Whips and butts - My basket willow holt

Winter is the time to work on the trees on the smallholding. Deciduous trees are dormant which means they can be moved, planted, cut back and most of them can be pruned.

Coppicing and pollarding are ancient ways to manage trees. Coppicing just means cutting the tree right back to the base. How often you do this depends on the species of tree and what you want to use the coppiced wood for. It works because a developed root system puts all its energy into producing multiple fresh shoots from the coppiced stump. These grow straight up and uniform and are easy to harvest.

Pollarding is basically the same, but a trunk is left on the tree and the cutting back performed a few feet up. This is particularly useful where the young shoots might come under grazing pressure from rodents, anything from voles to rabbits.

One type of tree which grows back particularly well is willow. Today I want to talk about my basket willows. These are species and varieties of willow chosen specifically for the colours of their stems and for producing multiple stems suitable for basket weaving.

Basket willows are cut back every year. Gradually a decent stump develops from which spring multiple stems every year. Growing them close together encourages the stems to reach for the sky. If not cut, the stems will branch in their second year, which is not what is needed for weaving.

Several years ago I purchased quite a few varieties of willow. These are purchased as pencil thick cuttings about 10 inches long. All you do is poke them into the ground and they should root. 

A little extra care helps them settle in and grow stronger. They need protection from grass growth and may need some watering until they develop their root system. I underestimated the importance of this extra care so, in my weedy and windswept site, establishment has been slower than I would have liked. Most people plant through weed control fabric, but I have come to hate this stuff. It just deposits hundreds of long thin strands of plastic into the environment, eminently dangerous to wildlife. Instead I purchased some cheap fleece-like fabric, but it just didn't do the job and the weeds took over. I hoped that the chickens scratching about under the trees would help with this too, but they rarely go there and prefer to make a beeline for the veg patch whenever I accidentally leave the gate open.

As for watering, that's not going to happen. They are far too far from any convenient source of water.

I started with between 5 and 100 of each variety. Some did really well, others really struggled or even died out. Every year I cut them back and use what I've cut to make more cuttings, with the aim of multiplying the originals into long lines of maybe a hundred or so of each variety.

Cuttings taken from this year's growth are used to multiply the willows many fold.

Over a few years the successful ones have grown stronger and stronger and now give excellent material for new cuttings. However, the drought of 2022 meant that almost without exception the cuttings from 2021 failed. 

Anyhow, I feel that I am now getting somewhere.

The arrival of lorry loads of woodchip has helped. This is excellent as a weed-suppressant mulch and holds the moisture in the soil too.

So this last week I have been extending my basket willow holt. I have simply spread woodchip over the existing grass and then planted my cuttings straight into it.

 

I simply poke the cuttings (the right way round) into the ground, leaving them protruding so I can see where they are going. I then have the laborious and painful task of pushing them all down into the soil. Gardening gloves help, but it's still sore on the palm of the hand.

I've purchased several new varieties as well  as replacing a couple of varieties that I had completely lost.

I have managed to harvest enough of some types to be useful for basket making, but for the moment I will still be reliant on using bought in willow for this. By next year I would very much hope to be producing enough for my own use.

I also intend to start selling cuttings of named varieties. I now have over twenty different varieties.

A Frost Sets In as thoughts turn to Spring Growth

We're in the middle of another cold snap. Days and nights have been crisp for almost a week now and the ground has remained solid.

I'm well aware that there may be people around the world reading this who would barely raise an eyebrow at this, but temperatures have been down to 5 and 6 below at night (Centigrade, not Fahrenheit). And today, for the first time in this spell, the temperature never actually rose above freezing point even during the day.

Amazingly we've not had a flake of snow yet this winter, but the seasonal chill is on the whole welcome. We don't always get seasonal weather any more, or at least it comes in the wrong season.

Unfortunately I am now of the age where the cold very quickly gets into my bones, though I'm OK if I wear five or six layers of increasing thickness. My fingers suffer though and I find it difficult to do any gardening chores with more than one pair of gloves on. I have however discovered that I get A LOT fewer cuts and grazes on my hands when I wear a pair of work gloves.

Jobs on the list for this week were (with the emphasis on were) pruning orchard trees, coppicing willows and planting new cuttings, shifting more woodchip and digging up some of the tuber crops such as Chinese artichoke (crosnes) and yacon. Unfortunately none of that is very feasible when the air is icy, the ground is rock hard and there's a good couple of inches of ice on all water surfaces.

So instead I've turned my hand to seed sowing. Last year I played it patient, went late on everything in the knowledge that it would catch up and overtake and that seedlings wouldn't end up leggy. As it turned out, we didn't have a single frost past the end of April and hardly even any during that month. Then there followed an extended period of drought culminating in a summer where the thermometer tipped the scales at 40 degrees (Centigrade again!). This, for Britain, was a record.

I wished some of those seedlings had been further down the road. Many perished in the heat and the dry conditions and it was too late to start again.

So this year I am displaying a massive over-reaction and going super early with everything. I've got a huge choice of set ups to regulate seedling growth (all improvised, no fancy grow-lights or anything like that, just different rooms, different temperatures, different light levels, different protection). And if we get failures, at least there'll be time for another attempt.

I have already sown 12 types of onions. They are on heat mats until they germinate, then they can move somewhere a tad cooler. I've sown quite a few perennials too - in general they appreciate a period of cold before the germinate as the soil warms up. Next it will be aubergines which require a long growing seasons but will need to be mollycoddled through to May like the tender little things they are.

Meanwhile I am trying to think of an easy way to transfer some of the heat from the woodchip piles to the polytunnel. In one place I've got 50 degrees centigrade of smoking heat. Not far away I've got temperatures hovering around zero. 

There must be an easy way.

This year I am going to be super organised (I've never said that before!)

Anyway, I'll leave you with another picture of today's hoar frost.

Getting the plot ready for a new growing season

Winter is a time to catch up and to get everything ready for next year. 

Last year's failures and disappointments can be left in the past as we optimistically plan for the year ahead, a year of bountiful sunshine and rain in perfect proportion, a year where we finally keep up with sowing schedules, remember to keep seedlings watered but don't drown them, keep on top of the weeds, keep up with harvesting and even keep on top of succession sowing and planting.

And that will all start with getting the beds prepared in plenty of time for spring. For some that will mean digging over so the frost can (allegedly) break the soil down or rotavating to start the year with lovely, clear beds. The conscientious will work in manure or ample compost. 

None of that for me though. I want to keep the soil covered to protect it from being beaten down by the worst of the winter weather. It won't be turned, but protected from the elements it will emerge from the winter with a crumbly surface. Most of my annual beds are currently covered with homemade compost or, when there wasn't enough of that, for there never is, a deep layer of straw. This was a choice which was made for me thanks to the cheapness of straw in this area - we should always aim to use whatever is locally available. If it's not sufficiently rotted down by sowing time, I'll rake it off the surface and add it in to the compost piles. 

Rhubarb is already coming up, though it may get nipped back if we get anouther cold spell

In the forest garden, most of the herbaceous plants have retreated under the surface for the winter. But as the rays of spring sunshine hit the ground strong, fresh shoots will appear. For the moment I am keeping the perennial beds well mulched. For this I use woodchip, which I now have in more than plentiful supply. 

Plenty of woodchip and logs to be getting on with!
Can you spot the robin?

Under the fruit bushes I am actually using freshly shredded leylandii. It's still producing a lot of heat, but this will quickly dissipate once it's spread out over the ground. The primary purpose of this is to suffocate the weeds, starving them of light and stealing their nitrogen as the decomposition bacteria get going. Keeping on top of weeds, especially grass growing up through thorny gooseberry bushes would be a nightmare without mulching. 

Woodchip makes an excellent mulch for the raspberry beds.

It will decompose quite quickly and put its goodness back into the ground. I won't need to dig it in, for the worms will do that and its nutrients will be made available to all my plants by the magical processes which are allowed to go on in the soil when it is not repeatedly turned and disturbed by constant upheaval. I'm talking not just worms and minibeasts, but fungal mycelia and bacteria. For the cycle of nutrients, with a little encouragement from us, is much more efficiently handled by nature. No need for simplistic additions of fertiliser backed up with liberal dowses of herbicide and pesticide to eliminate all 'competition'. Nature achieves all of this in a much more complex way. I don't even need to completely understand everything that goes on, in the same way that I don't have a clue how my car or this computer actually work.

Logs and woodchip are now being delivered to the smallholding with alarming regularity! I don't want to turn it away and have plenty of use for it, especially the woodchip, but it is keeping me busy redistributing it around the whole smallholding. It might help me with my resolution to shed a few pounds.

The logs will of course be handy for heating the house, but some are just too big to handle so they will be left for wildlife. Much of the wood needs to season too and I am not keen to use the leylandii in the woodburner. It needs at least a couple of years of seasoning otherwise it's guaranteed chimney fire! Given the amount of wood now coming in, I won't need it for this, so we have multiple woodpiles appearing all over the smallholding. The wildlife will love it. 

I've found another great use for the leylandii logs though. It makes a great edging for perennial beds. It's not too formal but does just enough to define the areas so they don't seem too messy amd random. I don't really do formal, but a degree of organisation and layout is necessary to aid tending plants and harvesting. 

I have decided to create some beds which come somewhere between annual veg beds and forest garden. These are my beds for perennial veg. Here will live Jerusalem artichoke, Turkish rocket, herbs, perennial kales, 9-star perennial broccoli, Chinese artichoke (crosnes). Many of these don't need the intensive input of labour demanded by annual crops, but they don't really fit into the randomness of the forest garden, especially as the canopy closes over and sunny edges become more limited.

The only things that stop me getting more done during the winter are the limitations of my ageing body and the frustratingly short days. 

But as you can see, I've been a bit busy. Before I know it though, the sowing schedule will be ramping up. At the moment it is mainly perennial seeds which are stratifying, the process by which they are sown early enough to experience a protracted cold period. In nature, they need this before they germinate. It is nature's way of making sure that seeds shed in the summer and autumn don't germinate too quickly before spring arrives.

My seed potatoes are arriving this week, which is a sure sign that the main sowing and planting season approaches. Fortunately hours of light increase roughly in line with the amount of work which needs doing... thinking about it, it's probably the other way round, it's the increasing light which heralds the need to prepare beds and get sowing seeds.

And so 2023 is under way!

Good luck everyone.

All A Bit Late In The Veg Garden

Here's what the veg beds were supposed to look like back in early summer. Unfortunately, it is now too late for many of them to produce a harvest. The courgettes and beans are finally putting on some growth but we'll run out of daylight hours and sunshine before they can produce any sort of crop.

Some of the leafy veg will provide a late harvest.

The ground is finally workable enough to harvest some potatoes. I have left them in the ground for as long as possible to absorb as much moisture as they could find, but any longer and the voles and slugs will find them. The harvest is pretty meagre but it's better than nothing.

This year, I am covering cleared beds with straw. There was not much prospect of getting succession or cover crops in and I obtained a stack of old straw cheaply early in the year. The soil will stay protected from beatings of rain. In the spring, when I pull the straw back, the soil surface will be moist and crumbly. Any straw that has not been incorporated into the soil will be raked off and transported to the compost heap so it does not provide an irresistible home to slugs.

Our mini rainforest

Strange as it may sound, the key to a forest garden is the network of paths which provide access. These can have a habit of disappearing into the emerging vegetation. They not only provide access, but they invite people to explore. 

Originally I edged the paths with any spare branches I had from work around the smallholding, but now that we have an almost endless supply of logs and chip, I decided to refresh everything. Leylandii logs are not ideal for burning in the log burners as they contain a lot of sap, but they are ideal for substantial path edging. While I was lugging logs Sue was barrowing woodchip, topping up the beds with leafy woodchip from a poplar tree. I filled the pathway with coniferous chip.

This is not just to make everything look neat and tidy, but it is protecting and feeding the soil as well as depriving grasses and weeds of light.

When I reviewed the photos I took, it is all rather reminiscent of trekking through a rainforest - although maybe not on such a grand scale!

While Sue and I were busy doing this, the dogs were being helpful by digging up the grass path by the compost beds tracking the underground journeys of moles or voles. Here's Monty with a chicken overseeing operations.

Wonderful woodchip and lovely logs

I have spent many an hour on my hands and knees weeding. At times it's a pleasant mindful exercise. At times it is a back-breaking, soul-destroying chore.

If you believed all the no-dig hype, you would be wondering why I need to do weeding. After all, you just cover the soil with an inch or so of compost every now and again and hey presto! no more weeds.

This works in theory, if you can possibly get enough compost and if your compost has heated up enough to be weed-free.
But unless you have a close relative rich enough to keep cattle and donate a constant supply of cow manure, producing enough compost to keep your garden covered is a Herculean task. Make no mistake, I make a LOT of compost. Nothing goes to waste and we have plenty of poultry bedding to keep it active and topped up, but still it shrinks down and by the time I have covered a third of my beds the weeds are coming through again and I have run out of the precious compost I so lovingly accumulated and tended over the previous few months.

So what's the solution?

Well I may be moving closer to having one. I have steadily increased the number of growing beds which are perennial and the new forest garden area has rapidly expanded this. The perennial beds can take a mulch of woodchip rather than compost. As time goes on the canopy in the forest garden will close over, the young shrubs will grow and there will be fewer and fewer weeds to conquer.

A Word about 'Weeds'

At this point I should acknowledge that many plants referred to by others as 'weeds' are not considered weeds by me, but I won't deny that some plants are most definitely not welcome in certain places. Dandelions are a classic. Welcome throughout the smallholding EXCEPT in my veg beds. The only reason for this is that my observations tell me that every dandelion root harbours a slug. If it weren't for this, they could happily co-exist next to my other crops. I'm sure somebody will tell me that dandelions can be a useful crop too but the reality is that I probably will never get round to harvesting the roots on a regular basis.

My worst weeds are grasses and creeping buttercup which invade the veg beds relentlessly. Next come nettles, welcome in many corners of the smallholding but too painful to accidentally meet on a regular basis, dock, just because it self seeds so readily, though it does unfailingly grow alongside nettles and provides a welcome soothing relief to the stings, then creeping thistle which is remarkably tenacious. These weeds I do try to eradicate from the veg beds, but it is an ongoing fight which neither of us ever wins!
Lesser weeds are dandelion, plantain, willowherb, cleavers, feverfew, fennel, chickweed. These are all tolerated, even encouraged in moderation, but need taming as all self-seed with abundant enthusiasm.

Besides the basics of pulling and hoeing, covering the ground in the veg beds with compost is definitely the best option.

Wonderful Woodchip

So why have I chosen this moment to write about woodchip?
Well if I can use woodchip as a mulch in some areas of the garden, then I can save the valuable compost for the annual veg beds and I might just have enough to go around.

After ten years trying to find a reliable source, I am finally getting regular loads of both woodchip and logs dropped off at my smallholding. It does a favour to the landscape guys and it is very useful to me. I just hope it continues. At the moment I am getting a couple of van loads a week!

What am I going to do with all this woodchip? 

Firstly, woodchip can be added to the compost pile, especially if it is chipped thin branches, known as ramial chip. This is why I have willow coppice and elephant grass growing. Leafy chippings also add good volume and body to the compost. Woodchip heats up incredibly quickly, to the point of being almost too hot to touch, so it is a good accelerator on the compost, the heat produced by bacteria in turn hopefully treating the compost by killing weed seeds and pathogens.

If the regular supply continues, I will give one load to the sheep for the winter. Although they are incredibly hardy and can easily take a thick layer of frost on their wool, they aren't averse to a heated bed either!

I can use the heat generated to give background heat in the polytunnel too or to create a hotbed early in the growing year.

Woodchip makes a wonderful ground cover for the fruit bushes

My main reason for wanting a regular supply of woodchip is that it is great on the perennial beds. The insects and worms slowly take it into the soil and create a rich top layer which is full of life, insects, fungi, worms and plenty of smaller stuff going on which improves the health of the soil no end.

I am also using it as a mulch in my willow holt, where I have struggled to stop the grasses competing with the willows without resorting to landscape fabric, which I hate using. 

And if the flow of woodchip still keeps coming,  I can fit lorry loads of woodchip into the chicken pens. They will love scratching around in it and it will stop the pen getting muddy in the winter.

With the woodchip comes loads of logs. These will be most welcome to use in the wood burners and should save us a fair bit on the oil bill. The pines aren't so suitable for this, but they will make excellent edging for paths, rotting down to provide habitats too. 

There'll be plenty left, so a stumpery is in my plans, plus a giant log pile somewhere just for the wildlife.

And when just the right logs come along I'll order in some mushroom spawn and get that going.

Finally, shifting barrowloads of woodchip and logs around is keeping me very fit!

The Joy Of Sausages

It's hard to believe that we've never in 12 years of smallholding made our own sausages. You need a certain amount of equipment for mincing, mixing and stuffing. This can get very expensive for industrial scale equipment, or you can go to the other end of the scale and sausage-making will be a nightmare if you're making more than half a dozen.

Then there's all the bother with mixing in rusk and choosing the correct skins. And that's before the somewhat suggestive but risky procedure of getting the stuffing into the skins. Anybody remember The Generation Game..!

We've not kept pigs for quite a few years now. They cost a lot to feed and you get a lot (and I mean a lot) of meat.

But for a while we'd been wondering about turning some of the older sheep into sausages and burgers. Shetland sheep are a native breed and are best kept through one winter to go for meat in their second year. This is known as hogget and has a stronger taste than commercial lamb. It is much sought after.

Sending off intact males can be problematic with some species. Goats  and pigs especially can come back with a strong taint to the meat which personally I don't find very palatable. But we've  never had a problem with intact Shetland rams. We keep them away from the females before their final journey and try to make sure they go in late summer, when they have had the opportunity to fatten up on the pasture and before their hormones get going in the autumn.

Rambutan had to go off as he was related to too many of the ewes. And three of the older ewes need to go off soon. Rambutan is about four. The older ewes about nine, so they will definitely be classified as mutton, a rarely sold meat these days as it's not economical to keep livestock that long.

So Rambutan went with a younger castrated ram and we got both of them minced with lamb and mint burgers and merguez sausages in mind. In the end there really was no discernible difference between the mince we got back from the two sheep.

Kill weight for Rambutan was 25.0kg and for the other 17.5kg which is about right for a native breed sheep. Commercials are bigger, but natives are tastier and have longer lives.

We got nearly 17kg of mince from Rambutan and over 12kg from the other, giving us plenty of mince to play with. We weren't sure about the fat content of the mince. Most recipes call for minced shoulder and belly. I reckoned that the whole sheep minced would come back about right and it certainly looked about right.

I did a fair bit of research into recipes for lamb sausages and lamb burgers, tallied up the ingredients we needed and made a visit to the ethnic stores of Peterborough to stock up on spices. Some of the mince we kept back for other recipes.

Day 1 - Mixing the ingredients

We spent an evening mixing up ELEVEN different flavours!

These were: 

BURGERS: Greek, Middle-eastern, Spicy Indian, Thai, Minted and Basic with rosemary and thyme. We mixed up each batch by hand, working the spices and other ingredients in thoroughly, then put them in the fridge overnight for the flavours to blend and the meat to chill.

These were the SAUSAGES: Minted, Lamb Massala, Rosemary & Red Wine, Merguez 1 and Merguez 2.

Day 2 - Burgers and Meatballs

We have a burger press so it didn't take too long to make about 120 burgers. A quick try of a couple of the mixes and we were absolutely delighted with the juiciness and the flavours. We used some of the various mixtures to make meatballs too.

Day 2 - Sausage Making Attempt 1

There is a mysterious aura surrounding the dark art of sausage making. Secret recipes, do it like this, don't do that... It was an art we had thus far never dabbled in.

A while back we had purchased a grinder and sausage stuffer attachment to go on our stand mixer. Even if the sausage making went badly, the mincer is a happy medium between something hefty and commercial and something clamped to the side of the kitchen worktop and cranked by hand. We ordered some sheep casings for the sausages. I had ordered two sizes as I really wasn't sure what we actually needed, what would fit the three sizes of sausage stuffer tube we had and what would work best. The casings come in brine and need rinsing and soaking. They are a bit slippery to handle so we paid a tiny bit extra to get the ones which come on a spool. This makes it easier to load them onto the stuffing tube.

We started with the Rosemary and Red Wine mixture. It went incredibly well. To our amazement the sausages came out almost perfectly. But it turns out this was beginner's luck! When we switched to a smaller diameter skin and tube things started to go wrong. The meat mix was backing up and just wouldn't go into the skins. We tried all sorts with no luck. We even went back to  the wider skins and tube but our problems continued. A brilliant start had somehow come to a stuttering and very frustrating halt.

Day 3 - The Joy Of Sausage making

We figured that our problem had been when the meat mixture warmed up. So we kept it nice and cold and put the metal grinder parts into the freezer for 10 minutes before each batch. Hey presto! Back to successful and easy sausages. 

We tried switching back to the thinner tube. It was better than the previous evening, but still not easy so we settled on the 24/26mm casings.

It really didn't take long to finish making the last three batches of sausages. When I say sausages, I mean 2m long sausages! We still had to figure how to twist and tied them into strings.

This is where YouTube really came into itself. Scott Rea Productions is a fantastic channel. We had used it to solve our initial sausage problems and the slo-mo sausage stringing video was perfect. It wasn't quite as easy as he made it look and we adapted the method a little, but it wasn't long before we were both enjoying great success... to our surprise.

This certainly won't be the last of our sausage-making and I am very happy using sheep instead of pork as the basis for sausages and burgers. In the end we didn't use the rusk we had bought in. It really wasn't necessary.

So, my five pieces of advice:

Sausages don't have to be pork (in fact lamb makes excellent meatballs and burgers too)

Do a bit of research and get everything ready

Give yourself time

It helps to have two people

KEEP EVERYTHING REALLY COLD

Bee-themed paving

There used to be about 20 square paving slabs behind Sue's beehives... until they got pilfered for other projects around the smallholding!

Getting hold of paving slabs is easy if you have the means to transport them and they can be had for free or very cheap on Facebook Marketplace.

But I had the bright idea of bee-themed paving! That's right. Hexagonal slabs. Luckily it only took a week or so to find some locally and a few weeks to find some more to extend the scheme.

There's no fancy patio-laying going on here. They are simply placed on the ground and have to take responsibility for settling themselves down into something approximating a flattish surface!

Sue and I are very happy with the result.