Rain at last. And leeks.

Despite the screen on my phone last Sunday, I had to wait till Thursday before we had any appreciable rain. This was our first rain for almost three weeks and was needed. After the wettest winter on record, there is still plenty of moisture just under the surface.

However, the top layer is where the seedlings need to get a hold. With the delightful weather we had during my whole two week Easter break, I was pretty much up to date with everything except rotavating the spare veg patch and getting the first carrot seeds in. The only other outstanding job was a second sowing of Broad Beans and planting my last bag of onion sets. One small problem with the last couple of jobs though - they'd gone missing!
This problem was easily solved when I eventually looked inside a basket hanging in the lobby. But the rotavating and seed sowing were at the behest of the weather.
So, when the rain did finally arrive, I was straight out on the rotavator. The soil in the Spare Veg Patch is clayier and lumpier than the rest of  my veg patch. Without rain, cricket ball lumps of earth just travel round and round in the rotavator tines, emerging completely unscathed. But three hours after work on Thursday and another four on Friday had the ground looking much better, even if my arms and torso felt as if they'd taken a thorough bashing!

The rain prompted the parsnip seeds into action too. Always slow to germinate, but they always seem to come good in the end. Some very careful weeding will be required though as all manner of seedlings manage to come up before the parsnips.

And the potatoes are leaping into action too, helped by the ducks who insist on flattening the ridges. Luckily nights are warm at the moment so I can ridge them back up at my leisure. At least the ducks keep the slugs at bay. Reports from other veg growers suggest a bad year for them, but as yet I'm not seeing it, fingers crossed. So if it's down to the ducks, then a few flattened potato ridges are a price well worth paying.

Anyway, here are the Red Duke of Yorks.

 

And finally... the first leeks have gone outside. I grow them in half seed trays in the polytunnel. They always seem to germinate easily and once they are about six to nine inches tall (not quite the pencil thickness that everyone seems to recommend) I move them outside, planting them 9 inches apart in each direction. Planting leeks is a bit of a ritual. I make a hole as deep as I can with a dibber. Stopping the soil from instantly falling back in is somewhat of an art.

I then drop in the seedlings. I don't bother trimming the roots or the leaves and it seems to work very well. I then water the seedlings in and just allow the holes to fill up on their own. I always grow Musselburgh, which serves me well but is quite a late variety. So this year the first leeks in are Jolant, one of the earliest.

 

I planted a few rows of carrots. Purple Haze, White Satin, Ideal Red and Chantennay for a nice colourful mixture. I also sowed some Resistafly and some Flyaway. Hopefully they'll avoid carrot fly, even if the others don't. Lastly, a row of Autumn King and a row of Early Nantes - just for a bit of bulk standard carrotage.

As soon as they start coming through I'll sow the next lot.

 

And I'm still hoping that a few more of those April showers fall on Swallow Farm.

An Unexpected Glut of Carrots

I wrote this post several days ago, but forgot to publish it!
So any keen followers may notice a few errors in continuity!
Here goes...

Buoyed on by my successful digging yesterday (last weekend), I decided to spend today (last Monday), my last day before school term starts (I've actually been back a week), digging.

Now that all the weeds have died down, a few carrot tops had become visible. I know I should have harvested them ages ago... Long story ... which I'm about to bore you all with.

Despite all my attempts, for several years I have been outwitted by a very, very small fly. I've never even knowingly seen it, or its grubs, but whenever I dig up my carrots they are spoilt by a mosaic of dirty tunnels. There are two blunt-ended solutions which I could adopt. One is to erect a two foot high barrier around my carrot beds. The other is to cover them with fleece throughout the growing season. Neither of these is very practical on my site, though not impossible. There is a third option too. Not to grow carrots. They are cheap in the shops, taste nice and are always perfect. But I just like the idea of growing my own. I know that they are chemical free, I've got the land and you get thousands of seeds for not a lot of money.

To be fair, the first year I grew them, in London, my carrots did well and only a few were affected by carrot fly. And the first year I grew them here it was a similar story. But it's been downhill from there.

Last year I couldn't even get my carrots growing at all, repeated efforts at sowing being defeated by cold, waterlogged ground and a plague of slugs.
This year I came up with a cunning plan to defeat the carrot flies. I decided to grow my rows of carrots in amongst mixes of annual flowers. The theory was that the flies' sense of smell, which they use to search and destroy carrots, is confused and distracted by the bountiful floral aromas of the blooms. In practice, I couldn't tell which seedlings were weeds and which were pretty flowers. Conditions for growth, apart from a cold start, were good this year and all of a sudden, before I knew it, I had beds of thick growth towering high and covering the ground. The only problem was that the poor little carrot plants, slow to germinate, got swamped, lost. To make matters worse, the bed never ended up looking very pretty anyway.
I had long given up on a crop of carrots, but as the annuals and weeds died down, there were the lines of carrot tops, a bit patchy but some had made it through. But it was now very late in the season and the voles had been at work - the same voles which have been helping themselves to my potatoes, attacking from underground, and the same voles which have gnawed away my celeriac bulbs, cleverly leaving the foliage still growing to hide their crime!
I knew that the carrots had been in too long now and that the carrot flies (and probably a few slugs) would have been attacking them from  underground too.
So, to paraphrase this tale of woe, I messed up on the carrots and abandoned them...till today. Today when, for some unknown reason, I decided to salvage what I could of the crop. I knew that hardly any would be suitable for storage and I wasn't wrong. But with a bit of peeling and a lot of chopping, I did manage to get quite a pile of carrots. Nowhere near as much as I should be able to get, but at least it was something.
Next problem - what to do with them? I could just slice and dice, blanch and freeze, but this really seemed quite a pointless exercise. I might as well just buy them from the supermarket.

Carrot and Coriander soup, Carrot and Cumin soup,
Carrot Cake, Carrot, Lime and Ginger juice.
All delicious!

So I came up with a three point plan.

Carrot soup. Carrot cake. Carrot juice.

I considered carrot wine, but thought better of it. Besides, I could probably make this just as well from cheap bags of 'horse carrots'.

A few hours later, et voila!

An Edible Hedge, A Carrot and some Cross Eggs

Friday 21st September 2012

The first really wet day for a while, so just a few odds and sods events to catch up on.

Cross Eggs
I was re-reading one of my books on keeping chickens the other night when I came across a really simple idea to solve a problem I've been having.  For Priscilla, as you know, is sitting on a clutch of eggs which will hopefully all hatch into fine hens for me. But there has been a problem - other chickens laying eggs next to her which she then carefully rolls across the straw and under her feathers. Trouble is, they'll never hatch as they'll be adandoned once the main clutch have hatched. Meanwhile, she is leaving me with too few eggs to sell. But this problem stops today. For each egg under Priscilla now has a large pencil cross on it. I can't believe I didn't think of it myself. From now on, all newly laid eggs will be easy to identify.



The edible hedgerow,
fenced off from marauding sheep.

The Edible Hedgerow
Last winter I planted an edible hedgerow, composed of hazels, elders, sloes, blackberries, crab apples, dog rose, wild pear, cherry plum and hawthorn. In a few year's time I'll hopefully be able to potter around in the garden and return with baskets full of wild hedgerow fruits to turn into jams and wines.
However, Number Ten and Number Eighteen (The Lambs) have completely misinterpreted the term edible hedgerow and, since they have been moved to a new area of grazing, have been trying to eat the whole hedge! Nothing that a bit of temporary fencing couldn't sort out though.









And finally, remember those rows and rows of carrots that I sowed earlier in the year to no avail? Well, I'd pretty much forgotten about them and left the beds to the flowering annuals I'd planted to confuse the carrot fly. But just look what I came across the other day! No prizes for beauty, but it may find its way onto the bench at the smallholders' produce show next weekend.

Thinking forward to next year.

Swallows gathering ready to leave

This year has been a challenging one but still I have learned a lot and things have moved forwards here on the smallholding.
But as September is upon us, I start to cast my mind to next year. Which varieties have earned their place in next year's plan? What should I change? What has worked well?

Saturday 1st September 2012
An autumn sunrise!

Of course, next year may well be completely different. But here are my initial thoughts.

Potatoes - They liked the water this year, but the swollen lenticels made them a difficult prospect to sell. Then The Blight hit. I tried over a dozen varieties, which has given us way too many spuds given that I can't really sell many. And that's a lot of digging to plant them in ridges, earth them up and then dig them out at the end. So next year I'll be more selective. I've not even investigated how some of the types have fared or harvested, but my initial thoughts are:
Earlies and Second Earlies
Bonnies - a definite - large, smooth, abundant, good-looking. Quite large losses to blight, but next year I'll be more ready to deal with it!
Red Duke of York and Salad Blue - The Yorks are a mealy potato, great for chips and roasting. Didn't enjoy the wet soil though. Salad Blues did well, but more of a novelty crop. They give a nice, sweet mashed potato, but the purple flesh turns a little greyish.
I'll probably choose one of these varieties each year. Both hit heavily by blight.
Dunluce / Arran Pilot - Two good early potatoes. Dunluce grow big quickly but Arran Pilot didn't reach full size before the tops were bitten. Probably grow one of these in future, along with Charlotte. All affected by swollen lenticels, not great on a new potato.
Swift - I won't bother with this one again. Maybe it just didn't like conditions this year, but poor yield, never really got going.
Edgecote Purple - An attractive, purple potato (clue's in the name) which has cropped fairly well. Not too many tubers got by blight. Shame I had to take off the foliage so early. The spuds which reached full size were amazing. A definite for next year.

Maincrops
I've not harvested many of these yet. Last year the Desirees and Pink Fir Apples did brilliantly, but that was a dry year so I'm expecting the opposite this year. However, there'll always be a place for both of these in my potato patch. The Setantas cropped well. Although the tops were decimated by blight like all the others, I seem to have a good crop of healthy, red tubers under the soil. I've not tried them enough ways to comment on taste yet.
Sarpo Mira - strange to see one variety almost totally unaffected by blight. Top growth is still green, even now. This is a big advantage, though I have been told that the taste is a bit bland. I'll let you know.
I'm really hoping the Orlas do well, as they're sold as the organic gardener's spud. Top rotted away with blight, so we'll see what lies under the soil.

Peas
Well, we've all learned that peas love loads of water. What a great year for them! I used to think they weren't worth growing, and they're probably not if you're going to put them in the freezer. But as a fresh crop they take some beating, even if they don't stay on the fork, especially raw which is how I prefer them. I must say, I find it hard to tell between different varieties. They're all lovely! The traditional Kelvedon Wonder did well this year and they're going cheap in the shops at the momnent. I could save my own seed, but if it's economical I like to change it every now and again.
The Sugar Snaps were lovely too, so fresh and crunchy, but I'll make more effort to get a successional crop next year. As for the mangetouts - well, the purple-podded look nice and crop well, but for me they're a bit too cabbagey. Next year I'll be trying a more traditional green mangetout.

Beans
What a disastrous year! Virtually none made it past the slugs, which is such a shame. I grow French Bean Blue Lake for fresh pods and Canadian Wonder for kidney beans to dry. I tried the latter as fresh pods last year but couldn't bear the stringiness. The Borlottis joined both these varieties in totally failing this year.
On the plus side, the pack of "exotic beans" which I got from the 99p shop (or was it Poundland?) gave me a pretty good crop of purple pods (Purple Teepee) and the yellow pods (Monte d'Or) tasted beautiful. I'll be interested to see how the black-eyed beans do.They are healthy at the moment. I'll be buying a few of these packs next year, though it's a bit of a pain having to sort out the seeds from the mixed pack.

Runner Beans
Again, these struggled to get past the slugs. The Painted Ladies are a heritage variety which I've chosen on account of their red and white flowers. They are vigorous and crop well, but I've decided to go for a stringless variety next year. I don't like a mouth full of razorlike stringy green stuff and, even if I try to pick them young, I reckon that a customer finding themselves chewing on one of these would not come back.
The Czars, which I grow for their white flowers and white beans, are much less vigorous but, when I do eat them as pods, less prone to be stringy unless they are obviously too big. So they get another chance next year.

Three Sisters
Well, it only ended up as Two Sisters but I've been pretty impressed. The Sweetcorn (Lark) has flourished, it's wispy heads towering above the carpet of courgettes, squashes and pumpkins. Aside from the courgette mountain problem, this system may get even more space next year. I'll add more different winter squashes, as they look great and store well.

The cucurbits which I grew in tyres have done very well too, so I'll continue with this next year.

Leeks and Celery
The leeks and celery seem to be growing very well indeed in each other's company. We've started taking some of the young celery already and I look forward to the leeks later in the year.

Root crops
The Parsnips (Tender & True) have, I think, done brilliantly. Another crop which likes plenty of water early on I guess. I'm confidently expecting to have to bring in a digger to get the whole roots out. I don't know whether interplanting with garlic has helped, but since they've done so well I'll repeat this next year. In stark contrast, none of my Hamburg Parsley came up from two sowings. Such a shame as I really like it. I'll try again next year, but if it fails again...
Carrots of all varieties have had a catastrophic year. I've always been able to rely on these doing well before. I'm sure they'll do well again next year and I'll still grow lots of different colours and shapes.
The Scorzonera, which did so well last year, also failed to materialise. We really like the taste but the long, black roots are extremely fiddly to peel. In contrast, its sister crop, the Salsify, has done brilliantly, as has the Celeriac next to it. Both crops need longer to harvest, but I'm full of expectation. I'll leave some Salsify to flower, since it's a lovely plant all round.
Beetroots have done OK this year, though germination was poor and the slugs got all of those which were planted later. But I do love the taste. I think three types is enough, a red one (may try one of the longer tubers next year), stripy Chioggia and a golden one for sure.

Brassicas
As usual, everything else has got on top of me and the poor brassicas have dropped off the bottom of the list. Next year! The turnips did well early on!



So, that's the beginnings of my plans for next year. No doubt over the winter months I'll be absorbed in planning everything in much more detail. There's the flowers and herbs too, and of course I have a polytunnel for next year which will give a whole new range of opportunites and challenges.

Roll on 2013!

Going back to my roots

  

Friday 29th June 2012
The clearest of morning skies

Remember those carrots that never came up? No, I'm not going to tell you that they've all magically and mysteriously sprung up in the last few days. Quite the reverse. They've been an unmitigated disaster. The spring onions have fared just as poorly, as well as a couple of my beetroot varieties. A combination of three factors has caused this. First, my own miserliness, trying to use old seed that had been poorly stored. Second, the washout spring and early summer we've had. And third, the plague of slugs we've encountered this year.

In fact, things have been so bad I've been avoiding this quarter of my veg patch, letting the onions, shallots and garlic get on by themselves. They're planted to deter the carrotfly!
Of course, the easiest way to deter carrotfly is to have no carrots!!!

My root beds (after a tidy up)

Back to my roots
Today's job was to go back to my roots. I ventured in, equipped with shears, hoe and trowel. At least if I could tidy up the edges and weed out the weeds, with the sun shining I might just see a chink of light at the end of the tunnel.

... And there it was. My salsify was flourishing between the sage plants I've dotted around for the general well-being of the veg patch.

Salsify and Sage doing well.

Celeriac
The other end of the salsify bed was waiting for my celeriac seedlings, and they went in today too. This root is in fact a form of celery where the base swells up and is the part to eat. I prefer it to celery as I find the taste more delicate. Besides, those whiskery, bearded roots always make me smile when I pull them up in the autumn. Celeriac needs a long season to succeed in this country, and home-grown plants never quite achieve the clean lines and the stature of those in the shops, but it is nevertheless a crop which I find well worth the effort.

Carrots
Spurred on by my discovery of a thriving salsify crop, I uncovered just a few carrot plants, borne of the toughest seeds.

The idea of some beautifully sweet, early carrots is a distant memory now. So too the multicoloured succession of roots plucked straight from the ground and lucky to make it back to the kitchen before being munched.
But I figure it's not too late to try for a crop to enjoy in the autumn and to store through the winter. So I've resown some of my beds with seed purchased this year. The slugs are more under control, the weather seems less inclement and I reckon things might just turn out OK.

Mixed success in the beetroot bed.

Beetroots
Over in the beetroot and onion bed, the Red Ace beetroots have fared pretty well. About three quarters of the line has come up, so I filled the gaps today. The Chioggia, those wonderful beetroots with their rings of colour, were much more sparse. And the Burpees Golden, Sue's favourite... Two plants in a twelve foot row!
I've resown the seed I had left over from the last two varieties in seedtrays to give them as much chance as possible of at least getting a start in life, and I used any leftover seed to partially fill the gaps. I may just get a few extra plants if I'm lucky.

Scorzonera
(please don't ask me exactly how to pronounce it. I've done well to spell it!)
The scorzonera and maincrop carrot bed is difficult to fathom at the moment. There's certainly no carrots come up and it's hard to find more than a few young scorzonera plants, but they do look so like grass and are terribly difficult to pick out in amongst the stray blades. Since my veg beds were carved out of a lush sheep paddock, eradicating the couch-grass and dandelions from them has been a drawn-out process, but one which I am definitely winning.

Scorzonera and salsify are usually grouped together as sister crops, so it won't be a disaster if I only get salsify this year. Last year I only bothered with scorzonera and was delighted to harvest a good crop of ridiculously long, gnarled black roots at the end of the year. If you can get past the fact that they are stubbornly difficult to peel (best done after coooking), you really should give scorzonera a chance. I love the taste and texture, though I can't even begin to describe it.

Thinning out the 'snips


One of last year's parsnips which I must have missed!
I do like to leave some vegetables to flower .
Salsify is a particularly good one, as is rocket.
I may try collecting the seed, though I won't rely on it.

The parsnips are, along with the salsify, the stars of the root bed show this year. I've grown lines of them interspersed with garlic and a few pot marigolds. They're supposed to be good companions. There are a few odd patches where germination has failed, but on the whole my 'snips have done well. I do know that parsnip seed is one that really doesn't stay viable for more than a year, so each year new seed is used.

I learned a valuable lesson last year, when I failed to thin. I was rewarded with a crop of long, skinny parsnips which didn't make much impact in the pot. Where I was lucky and a seedling had germinated all on its lonesome, I got the most fantastic long, chunky roots. So today I bit the bullet and thinned. Most of my plants were growing in pairs or even triplets, as I had sown the papery seeds in clusters at stations every six to eight inches apart.
(While just looking something up, I came across some valuable advice about sowing parsnips. Two bits of advice really. The first was to sow by scattering seed along a four inch drill rather than at cluster stations, as the latter often leads to gaps in the rows - I can bear testament to this. The second was to ignore the seed packet instruction and wait till early April to sow rather than February. I never make February anyway!)
Anyway, back to the thinning out. This process pains me greatly. I find it like pulling my own teeth, though I know it has to be done and is for the best. But today I pulled a couple of dozen perfect, tapering roots. I can only hope that my attempt to leave the strongest plants means that there are even better plants left in the ground with room to expand.

It just seemed such a shame, and especially with all those gaps, but I really couldn't imagine that such long, thin roots would transplant well into the gaps. So instead I filled them with a few spare celeriac plants.

Hamburg Parsley
I've saved the worst till last. Nothing. Zilch. Rien. Last year I spilled all the seed before I could sow it and had to buy in an emergency packet. In the end it didn't get sown till June 18th, but I still got a decent crop. The roots look like parsnip but have  a nuttier flavour and the leaves can be used just like normal parsley. I do like a plant with two uses.
So today I rotavated the bed and started afresh. A bit late, but I'll push my luck and see what happens.


Just one bed left to sort out now. I grow my leeks and celery in the roots quarter of the veg patch and I have some young plants thriving in seed trays at the moment. They'll move into their final positon in a couple of days time.

Flaming June

Thursday 7th June 2012

The moments just before the sun comes up often give the most dramatic skies

as the light bounces around the clouds.

Today was one of my favourites of the year so far.

Flaming June is to be taken as a mild expletive, not a description of the weather!

Talking of flames, that reminds me. Where are my carrots? I've sown about six different types (not all orange) at three different times in several different places and they're now long overdue. I can only think that they are all lying dormant and will take me by surprise, or that the seeds have lost their viability since last year. But all of them?? Could be the slugs, but again, all of them?

Anyway, I'll give it another week and then I'll sow new ones, much more thickly and forget successional sowing! The same seems to have happened to my Hamburg Parsley and Spring Onions. Maybe a hot, dry few days came at just the wrong time, especially with the hosepipe ban still in place.

Well, June has not exactly been flaming so far. In fact, there's been enough rain to make weeding a delightful task. And boy, have those weeds grown! Today was the turn of the soft fruit patch to be cleared. Rhubarb, gooseberries, currants of all colours, raspberries, blackberries, tayberry, honeyberry, blueberries and strawberries - all were beginning to be engulfed by dandelions, docks, sowthistles, proper prickly thistles, nettles, mayweed, fat hen and a host of other invasive plants.

But sometimes, if you time it just right, conditions for weeding are perfect. And today was the day. The soil was not sticky or clogging, but was so soft that even the likes of dandelion and dock with their deep, tapering roots, if grabbed firmly at the base and tugged gently, yielded their whole root. Such was the task that, after a late start, it took most of the day and resulted in four barrowloads of weeds for the pigs to pick through. 

And now we have raspberries again. I can even work out which are the summer fruiting and which the autumn fruiting. We just need some sun to ripen all those fruits nicely.

Outwitting the Carrot Flies.



Monday 30th April 2012
April finally comes good



A sunrise!!! A nice day! And a 14 hour day in the garden to make the most of it.

Daisy and the piglets have quickly turned their grassy enclosure
into something more akin to the trenches of WW 1!
Not long till weaning now.

Buzzing

The bees came out in force today and it was fantastic both to see so many filling the air and to smell that heady aroma of wax and honey which surrounds a thriving hive. They allowed fairly close approach, though my stripy jumper seemed to annoy a couple of them at one point, not even when I was close to the hive.

Mauled by a Guineafowl

But prize for brazen attack of the days goes to Guinea Guinea. The sunshine brought out his macho side and, as I plucked the flowering shoots from the sorrel bed, he was making a right racket. I realised after a while that, behind me, he was puffing himself up, spreading his wings, running madly in circles and making false charges at me! I tried to explain that I wasn't a threat and that, if this behaviour continued, he might end up in the pot, but all to no avail.

I decided that ignoring him was the best strategy. That was until, crouched down attending to the sorrel plants, I suddenly felt a guineafowl on my back!!! And I don't think he was being friendly.

Outwitting the Carrot Flies.

The root beds were almost ready for sowing and planting when the rains came. I never thought it would be this long before I could reasonably get any seeds in.

I have ridiculous numbers of carrot seeds, each packet containing seemingly enough to fill a field. There are early ones, late ones, short, fat ones, long, skinny ones, orange yellow, white, purple, even some which promise resistance to carrot fly.

Ah yes, carrot fly.

I've never knowingly seen one, but I have seen the damage caused by their larvae, burrowing round the edge of carrots like a helter skelter, then going through the middle rendering them pretty inedible - though the chickens and pigs don't mind such imperfections.

Carrot flies find their favourite vegetable prey by smell, so it is important to sow the seed thinly to minimise the need for too much thinning later on. There are other ways to counteract these seek-and-destroy tactics, primarily by disguising the smell of the carrots, not with Febreze or Lynx, but with onions, spring onions, garlic and coriander. So my carrot beds tend to consist of rows of carrots interspersed with onion sets, garlic cloves and lines of spring onions. I like to plant coriander, probably my favourite herb / spice plant, in clumps at the edges too.

But even all these attempts at disguise do not always work. So this year I am introducing another tactic, mixing the carrot seed in with packets of mixed annual flowers. Hopefully a pretty way of confusing those pesky carrot flies.

All the text books say, too, that carrot flies are incapable of flying above about 2 feet off the ground, so surrounding the carrot bed with a barrier to this height is supposed to work. I have yet to find a practical or attractive way of doing this.

If all else fails, I am also planting resistant varieties, imaginatively named Resistafly and Flyaway. Hopefully they do what it says on the can.