging between midnight and 1 a.m.
I wrapped up warm and settled down wrapped in a blanket as the night air was chilly. The moon hadn't risen yet so the stars were even more spectacular than they have been all week. It was a quiet night for birds though, with just the local mallards flying around and a couple of woodpigeons singing (yes, they sing during the night).
That was until 1 o'clock when a very clear shriek pierced the air followed by another. I had been swotting up on the calls of potential night fliers and instantly recognised this as the unlikely call of a Little Grebe passing right over my head.
This is the eighth new bird that I have registered for the smallholding in as many nights sat listening. It's astonishing how the birds that fly over during the night are such a different set to those that I regularly see during the day.

Easter Monday

A sad start to Easter Monday as it was time to dispatch the Muscovy duck that we reared last year. He had grown into a big boy but, to the displeasure of the boss male, he had also taken a liking to the females.
For quite a while now this had made putting the ducks away at night a bit of a nightmare. Every night the chickens and geese put themselves away, the turkeys and guinea fowl go up on the fence, but the ducks loiter outside until I appear to put them away. The female and the boss male then go into the house as a group, bobbing their heads at each other and hissing in a friendly fashion. It's not unusual for two to get wedged in the door as their efforts to go one at a time go awry.
Once in, the old male turns around and guards the door.

Boss male with his girls

The problem comes when the young male, who has been hanging around hiding, then needs to be put away.  For he is scared of the dominant male and every time he attempts to enter the house he comes running back out again. Leaving him outside is not an option as he doesn't go up on the fence and would otherwise end up as fox food. However much we have tried, he won't do the sensible thing and go into alternative overnight accommodation.
So the only answer is to chase him round and round the pen until it is the easier option for him to brave going into the house.

This has been an inconvenience, but in the last few days he has started being pecked in the house. He was always destined for the plate anyway, but this made the matter more pressing.

So this morning I caught him straight from his overnight accommodation (a risky operation as he was a big, strong boy and Muscovy ducks have sharp claws) and did the deed.

While I was doing this (and well before, while I was still in bed), Sue had been a busy bee in the kitchen.

I went down to the kitchen to find a Rhubarb and Orange Crumble made with our own hazelnuts in the topping. Yummy!
Sue had been at the bottle again too. She had bottle up her plum brandy and sloe vodka and put some rhubarb and ginger vodka to start as well as sloe port.

That should help us through lockdown!

It was a much chillier day today so I chose an indoor task, pricking out the celeriac seedlings and planting them individually into modules. This is a fiddly task and the seedlings need to be treated very delicately. I selected the strongest 40 seedlings from the small tray of maybe twice that number. They can now go to the polytunnel to grow on before they are planted outside. It will be a long while before they are ready to harvest.

40 celeriac seedlings in the polytunnel

next to sugar snap peas and red onions

I spent the early afternoon planting another couple of beds of potatoes before we turned our attention back to the Muscovy duck, now hanging out in the stable.

Muscovy ducks have three layers of feathers and plucking them dry is a Herculean task, so instead we dunk them in boiling water for 3 1/2 minutes which makes plucking far easier.
We do the plucking in the stable which makes for easily sweeping up the feathers to go on the compost heap. We did have to keep the geese away though so they wouldn't see what was happening.

One was sitting on the nest so we left her there, a much safer option for us. We have the same problem with the geese as we had with the Muscovys. Last year's sole offspring is a young male and is get harassed. Fortunately he has the sense to spend the nights in the separate stable we have allotted to him.









While we were clearing up I decided to sort out last year's onions. We didn't manage to use them all before their inbuilt senses kicked in and they sprouted fresh growth. So I sorted them out and moved those which were still ok to the fridge.
Unfortunately no animals or birds will eat onions so any excess grown cannot be used for them.

Final job of the day was to mend the roof of the chicken house. The overnight winds had whipped off the felt. To be fair, I had been looking at it for a while thinking that it needed replacing.

Easter Sunday sees the return of our Swallows

Let's start with the weather.
It rained constantly for the first two months of the year with storm upon storm sweeping through, but all this wet and windy silliness was put to bed by Coronavirus. Since its arrival we've had gorgeous weather, particularly since lockdown. We've gone from complaining about mud and flooded paddocks to complaining about bone dry ground.

Not too longer ago things were very different

As I write this on Sunday evening, the Easter weekend has seen temperatures into the mid 70s (old money). Saturday night we had some heavy showers, but it didn't make much difference to the soil. To do that we need sustained rain, even if it's just drizzle. Late afternoon today brought a change though. A chill wind howled across the fields and thunder rolled around the fenland skies.

I was up very late last night after nocmigging till the early hours. I added another new bird species for the farm list. That's seven new species heard in the last two weeks. This will have to stop when I go back to work though, as I'm now seemingly too old to burn the candle at both ends.

There was a big job planned for today, planting the maincrop potatoes.
I grow six varieties of maincrop: Orla, Cara, Desiree, Blue Danube, Valor and Pink Fir Apple.

Fossicking chickens

I no longer bother with digging trenches or burying seed potatoes deeply. Now I just clear the ground, nestle each potato into a small indentation made with the trowel and cover everything with a thick layer of compost. I then have to net or fleece the bed to stop the chickens and turkeys scratching all the compost back off the potatoes. The beds can be uncovered once the potato plants emerge and the compost settles down a bit. By then the ex free range chickens will be confined to their pen again as they can be a little too destructive in the veg plot. It is lovely having them fossicking around the place though.




I managed to get four beds cleared and planted up today. Normally the beds would have already been cleared, but my bad back over winter put paid to getting ahead with everything.
One of the beds still had last year's parsnips in. I harvested to the end of one row and was very pleased with the parsnips I got, though some were afflicted by carrotfly. That's why I always grow more than I need. These are one crop that does require soil disturbance to harvest.
I left half a row of parsnips standing and just planted the potatoes in the spaces.

I also finally discovered where the other turkey hen has been hiding as I happened across her nest complete with three eggs. She is in last year's summer salad bed, which is now full of flowering rocket and borage. Fortunately her nest was at one end of the bed so I was able to clear enough to leave her nest and still plant my Cara potatoes.

One of the beauties of no dig is that it is far easier to leave things in situ and plant around them, whether that be a turkey nest, a perennial herb or a self-seeded plant like poppies, borage or marigolds.


Not everything goes smoothly in the veg plot though. The broad beans I sowed direct a while back have germinated poorly. It may be that the voles found them, but less than half came through. These were from quite old collected seed though. It's not a total disaster as I always end up with too many broad beans. I have resown into the gaps, two beans per station this time. If they germinate it will spread the broad bean harvest over a longer period.

Of course our smallholding has plenty of livestock too. Now that the paddocks are drier and the grass is growing the sheep pretty much look after themselves. The poultry are pretty easy to look after too, thought they need twice daily feeding and locking away at night, as well as chasing out of the veg garden occasionally.
They can be a little messy though, especially the ducks. While I pottered in the veg plot, Sue was busy deep littering the chicken houses. Every couple of weeks we (well, mostly Sue) completely clean out the poultry houses, but in between we just add more straw. This bedding makes a valuable addition to the compost heap.

The bees take a fair amount of Sue's time too. One of the new hive stands had settled down and left the two hives it was supporting leaning forwards. First job of the day, while the bees were very active in the glorious sunshine, was to lift up the whole shaboodle while Sue wedged offcuts of wood under the front legs. This involved putting myself right in the line of fire at the front of the hives. This is where you need total confidence in your protective bee suit. We managed to level up the hives, but not before a bee got inside my bee hood. (The suit has a small tear which was theoretically closed off with a clothes peg. I have since insisted that Sue patch it up for me.)



This was a bit unnerving, but fortunately the bee was more intent on finding a way out than attacking my face.

I've saved the big news till last though, so if you've not managed to read this far you won't find out, but then you'll not be reading this so you won't know you've missed out.

So here goes. DRUMROLLLLLLLLLLLLLL...

The swallows are back! Yay!!! Three appeared above the veg plot early afternoon. Their calls and chattering stopped me in my tracks as I delighted in the sight, the clearest symbol of the passing of the seasons.