Friday 26 February 2021

2021 Week 8 - Final preparations for outdoor growing

Spring is most definitely in the air! We've had warm, dry winds all week which have done wonders drying out the land. It's left the soil in the veg plot nicely pliable too, not that I dig it much now that I have converted to no-dig. It does make for good weeding though. Oh the satisfaction of pulling out a couple of foot of couch grass root in one go!

The veg plot is gradually taking shape as winter debris is cleared and beds are covered.

There was a lull in the seed sowing schedule this week so instead I've been concentrating on getting all the beds ready. With no dig, this mainly involves just shifting all the compost I managed to make last year. There's not enough to apply a thick covering all over, so I focus on using it in the polytunnel and on this year's potato beds. I've also been harvesting and chopping back the willow growth. Some is used for structures to support climbing plants and the like in the veg plot. The rest will be shredded and can go on my new perennial beds.

The mangetout has been planted in the polytunnel beds

We were back at school this week. Actually it was our bubble's turn to be teaching from home, but our broadband has been behaving like a temperamental small child which meant that I had to go into school every day just to connect to broadband so I could Zoom into pupils' homes and classrooms. I mostly had to work in a classroom on my own so I didn't do too much bubble crossing. 

The nights are really drawing out now though and it's easily possible to get a couple of hours done in the garden when I get home from work. This makes a really big difference.

Home from work and still plenty of light left

One of the principles of sustainable smallholding is never to throw anything away and to accumulate anything that might come in useful one day. This policy was vindicated this week as some incomplete polytunnel frames which I had collected quite some years ago (and had been moved around the smallholding several times) finally found a use.

With my new found interest in growing perennial plants, I have lots of pots over-wintering. They are fine in the polytunnel over winter, protected from the worst of the wind and frost, but temperatures in the polytunnel have been soaring whenever the sun shines, These plants are much better outside now, but a modicum of protection from the wind and the birds is still useful. So I have build an extension onto the back of the polytunnel and converted a previously wasted space into a nursery area. I just need the bird netting to be delivered and it will be complete. There was an old scaffold platform making the place look messy too. This I have repurposed into staging for plant trays.



I am really pleased with the new space I have created.

Boris and Arthur help out
with plucking as usual.

Bird flu restrictions are still in place so the poultry remain locked up. But the turkeys have started to fight as two young males have been strutting their stuff. There always comes a point when rearing birds when the boys have to move on. With this more aggressive springtime behaviour came a bit of wanderlust too. One morning we discovered they had got out and ventured into the field next door! This was the cue to round them up and for one of the boys to be freezer-bound. As usual I got a couple of wing-whacks in the face in the process of catching him. I've learned to take my glasses off.

I've been a busy boy this week. I've also built a low shelter for the chickens, again using old bits of polytunnel frame. I've got some old polytunnel cover sitting around that I scrounged too which should make this into a perfect shelter from the wind and the rain. It will also give the poultry some dry, dusty ground to bathe in once they are all free to explore.

The Silkies have had a major home improvement too. I purchased several large sheets of welded mesh. This was mainly to stop the rats digging under and into their pen, but it has also served to keep the chickens up abuve the mud. They seem very happy with the new arrangement.

More happy animals.

We have let the sheep back out of the stables. They were ecstatic, the old ewes running and bouncing and leaping around the paddock when they were let out. Rambutan got very over excited too. He is not in with the girls this year, but decided that ramming me would be quite a good game. I can tell you it hurt! It did remind me why they are called rams.


The geese responded to having all their stable straw changed by almost immediately beginning to lay. The first goose egg is one of those markers of the seasons for us. Next up will be the return of the swallows onto the farm.

Of course, I can't go without giving a Covid update. There is seemingly light at the end of the tunnel as Boris revealed his road ma. As expected we get all the children back at school in  a couple of weeks time. But I won't be around for the first week when they come back. For I have finally got the hospital appointment I've been waiting over a year for. This is one of my regular cancer checks and it has been a worrying time not having these checks. Hopefully nothing nasty has developed inside me while the hospitals have effectively been closed for normal service.

As well as the twice weekly lateral flow tests I am now taking for school, I will be required to take a proper test before I go into hospital and to self isolate for a few days beforehand. This time exactly a year ago I was one of the first to self-isolate in this country following my return from Thailand with a persistent cough. How things have developed since then.


Finally, my forest garden has arrived in a couple of boxes this week. Well, it's just part of what will hopefully become a food forest in the future (more of an edible copse really). For now this unusual mix of trees and shrubs has a little growing to do.

I'll tell you what the plants are in detail next week. I'll leave you with a mystery. What are these?

Thursday 18 February 2021

2021 Week 7 - Mulching and Willow Weaving After The Big Freeze

What a difference a few days make. The sun is streaming through the window, the snow is gone, the bees are out, birds are singing. 

Goose Love is in The Air
Valentine's Day on the smallholding means one thing... Cleaning out the goose stable, several months worth of accumulated straw and muck. For this is when the geese come into lay. Their behaviour changes as they become much more raucous and aggressive with each other.

Rather perversely, this is one of Sue's favourite jobs. I am happy for her to do it. All that mucky straw doesn't go to waste though. I am chief distributor. The blackcurrants always get a good dollop of this nitrogen rich mulch, as does the rhubarb. Both of these are relatively unaffected by the slugs that the mulch might attract.

I also decided to risk mulching some of my veg beds with it. The beds over near the boundary hedge are prone to drying out and this year will be hosting brassicas and squashes, both hungry crops. It will be a while before any of these seedlings are planted outside and it should give the ducks time to get on top of any burgeoning slug population before their services become more damaging than helpful and they get kicked out of the veg plot.

Ready, Steady, Sow!
Valentine's Day is also the starter gun for seed sowing. The days are getting longer quickly. and conditions are easier to provide to keep seedlings happy. I have pushed all my timings forward this year. In one sense this is a bad idea since you're pushing the limits and not growing the young plants in ideal conditions. On the other hand, I know there will be serious bottlenecks for propagator space and bench space in the near future, so the more I can get going now the better. The heat mats are in particular demand. These peppers should hopefully get off to a quick start with some bottom heat. Once germinated they can move to a warm spare room by a south facing window.

This week has seen me sowing more lettuce, turnips, carrots, radicchio, kohl rabi, parsley and broad beans. I've been busy sowing seeds of perennial plants too. These are often harder to germinate and look after, but the rewards come if you can get them through to planting out.

The conservatory is full of chitting potatoes



My potatoes arrived this week too. Varieties were a bit limited but I've risked saving some through from last year. I think I have eleven varieties. A bit excessive but they all have very distinctive qualities.

Additions to the Forest Garden
I received some plants in the post for the forest garden too. This is the experimental, exotic end of my growing. Japanese Raisin Tree, Himalayan Honeysuckle and Red-berried Elder will make exciting additions to the collection.

Fortunately the snow melting and a little rainfall has not flooded the place out. In fact it is drying up quite nicely.🙏 The warm weather and a steady breeze helps but I think when the ground is frozen it allows the soil deeper down to drain somehow faster than usual.

Willow weaving
Because of this I've been able to get out and sort the willow poles that I've been cutting. I have everything from thin slithers to three inch thick straight branches. The first thing I did was to construct a protective cage for my surviving perennial kale since the turkeys and ducks had ravaged the ones I had left unprotected over winter. I love this sort of task as it combines willow weaving with gardening and being outdoors.





I then picked out willow poles suitable for various purposes - bean poles, climbing structures, support frameworks. I will gradually throw these to the sheep to debark so they don't start growing when poked into the ground. The bark stripping service is available at a small price 🐑🐑🐑🐑😉.



Wednesday 17 February 2021

2021 Week 6 - A New Dawn for Fenland Growers, Smallholders and Crafters

A quiet week here in the freezer. Seed sowing is warming up but the freezing conditions, well below zero at night and hardly rising above it during the day, remind me not to get ahead of myself.


So instead of the usual rundown, I'll use this post to talk about our local smallholders club. 

Even before Covid and lockdowns One, Two and Three, clubs of this sort were struggling. More and more is done online these days but that leaves a huge gap in personal contact and practical support. Lockdown has of course exacerbated this. 

Our program of events came to an abrupt halt a year ago, just after I stepped down as Chair and the first lockdown was announced. Clearly despite an excellent club magazine and an active Facebook page this makes it difficult to attract and keep new members.

The club began over 40 years ago as Fenland Goatkeepers Club (FGC). At some stage it added Smallholding into its title to become Fenland Goatkeepers and Smallholders Club (FGSC). Then a few years back the specific reference to Goatkeepers was dropped and we became FSC. But times are changing quickly and everyone needs to be prepared to grow and adapt.

So it is that this year we have become Fenland Growers, Smallholders and Crafters (back to FGSC!)

A new logo for a new start

Times may be difficult for individuals and clubs, but major upheaval can sometimes lead to positive change. More and more people are taking up growing their own food. Seed companies have been overwhelmed. During successive lockdowns people have learned to notice nature and to appreciate more simple pleasures in life. This all combines with a massive new enthusiasm for sustainable living as people's knowledge and awareness increases of how we are harming the earth and the steps we can take to start to redress the balance.

A new dawn

We've all had to move online, Zooming is booming! But I have a feeling that at the end of all this we will all appreciate personal contact just a little bit more, even if we have to wear masks to do it.

So we find ourselves in an intriguing position of moving into a more online, virtual future but at the same time learning from the traditions and lifestyles of the past. On top of Covid, but looming large in the background is climate chaos and the havoc that humankind is wreaking on the earth.

So with this new realisation of our vulnerability comes a renewed interest in sustainability.

The renaming of our club reflects a broadening of our horizons to become more relevant. Smallholding still remains at our centre, but there are many, many people who just want to grow a little in their back yard or on their windowsill, who want access to the natural products of smallholding, who want to share traditional skills.

The club is really pushing forward with its structure of different groups operating under its umbrella.

Current areas of interest are Crafting Groups, Preserving and Cooking Groups, Livestock Groups and Growing Groups. In the future lie Men's Sheds and possibly even community smallholdings

Personally my interests come mostly in the growing category. I started the club's very first group, the Grow-Your-Own group, quite a few years ago now. I've handed the reins of that one over to someone else now. So I am looking to try something else. For the beginners in the club I am planning to start Zoom meetings to teach and share the very basics of growing. At the other end of the scale I also want to start a specialist group looking at the sustainable forefront of food growing, permaculture, organic no-dig, forest gardening, that sort of thing.

Hopefully, just hopefully, more club members will start to get involved. There has always been a reluctance to join in or help out but we have an enthusiastic committee now and we are offering free membership for the year to bring in lots of new people.

What we have set up here on the smallholding is I hope an example of sustainable lifestyle. If we can share the skills we have learned through the club then the little difference we make to the world might just be multiplied up a few times.

For those old enough to remember them, we have started growing giant Walnut Whips on the lawn!
This is a major step forwards in becoming self-sufficient :)

Monday 8 February 2021

2021 Week 5 - Pruning and Zooming

You've got to retain a sense of humour.

Pruning Orchard Fruits
This week's big job has been pruning the fruit trees and bushes.

These two apple trees (a juicer and a cider apple) form part of the canopy in the new forest garden.
They've had a good haircut!

You leave stone fruits alone at this time of year, but the apples and pears needed their annual trim. Pruning is always presented as somewhat of a science and for several years I would accomplish the task with my trusty fruit growing book with me. Unfortunately the trees didn't always grow as they were supposed to in the book.

As I have gained experience, I have come to understand how trees and fruits respond to pruning. I have realised that pruning achieves various purposes. Firstly, there is pruning to take out damaged or diseased wood. Then there is taking out any branches which cross as the rubbing of the bark leaves a route in for infection. Once these fundamental steps are completed, there is pruning for the sake of producing fruit and pruning to keep the shape of the trees. 

As far as fruit production is concerned, I have realised that if you cut back the small side shoots they will eventually, over a year or two, turn into what we call fruiting spurs. To put it another way, what would have grown into branches is stopped and produces blossom and fruit instead. 

Pruning for shape is not just for aesthetics either. You need an open structure so that air can circulate and you need to make sure you can reach the fruit for harvest. Increasingly as our weather turns warmer and wetter fungal diseases are becoming the biggest problems, those and problems associated with alternative periods of drought and excessive rain, so thinning branches and thinning fruit has become more and more important.

This year I felt confident enough to show another couple how I prune. I concentrated on a holistic understanding of how the tree responds and what you want to achieve. I hope it was useful.

Pruning the Soft Fruit Bushes
All the soft fruit bushes needed pruning too, blackcurrants, red and white currants and gooseberries (a prickly subject!).

You need to understand how they fruit and how pruning affects new growth, but the principles are very similar to those that apply to apple trees. 

Fruit pruning days provide a very special treat for the Shetland sheep.
They really appreciate all the cuttings, even the spiky gooseberry twigs.

The soft fruits have been festooned with berries and currants for the last few years. New plants are ridiculously easy to propagate too. As a result, I've actually ended up with too many bushes which have expanded leaving no room to get between or for airflow. So this year I have pruned them quite heavily (pruning is not a science and subjective decisions need to be taken). I thinned out a few bushes too. The only problem with this is that the open ground becomes a haven for grass and weed growth. However, since I want this area to become part of my forest garden, I shall put smaller herbaceous perennials in the gaps which hopefully will require little attention and give us some novel crops.



Imbolc
The week's weather has been generally good, typically late January weather, some days cold, some warmer and wetter. The bees ventured out on a couple of days and I've heard robins, great tits, blackbirds, a song thrush and skylarks in song. This made pruning a pleasant task.

I've seen much talk of Imbolc on social media. It seems to have become very trendy to acknowledge these ancient festivals. Imbolc is allegedly a Gaelic festival to mark the start of spring. I am all in favour of appreciating and marking the passing of the seasons, but come on! I think it's a tad optimistic to be talking about the beginning of spring so early in February. There is sometimes a gap between reality and hope. 

One of my favourite plants at this time of year is mahonia or Oregon Grapes. Ours has split into two plants and become quite statuesque. It flowers and fruits really early and is an important food source for the bees when they venture out of their hives on warmer days.

I won't say that spring is quite here yet, but there are hints of its approach. To brighten things up in future, I had ordered a whole load of bulbs to go in the hazel coppice as I have now moved the strawberries on from that area. Hopefully they'll survive and we will have the delight of snowdrops, aconites and bluebells coming through. Planting them all was a lovely job to do with Sue and the dogs helped by enthusiastically digging up some lawn.


The garlic cloves I set in the ground a few weeks back have all come through strongly now. Once they get their roots in I'll take the netting off. The birds do like to tug at them though.


But the week ended with more heavy rain and the water has come higher than ever before. There comes a point when wellies become standard wear and you give up trying to go round the mud and puddles. 


Covid update

It's been my week to teach from home so I have almost no direct contact with the outside world. This makes me feel safe. School staff are now taking twice weekly lateral flow tests. These are notoriously unreliable but they do give a little reassurance despite being pretty uncomfortable to self-administer. We now look forward to gag-tastic Sundays and Wednesdays!

I also received an oximeter in the post. Both Sue and I have been feeling unusually breathless at times but the oximeter showed a normal oxygen level so I guess it must just come down to getting old and maybe carrying a bit too much weight around the middle (me, not Sue).

I received my Google timeline update too.

124 miles travelled in the whole month and never further than 8 miles from home. I think this was 6 trips to work, one drive out for fish and chips and one trip to the hardware store.

A sign of the times.

Looking Back - Featured post

ONE THOUSAND BLOG POSTS IN PICTURES

Ten years and a thousand blog posts! Enjoy. Pictures in no particular order.  

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