Garlic and 'snips

Just a quick update on a couple of bits 'n' pieces.

Garlic and Parsnips
Firstly, as you can see. my garlic is doing pretty well this year. It will be out of the ground in early summer though, so in between I've sown rows of parsnip seed. I don't find a need to do this as early as some advise. Mid to late April is fine and I've always had sizeable parsnip tubers by the winter.

Until recently I allowed plenty of parsnip plants to go into a second year and flower. They are wonderfully statuesque plants and beneficial insects make a beeline for their flowers. The seed I collect from them produces next year's plants.

I will confess to having parsnips springing up everywhere! But I am having to put a curb on my parsnips. They are high up the suspect list for causing some rather nasty blisters which react badly for several years when exposed to sunlight. 

I can still grow them, but will only allow one or two plants, away from paths, to flower.

Adapting to a changing climate

We've had our third very dry April in a row. I'm beginning to adapt to this clear pattern of climate change by raising my seedlings slightly later as it's difficult to get them planted and established in dry conditions. Frosts have been few and far between this winter too and none have been harsh. My Chilean Glory Vine bears witness to this. It's not supposed to be hardy in this region, but mine has happily survived the winter.

As we head towards frost-freedom, the garden is springing to life. Below is my Snowy Mespilus hedge which always looks beautiful for a few short weeks in the springtime. 

And can you spot who photobombed this photo of red dead-nettle. One of my favourite wild plants alongside one of my favourite insects, the bee-fly.

Avian delights

Every year we look forward to the swallows returning to the farm. As April progresses the anticipation rises, until one day, usually while I've got my head down in the veg plot, the chattering song of a swallow interrupts the sounds I am used to.

This year the first one returned on 18th April.  And here it is.

Over the next few weeks the number of swallows on the farm will increase and they will start to construct their nests in the stables. But they are not the only birds nesting on the farm. In fact, that I know of, nearly forty species have bred on the farm. I don't actively search for the nests but this past week I've had a couple of close encounters. 

Whilst undertaking a major overhaul of my shed space, including replacement rooves to stop the rain accumulating and pouring through the roof, I came across a nest on a shelf. As surprised as me, a robin darted out.

Fortunately I was able to continue clearing out the shed, making as few visits as possible. It surprised me how long the babies, quite probably only a day old, were left alone. If they thought I was a robin bringing food, they opened their beaks in anticipation. If they cottoned on that I wasn't a robin, they sat tight, resembling an insignificant ball of fur. I look forward to the day the fledge.

And in another shed I came across another nest, this one less surprising as the same bird has nested there for the last three year, thanks to a slipped pane of glass allowing access through the window.
This one is a blackbird's nest. We seem to have a lot of blackbirds this year.

Magic Oca Tubers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll keep you updated.

Good King Henry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let there be light

One fairly small action has made a huge difference to our smallholding. Out in the middle of the Fens life can be a little breezy at times. You learn to live with it and even to quite like it, but it's only sensible to afford yourself a little protection.

But why live on The Fens if you can't admire the 360 degree horizon, the sweeping views and the huge skies.

So over the years I've planted a small network of sort native hedgerows designed to break up the wind while still keeping the views. Of course, they are of enormous value to wildlife, particularly ince the farmers round here seem so keen on pulling out every bit of vegetation which dares even look at their featureless fields designed for huge machinery.

The main rooms of the house look out over one such field, but over the years a young laurel hedge had slowly blocked out the view and the light. These things happen almost imperceptibly.

But in early March I got stuck in and cut it back from maybe 15 feet tall to 4 foot stumps, which will resprout with softer material.

The difference is amazing. We have a view again! We have light in abundance. And the pond is very, very happy. The water has cleared, no blanket weed, no duckweed. I can watch newts and Giant Diving Beetles rising to the surface for air, pond skaters, water boatmen and whirligig beetles demonstrate various means of transportation in water.

Wake up, but don't smell the coffee

Maybe it was having to work in just about every year group because half our teachers were off. Maybe it was the 5 year old who kindly sprayed all over the right side of my face while I built lego with them.

Whatever it was, I have finally bowed to the inevitable and contracted Covid. It's amazing that Sue and I have avoided it this far. To be fair, it doesn't feel like a life or death threat any more, no more than other possibilities in life.

I sort of knew it was coming when I had some strange goings on in the preceding week. Standing in the polytunnel tending to my overwintered young plants, like a bolt from the blue I suddenly woke up with the ground falling away from me and the potting bench sliding away.
Of course, the one who'd had a wobble was actually me! Weird! I was lucky really, half a second longer and I could have been giving my head an unhealthy crack on the floor.

Covid me and post Covid
(thought he difference has absolutely nothing to do with Covid
and the second image is only due to public pressure!

I don't want to make light of Covid in any way, but the timing was good, taking me straight into a two week Easter holiday.

I was generous with it too. Sue is about 3 days behind me, so hopefully will be testing negative in a  couple of days as I did yesterday.

So how was it different to any other illness. Well, there were a few strange symptoms. The brief spells of dizziness for one. The complete exhaustion that appeared from nowhere. I spent a week working outside in half hour slots. The complete lack of taste (no cheeky comments!) and absolutely no sense of smell, not even coffee, not even bonfires, not even ... well,  no need to go any further. The constant thick head was a pain, though this had been lingering for a week before the positive test confirmation. The back ache and aching body (even more than creeping old age gifts me) was, looking back on it, another sign that a positive test was on its way.

And on the day of the positive test, I blamed the bouts of sneezing on early tree pollen, at least until my nose started running literally like a tap.

We're both relieved to finally have had it. I don't think it will be the last time. With the government having given up on any control measures, it is rampant in school and many children have had multiple infections. I just hope there are no more nasty twists and turns in this story as we seem to have totally dismantled our defences.