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.

Parsnips - the low down

Parsnip basics

• The seeds are like miniature paper plates, so don't sow on a windy day!
• There are many varieties. They all taste like, well, parsnips! I go for Tender 'n' True. It's cheap, no frills and does the job. I've tried other varieties and found no real improvement.
• The seeds are slow to germinate, so make sure the ground stays well-weeded or you'll lose the parsnip seedlings when they finally emerge.
• The seeds only stay viable for a year. Any longer and you'll have a high failure rate.
• You can sow parsnips much earlier than most other seeds, but there's not much point bolting the gun too early. You won't be needing a harvest until after next year's frosts anyway. No seed enjoys trying to germinate in cold, wet soil. 

• When you've done all that, don't forget to thin out your seedlings. I completely neglected my parsnips last year and as a consequence I now have lots of very puny parsnips. Schoolboy error!
• Parsnips are at their sweetest after the first frosts.
• Parsnips will stand in the ground all winter. No need to lift and store, though you may struggle to get them out if the ground is frozen.
• Parsnips have very few enemies, but they can attract carrot fly. However the damage is never anywhere near as severe as can happen in carrots.

• Leave some parsnips unharvested and they will grow into majestic plants next year.
• When they flower in their second year they are an invaluable attraction to hoverflies, which are excellent predators for all sorts of bugs which you don't want in your veg garden. In my trail last year, my collected seed fared much, much better than two year old bought seed.
• You can collect the seeds from these plants and use them next year. This way you never need to buy parsnip seed again.

What it looks like on the ground
Yesterday I harvested some of my puny parsnips. I will leave some unharvested to grow and flower this year.

The sign says Parsnips, the plants say garlic.

But there will be parsnips... eventually.

And today I sowed this year's seed. It is going between rows of garlic which as you can see has already grown well after I planted the cloves back in January. I find these two plants to make very good companions, and the garlic will be out of the ground and harvested before the parsnip plants grow big.

Another lesson I learned today - don't store your collected seed up on top of a bookcase with no lid on - mice will find it. Luckily my parsnip seeds were lidded, but I can't say the same for the fennel or coriander, which have been greedily devoured, just husks and mouse poo left as evidence!

When your companions begin to smother you

The title of this post is NOT a subtle hint to Sue. It's actually referring to pot marigolds, nasturtiums and borage. For these plants are wonderful companions to other plants in the vegetable plot and they randomly appear all over the place every year. But it's important not to get too attached to them, for they are still a plant and still compete for valuable resources. They all grow exceptionally well on my soil and, if left, will swamp the intended crop. So it is important to be firm with your companions, keep them in their place and kick them out when they start to get too much of a foothold.

Friday 1st July
The first cucumbers of the year. They'll be on tap now for a few months.

Look carefully at this picture of the geese and you'll spot a very young gosling, for Golly the grey goose stayed sitting on two eggs while the rest ventured outside. I held no hope, but one day a little bundle of yellow feathers poked its head out from under her.
Sadly this gosling has already succumbed. At three days old she took it out and I was relieved that the others accepted it. It successfully joined the flock and was very adept at keeping up with mum, who protected it well. So imagine my sadness when one morning, having watched it follow mum into the stable the evening before, mum came out of the stable without it. I found it dead down a small gap between the tyre nest and the wall. So frustrating.

Main job for the day was to weed the sweetcorn and the pumpkins for they were in danger of being swamped by self-seeded nasturtiums. Most have got their roots down and are growing fast enough to avoid significant slug damage, but a few of the sweetcorn needed replacing as they had been starved of light and withered. This is a reason to grow more than you need and hang on to the spares until you're absolutely sure they are no longer needed.

Saturday 2nd July
An extremely busy start to the weekend. The most important job was to catch all the sheep to worm them and apply treatment against fly strike (hence the blue crosses on their backs). We have become very efficient at this now so it didn't take long. A few years back this would have been a whole morning's task. As a reward for their cooperation, I moved the sheep onto new grass. In the picture below you can see the contrast between the grazed area they moved from and the new area of long grass. They always head straight for the clover.

Next up were the Ixworth chickens who needed their wings clipped. One of the hens had taken to hopping onto her house and over the fence and I didn't want her 'befriending' the other cockerel.
This is a simple and painless operation.

Once the animals were tended to, we turned our attention to the crops. The garlic has succumbed to rust, not helped by the fact that it has become overtaken by weeds so there is no air circulation. This is not too much of a problem and I had delayed harvesting until we got some rain in the hope that the bulbs would swell more, but under all those weeds it was getting too hot and sticky, a perfect environment for things to start rotting.

After a couple of hours in the sun, the garlic bulbs were looking much better. I'll let them dry out for quite a while before processing them to be stored through the autumn and winter. The best ones will be saved for replanting in late winter.
Part of the reason for the mass of weeds was that I had sown parsnips between the garlic rows. These two grow very well together, but this year the weeds came through too quickly and I couldn't hoe or pull them for fear of losing the tiny parsnip seedlings.
Clearing unwanted plants is very easy unless you have to pick your way around others.

Finally, a few images I snapped as I was taking a well deserved break.

The birds and the bees... and the sheep

The first honey of the year

complete with new labels.

Sometimes I don't mind getting wet, for once you're really wet through you stop noticing it and just carry on. But today I feel like staying dry, so I'm staying indoors. Besides, in the past week of warm, dry weather I've totally failed to mow the lawns so the soaking would come from the bottom up.
Why have I not mown the lawns? Priorities.
March and April are all about getting seeds sown and young plants raised. But come the second week of May, when the soil is warmed up and the danger of frost is passed, it's all about getting all those little plants into the soil so their roots can delve and explore and nourish. Stuck in seed trays or modules the plants just stop growing or, even worse, wither up and die if you accidentally miss watering their tray on a hot day.

Fortunately we have a rather well-timed week off school in which I can hopefully catch up with everything I've fallen behind with (mainly because I've been scooting all over the country chasing rare birds).

It's not all been about the vegetables though. There's been action on the sheep front and plenty of news from the poultry pen, most of it a bit calamitous, but not all.
So here's a run down of what's been going on.

Rambo shorn - a shadow of his former self.

24th May
The ewes and Rambo came down to the paddock near the house, briefly meeting the lambs on the other side of some sheep hurdles before the lambs went down to the big sheep field all on their own. The lambs were delighted to see their mums again and started bleating loudly. Their mums pretty much blanked them, fearing for their udders which are beginning to dry up now.
The reason for the swap was that Carl the shearer was due in the morning.

25th May
I managed to get all bar one (sorry for the pun, if you noticed it) of the sheep penned in with relative ease. They still come to investigate a bucket, but I wasn't quite quick enough to sneak round and close off the hurdles. One of the ewes made a dash for it. Never mind. It wasn't long before I had her penned in too. The secret with sheep is just to move them into smaller and smaller areas, remembering to bar (sorry!) their way back to the previous place. And never try to move a loan ewe. Easier to take the whole flock, separate the one and then take the rest back.
Carl arrived from his previous job and I was quite proud that I had the sheep so well penned and ready for shearing. Shetland sheep are sort of self-shedding, but they look a right mess while this is going on and some are too late for the warm weather. Two of my girls, the ones who had multiple lambs, were pretty much self-shorn already.


Shearing went well. Carl is amazing with the sheep. Strong but gentle. Even Rambo didn't put up too much of a fight this time. I got Carl to check and trim their feet too. For an extra £1 per sheep it's worth getting it done. As it was he didn't charge me for this and was not even going to charge for the two ewes which just needed a little tidying up. I paid him the whole amount though as he deserves it.



Last year we sold the wool to some spinners. They were very, very happy with it and we recovered the cost of shearing. This year we are planning to learn how to do peg looming so will keep as much wool as we need for ourselves. More on peg looming in a few weeks.

26th May
The exertions of the weekend were still telling on my body. I used to be able to do overnight drives seemingly with no effect but as I get older my body demands considerably more time to recover. So today after work it was a rest day, a lazy evening pottering around enjoying the smallholding, just taking stock of everything.
I did get the car serviced and MOT'ed today. It's a dangerous time of year to be without car (rare birds don't hang around waiting for the car to be fixed) so I was glad to get it done.

27th May
Only 3 eggs today! That's a pretty poor return. But it happens sometimes. The spring egg glut has happened and several of the hens have chicks or are sitting on eggs. Some of the hens are getting older so are less productive. The others have just gone on strike and we have a very sudden drop in egg production. This is not unusual, but inexplicably the timing seems to vary year on year. But I seem to remember this happening last year.
I should keep records, but I've never been good at that sort of thing. I like to be more inefficient! Organic. Creative.
Anyway, I sort of suspect the crows which now nest in the old ash trees. There's only one pair but they hang around the chicken pens a lot. I know they sometimes go down for the wheat and I've seen them take duck eggs when the ducks have decided to lay on the ground outside. What I'm not sure about is whether or not they have the audacity to enter one of the chicken houses and take the eggs. I can't believe that we could lose this many eggs and never catch them red-handed though, so  suspect it's more about the chickens than the crows.

Meanwhile, in the big chicken house where our Muscovy duck has inconveniently made her nest and been sat for the last five weeks, today we had the first cheep cheeps of a little duckling. Hopefully by tomorrow they'll all be hatched and I can think about where to move the young family for safety.

IT'S THE HOLIDAYS! I have eleven days off work.

28th May
A somewhat challenging day today.
Sue took the first honey of the year off the bees. Despite the proximity of a giant rape field, the bees actually seem to use a variety of sources of food. However, the presence of even some rape means that the honey is likely to set hard as a rock. Left in the frames in the hive, it quickly becomes irretrievable, so timing is crucial. It needs to be taken off the bees when it is just capped. For non beekeepers, the bees store the honey until it reaches the correct consistency and then cap it off with wax to prevent it drying out any more.
Sue's bee-keeping skills are developing fast now (thanks to the excellent West Norfolk Beekeeping Group).
Today she managed to mark one of the queens. Finding the queen is tricky so it is useful when you do find her to trap her in a queen cage and dab her with a bright colour. But it's a bit daunting handling the queen when the whole hive centres around her. This was the first time Sue had performed this delicate operation.
She also removed drone comb. This is the brood cells which will produce male bees and is where the varroa mite can really get a hold in a hive. Since the drones are pretty useless it is best to remove. Sue feeds it to the chickens who very much enjoy pecking out the juicy drone larvae.

I said today was challenging. That's because I was trying my best to work in the veg plot despite the unwanted attentions of Sue's angry bees, who were even more grumpy than usual as somebody had stolen their honey and interfered with their queen!

I resorted to wearing a hat with a veil over. I'm pretty good at ignoring the attentions of inquisitive bees and can even tolerate them landing in my hair. Usually they find their way out again. I find I just have to freeze still for about a minute. Then they go away but I remain frozen, for after a few seconds they always come back, just to check.
However, once in a while you get a complete nutter hell-bent on destruction. You can tell by the buzz. They go for the face or land in your hair and start burrowing and buzzing fiercely. If they're in your face the best thing is to run for it, but they pursue with vigour. In your hair I reckon you've got a 50/50 chance of getting them out before the sting goes in!
One of Sue's hives is way too aggressive. They have been since the back end of last autumn and things haven't improved. Unfortunately the queen will have to be replaced. A new one, specially bred to be peaceful, will be brought in and should then produce calmer offspring. The bees which remain should calm down too.
This is why there are no photos of the bees. I used to be able to stand right next to the hive while Sue had them open.

Anyway, in the face of such challenge I still got quite a lot done outside. Most of the outdoor tomatoes are now planted. The main varieties are Roma and San Marzano (both Italian plum tomatoes for sauces), Gardener's Delight and Outdoor Girl, a new variety I'm trying which is supposed to do well even if the weather is not ideal.
What sort of harvest we get from the outdoor toms is unpredictable. If they come good we will have tons. If blight strikes we could get none. And if the summer is dull we could have lots and lots of green tomatoes.

The other job for today was to sow the kidney beans, variety Canada Wonder. I've sown these direct, but if they don't come there's still time to resow them in modules. They are interplanted with Perpetual Spinach, a new crop for me.

29th May
Sad news. No sign of the Muscovy duckling this morning. Mum has moved the nest and the remaining eggs are all over the place. Maybe it was a mistake letting the chickens back in to roost last night.
I've closed the house off now and the girl is back on her eggs. The chickens will get a shock when they try to go to bed tonight, but I have laid on alternative accommodation for them if they find it.

Today was a perfect day for working outside but all I could get done was picking out and planting French Marigolds (tagetes). These act as a wonderful insect deterrent. I've planted a load of them in amongst my turnip and swede sowings to try to deter the flea beetles which destroyed the first sowing. I plant them between tomato plants too. They keep off whitefly. Then I just dot them around the place as a general defence against insect attack.
The other type of marigold is Pot Marigold (calendula). This is a pretty good companion plant too, though tagetes is a stronger deterrent. Calendulas are more hardy though and self-seed everywhere, appearing every spring almost in weed proportions. Fortunately they are easily pulled or transplanted to where I want them.
My work was interrupted though as today was the Smallholders meeting. I so wish they would consider evening meetings but I've made my point and it's not been taken. It was tempting to carry on working on the veg patch but fortunately with holidays coming up there's not too much pressure. Besides, today there was a visit to a smallholding I'd not visited before. It's always good to visit other places, though invariably I come back full of new ideas and jobs to do. There was a very informative talk on building a pole barn as well as the chance to catch up with my smallholding friends.
I also managed to pick up a copy of The Polytunnel Book for £1. This is my polytunnel bible. If I had to recommend one book, this would be the one.

There was just time after the meeting to take a small diversion on the way home to Paxton Pits where a Great Reed Warbler had been singing for about a week. These are like one of our regular reed warblers (small boring brown birds which sing from reedbeds) but a mammoth version and they don't sing, they holler! As it was, our Great Reed Warbler was having a very shy day. We heard a few loud calls but it wasn't in the mood for climbing to the top of the reeds and belting out its song. We left with a 'heard only' record.
Today was a good chance to try the car out too. The braking had been a bit shaky before the service and the garage had replaced something on the anti-roll bar. However, the problem seems to have got worse! Over 60mph it feels like the car has a wobbly wheel and breaking requires a firm hand on the shaky steering wheel. It'll have to go back in. Let's hope a rare bird doesn't turn up while I'm carless. Over in Denmark a Sulphur-bellied Warbler has turned up. It's so rare I can't even begin to explain. If one of those turned up here while my car was in the garage I think I'd just start walking.

30th May
Today I released the turkey family. They've been incarcerated in a very luxurious stable since their birth for their own safety. Mum led them all around the smallholding. Terry the Turkey would have been so proud if he were still around.

Early evening I decided to try and put them away for the night. After a couple of failed attempts, I managed to get them into one of the new sheds which has been kitted out in readiness. It's pretty nice in there.

The rest of the day was spent planting out my brassicas. I've abandoned the idea of using carpet underlay to stop root fly laying its eggs in the soil. Firstly each collar provided a cosy home for a slug with a handy local food source (my cauliflower seedlings). I sorted this out, slugs chopped in half, slug pellets scattered (I use the organic ferric phosphate ones, though I still try to minimise their use) but today I found half of the surviving plants dried up. The underlay obviously hadn't let through enough water. So that was it. Collars abandoned. Luckily I only really needed about a third of my caulis to make it through and the ones which have survived are looking very strong. There are more on the way as I sow them in succession. This means I can fill the gaps and that they will not all harvest at once.

Today, along with the cauliflowers, I've planted Romanesco, Calabrese, Cavolo Nero, Scarlet Kale, Red Cabbage, Purple Sprouting Broccoli and Cabbage January King.
They're all under netting and I've interplanted with marigolds and hyssop as companion plants.

This is a concerted effort at finally growing and harvesting brassicas successfully. If it fails I might just give up.

31st May
And so to the last day of May. A welcome rainy day, for I was starting to get worried about the young plants and seedlings outside. The water butts are filling up nicely.
Two surprises when I let the birds out this morning. The first was a robin inexplicably encaged in one of the broody hen runs. Quite how it got in goodness knows. I released it. That was good act number one.
The second was to find a very small gosling stuck in the feed trough near one of our Toulouse goose nests. Fortunately the grey geese are not quite so aggressive in their defence and I was able to gently pick up the little gosling, which felt cold, and place it next to mum on the edge of the nest. When I looked later it was gone, so I presume safely tucked in underneath mum again.
Not such good news from our other sitting mums-to-be. No sign of any ducklings under the Muscovy, despite the first one hatching three days ago. And no sign of any Ixworth eggs hatching under the other broody hen either.
To compensate for the various failures of our broody hens and ducks, we have placed 18 Ixworth hen eggs into our new (second-hand) incubator. It'll be more work for us to raise the chicks but we should have a greater success rate.

Every time we use an incubator we have a power cut. I don't think it's the fault of the incubators! It's just the poor rural infrastructure which means that every time it rains or is windy the power cuts out. Today we had two and the second lasted three hours. Hopefully it won't affect the development of the eggs.

So that's it. May has flown by and tomorrow it's the official start of meteorological summer. Bring on the rain!

Everything is growing... quickly

2nd May
The broad beans are up and doing well, well enough indeed to take the netting off and finally be able to access all the weeds which have started to emerge amongst them. I planted out Poached Egg plants among them - this supposedly prevents them being attacked by blackfly and it seems to have worked for the past few years so I'll continue with it.
I got half of the onions weeded too before heavy rain in the afternoon drove me into the polytunnel.
No matter though, plenty of jobs to keep me busy in there. I sowed more carrot seeds. The first two packs of Early Nantes seeds I used have been discarded. I was beginning to think there was something very wrong with my soil but different varieties have since germinated well.
I planted more kohl rabi seedlings out into the beds - these are the last ones for the polytunnel. From now they'll be sown outside. The early turnips I sowed are doing well (after a similar disaster with the first batch of seeds) and needed thinning. Hopefully we'll get some young turnips before long and the plants can then come out to make room for the young pepper plants I've got coming along.
I sowed some peas for outdoors too, deciding not to risk planting them straight into the soil outside - it also brought me some time to construct a support for them.
3rd May
We were awoken at 6am by the dogs barking. They were quite persistent, so obviously thought there was something out there. I went outside but nothing seemed amiss. It was a lovely morning with a gentle and warm southerly breeze.
I decided to spray the last few creeping thistles which survived last year's regime of attack. I have learned that just a few pests and weeds need radical solutions, but I try to do this as efficiently and as carefully as I can so as to leave the wildlife hopefully minimally affected. I tried pulling the nettles and thistles but on the scale of our smallholding it was an impossible task. I still leave patches of nettles around the edge, but the creeping thistles really are too invasive to tolerate. It's a great shame as they are alive with bees and butterflies when in flower.
The day continued hot and the southerly air brought with it an arrival of Swallows along with the first Swift of the year and a brief Sand Martin. Up till now we only had 4 swallows back on the farm. I always know when new arrivals come in as there is much excited chattering and chasing.
The first orange-tip butterfly was fluttering around too and later the first small white (= cabbage white!!!) This prompted me to erect the netting over my main brassica patch. I've constructed a veritable fort which should protect my greens from caterpillar and pigeon attack.

One final job for the day was to move all the sheep down to the big field. The paddock up by the house needs a little time to recover before I move the lambs back up again without their mums.

All the ewes and lambs meet up for the first time.

There is much excitement.

And after the final job, there is usually another one. In weather like this, keeping everything watered in the polytunnel is crucial. Forget for one day or miss a tray and a whole batch of seedlings can be dead. I'm using the overhead irrigation more this year but a bit of targeted watering every evening is still necessary.
After I'd given the hanging strawberries a good soaking I decided to tuck some straw underneath the developing fruits, firstly to act as a mulch and keep in the moisture and secondly to prevent the strawberries from rotting where they touched the soil surface.




4th May
22 Centigrade today. A real scorcher!
I sowed my first beetroots direct outside, between the onions. They are supposedly good companions. I sowed my quinoa seeds too. Well, some of them. I bought a packet which contained several thousand seeds, to be sown direct a foot apart. I had enough for a field full! Unsure of how they would germinate, I sowed them much more thickly. I sowed some in modules in the polytunnel too, just to be sure.
Quinoa is a new crop for me. I like to try new things, but they don't always work. Generally there are reasons why some vegetables (and grains) have become more popular than others, but there is the occasional exception to the rule.
Lastly, Rameses is down to two feeds per day. This in in preparation for weaning him off his bottle milk. His afternoon feed will consist of being offered a tub of creep feed and beet pellets (pre-soaked). I'm sure there will be loud protestations!

Rameses comes out for his feed and has been making friends with the dogs.

5th May

Gosling's first trip into the garden proper.

Not much done on the smallholding today. I did get to the hardware store though so was able to fix the hinges on the duck houses.
40 Sweetcorn minipop seedlings appear to have gone missing! I don't suspect foul play, more an ever increasing propensity to put things down and completely forget about them!
6th May
A white duck egg! The first for some time. The white duck has been through a bit of a hard time. We had to separate her from the black Cayugas as the young male just would not leave her alone, eventually drawing blood on her head and wing. We separated her off for a while. Meanwhile the overly hormonal drake was 'disappeared', but not before he had exhausted another of the females. Sadly we lost her.
The good news is that the white duck has made friends with the lone white Muscovy drake - the larger drake has taken the two females for himself. She has even started going into the same house as him and the egg shows that she is healthy and happy again. Maybe she approved of her new door hinges too.





More exciting news was the first tail-raising display by Captain Peacock. It wasn't spectacular and appeared to be aimed at a duck, but it was still a significant moment.
Finally I undertook a big job today, restoring the asparagus bed. It was in a bit of a state. Keeping weeds out is very difficult and the ridges I grow it on were collapsing. Furthermore, cracks had appeared in the soil around this years emerging spears and last year's decomposing stems had made more perfect hidy holes for slugs, who seem partial to a nice bit of young asparagus.

Traditionally asparagus beds were treated with salt, which would kill off weeds (and I presume do a pretty good job on slugs). I decided that some old builders sand I had would do a similar job, as well as filling in the cracks and holes. Anyway it was pretty hard work but I was pleased with the finished results of my work. The asparagus will very soon begin growing at a phenomenal rate and we can harvest it until about the end of June when we leave it to grow and gather the sun's goodness to store in its roots.

Polyculture, the way forward?

There follows an in-depth philosophical overview of the nature of vegetable gardening. There is a lot of detail about the principles I follow. It undoubtedly poses more questions than it gives answers. For this I apologise, but I am feeling a bit confused when it comes to how to manage my vegetable plot. It is time for a re-evaluation. Not that anything is going dreadfully wrong.

Every time I visit the Green Backyard in Peterborough I come away inspired. When we were last there making our rocket stoves, I looked around the vegetable garden and it looked nothing like mine. Notwithstanding the amazing sculptures and willow weaving which emerge every time you turn a corner, the vegetables themselves looked different. There is clearly a plan of sorts in effect, but it looks all cottage gardeny. Love-in-a-mist and salsify dot themselves around, along with marigolds, nasturtium, rosemary, sage, poppies. Every space has been filled, but just as often it would seem accidentally.









This is close to the image I had in my head of what I wanted my veg plot to look like, but I've strayed a long way from it, lured by neat lines and rotavated empty spaces. One bed in particular caught my eye. For just a few months ago it was a strawberry bed, before we did this to it!

Digging out the clay for the cob oven

But now it has been backfilled and planted up with black kale, peas, chives, courgettes, French beans, lettuces, potatoes. The plants still had plenty of room to grow into and nothing had yet self-seeded into the bed, so this was just about the only bed with visible bare earth.
But hang on a minute! What's happened to the rotation? I see plants from all different groups in the same bed.

Rotation is the keystone of organic gardening. The basic theory is that similar plants take similar nutrients from the ground, while others actually enrich the soil. So if you rotate your crops then you can control the soil to the benefit of each plant group and the soil will not become depleted. You top up the goodness with plenty of compost and manure before the spuds and the brassicas (green, cabbagey things) go in. The root crops go into soil which is not too heavy in nutrients, as they don't need them. The beans go in before the brassicas, as they fix nitrogen in the soil.
That's the theory.
A further benefit is that pests and diseases don't get time to establish in the soil, as each year they find a different type of crop in their patch. This is especially important when it comes to the brassicas.




With a bit of planning, this system is nice and straightforward. Crops go in, crops come out. And every year you dig and rotavate the whole lot, add your organic nutrients and let the chickens in to clear the ground of creepy crawlies and to further enrich the soil. Almost as simple as it sounds.

As well as rotation, there are other gardening principles which I have tried to embrace, most notably companion planting. Some plants prefer the company of others, but most importantly, some plants deter and confuse pests. Herbs are good at this, as are marigolds (calendula and tagetes) and nasturtiums.

A lone tagetes tries to protect the surrounding turnps

There are other principles which I don't follow, such as no-dig gardening. In this version, you don't dig! Sounds ideal! Instead you just keep adding oodles of compost to the surface, so never treading the soil down and never bringing all the weed seeds to the surface, which can be a big problem when you have just rotavated the ground in spring.
I can understand this, but think it works best on a very small scale garden with maybe just a few small beds. Even then, I don't actually think many gardens would have the capacity to produce enough compost to sustain this system. I suspect you either need enough land to bring in compost materials from elsewhere or, in urban gardens, people end up spending a small fortune on bags of compost, which somehow feels wrong to me.

Anyway, as much as I can I avoid treading on the soil - hence a system of small beds so that much can be reached from the grass paths. But gradually I have joined the beds, as the effort of mowing and edging the intricate system of paths became unmanageable and there is no way I can afford or desire to turn all my paths over to bought in aggregates. I must admit though that the volume of weed seeds dragged to the surface by the spring rotavation is a problem and they often overwhelm the emerging crops as they race ahead of them. There's only so close to your crops that a hoe can go and only a certain amount of hand weeding that my back can take.
In general, if the soil is dry, I hoe. If it is wet, I pull.

So, that's the theory over and done with.
Now for the practical. And I'm afraid it begins with a list of problems I have encountered, which have led me to slowly move towards bigger beds with neat lines of crops with bare soil between. It's all very ordered and, if you leave enough space between rows, you can get down them with a small rotavator which makes the large scale part of weeding a doddle.


I originally started out trying to combine gardening by rotation with companion planting, but found that it was tricky to hoe between the rows, or to get the companion plants to mature in time to do their job. If I planted marigolds in with my potatoes, they got between the rows and stopped me cultivating by any other method than by hand, which is just not practical on a large scale. Worse than that, maybe they kept certain pests and diseases at bay, but they stopped the airflow between plants which is so important in the battle to stave off blight, a pestilent fungal disease which carries a much greater threat than all other diseases and pests put together. One further problem, the calendulas needed to get going early so that they were healthy plants bursting with flowers in time to have a positive impact on the spuds. But the easiest way to get the spuds in the ground is just to rotavate or dig the whole patch in preparation for the seed potatoes going in. You just can't be working around small emerging marigold plants.



The potato patch. Pretty much bare earth for up to 9 months of the year

Another good idea for growing potatoes is to grow a couple of horseradish plants in with them. Just a couple will do. I tried this, taking cuttings from my horseradish patch, but they only really got going in their second year, when the spuds had moved on! I decided to leave them in the ground so they would be there next time the spuds came round, in a couple more years. But most of them got rotavated in the winter, as they had retreated below ground. Even if I had marked their location rotavating around them would have been a pain. And besides, I would need to plant one in every bed, as eventually every bed would be host to potatoes.

So I have decided to abandon companion planting in the potato patch. It looked prettier and felt right, but it was just not practical. Shame.

Calendula marigolds are excellent companions for most plants

I tried growing carrots mixed in with annual flowers too. These are supposed to confuse the carrot root fly and I figured it would look very attractive, a wild flower patch which also yields carrots. Trouble was, the flowers outgrew the carrots, which are slow to get going, then crowded them out. Besides, I ended up being more confused than the flies when I couldn't find the carrots in amongst the mass. At the end of the year, when the flowers had died down, I found carrots in the ground when I was rotavating. Most of them got shredded as the tops had died down and I couldn't find them before the blades of the rotavator. I could have followed the original lines, but the crop was too scant to do this as the young carrots had been overwhelmed. To make matters even worse, they were riddled with carrot fly!
I tried some more practical companion planting, growing my rows of carrots between rows of onions and garlic. This had more effect keeping the carrotfly away, but I have still found it easier to grow my onions separately, in their own bed each year. I just rotavate their patch to a fine tilth, plant the sets, keep it all well weeded and, come late summer, pull them all out again leaving a nice neat patch of bare earth ready to be worked in the autumn and left bare in the winter, for the chickens to pick over. Last year I decided to let self-seeded nasturtiums grow in amongst the onions. They grew too well! The onions got lost underneath and many of them ended up rotting off. Lesson learned. So now the onions grow on their own and the carrots grow in neat lines behind the protection of netting. Besides, the onions and garlic need fertile soil and the carrots don't, so growing them together does not really work in that sense. Except that I am now reading that it is not fertile soil that makes carrots fork after all. It is hard and stony ground, which mine is not. I must say, it is very rare that a carrot forks on me. A lot of the parsnips did last year, but I think that was because I didn't prepare the soil deeply enough. Mind you, I read so much contradictory advice that I never really know what to believe. So many of the old gardeners' ways are now superseded by modern methods, but I'm really quite confused over how much of that old wisdom was just wrong advice handed down from generation to generation and how much was the incredibly valuable benefit of experience. I'd like to think the latter, but then you look at the over reliance on nasty chemicals which I guess comes from the post war years and you begin to wonder.
I have read too, that the best way to maximise the nitrogen collected by bean plants is actually to uproot them and put the whole lot on the compost bin, in which case you can then eventually return the nitrogen to whichever part of the plot you wish. So bang goes the idea of leaving those nodules in the ground to give nitrogen to the brassicas which follow the beans.
It's fair to say I am feeling more than a little confused. I think I have read too much!

Companion plants get in the way... Brassicas don't need to follow beans... Carrots don't split in fertile soil...Small beds are unmanageable on a large scale...Are all my principles going down the swanny????

On the other hand, I am getting good potato harvests. For the first time this year I am getting success with my carrots. I am (almost) on top of the weeds thanks to straightforward rows and an annual winter clearance of the soil.

Yet something feels wrong. Much as the OCD part of me likes the neat rows and clean ground between them, the creative, nostalgic part of me yearns for that cottage gardeny look and the radical side of me wants desperately to believe that there is merit in companion planting and working with nature rather than constantly fighting to stave it off.

Feverfew growing up against the polytunnel

On the one hand, I don't want the soil so full that there is no ventilation. Also I don't want to be weeding by hand all the time. But on the other, it feels as if the soil is bare for half it's life and that having nothing between neat lines of crops is just allowing the soil to dry out and become sterile.

The vision I had when I was planning everything was one of vegetables accompanied by herbs, fruit bushes and perennial flowers, as well as self-seeding colonisers such as California poppy, nasturtium, love-in-a-mist, angelica. And I wanted comfrey and horseradish and lovage dotted around. I wanted to let plants go to seed and surprise me the next year.

But as soon as you put a rosemary bush, a redcurrant, some horseradish root and some flowering bulbs into a veg bed, it becomes impossible to rotavate it. And with that it becomes impossible to maintain a well-ordered rotation.
I've never managed to be organised enough to grow green manures properly, but this year I am planning to. Imagine trying to dig or rotavate these back into the soil whilst trying to avoid various plants dotted around the bed. Impossible.

So where is this blog post going? Is it here just to confuse, to pose questions and highlight obstacles?
Don't worry. There is an answer coming up, of sorts.

I came upon a system which sort of gets the best of both worlds. I would continue with the rotation and rotavation. But the new, bigger beds and efficient rows of crops have meant that I can spare some beds for other purposes.I toyed with the idea of leaving some fallow, onto which all my compost would go throughout the year. This is a component of no dig gardening and I may incorporate this to some extent in the future.  But instead I decided to allow myself the luxury of having whole beds bursting with colourful flower mixes scattered around the veg plot. One in each quarter of the rotation.

Last year's bee mix which I have
allowed to come back naturally

This would allow me to have neat, ordered rows of vegetables but the appearance of the whole would be much more aesthetically pleasing and more wildlife friendly too, especially for pollinators.
It worked quite well last year, but I still have large amounts of bare soil. By the time the early potato beds are being cleared, the bean beds are only just getting going.
There was none of this bare earth at the Green Backyard. As the potatoes were coming out, the beans (or something else) would grow into the vacant space. And what about those mixed crops? Surely not the product of complete gardening ignorance?

So I asked. And in the reply I heard words like "polyculture" and "successional growth".
I got home and started looking these up and, to be quite honest, I found very little information on them. Polyculture seems to be an area of permaculture, which I have never really got into. It seems to me to work best in warmer climes.
Anyway, I eventually found titbits of information. The principle is that you try not to grow any plant next to another one of itself. That way there is no obvious target for pests, which are confused by the array of colours and shapes. It is also more difficult for diseases and fungal threats to jump from plant to plant. That all makes sense, but what happens to your rotation, that integral principle of organic gardening? And how do you stop the weeds taking over? And how do you protect your peas and brassicas if they're dotted all over the place?

brassica bed - the whole rotation system seems
perfectly designed for growing brassicas

I understand all about working with nature, but I have come to realise that the ideal is not always practical. I actually don't really want to find caterpillars in my caulis or slugs in my lettuce. Nor though, quite definitely, do I want my food or garden polluted with nasty chemicals. I suspect that when it comes to it, even with my current system, I am actually working with nature a lot more than most gardeners.

I eventually got hold of a book with a couple of pages devoted to polyculture.The answer to my question on rotation was simpler than I thought possible. It basically said that, if you dot plants fairly randomly (even if there is a planting pattern in each bed), you are unlikely to end up growing the same type of crop in the same place year after year. Simple! Okay, you may (will) get some crops going into the same ground, but it will not be on a large or long enough scale to create any significant problems. You are far more likely to attract pests and diseases by growing monoculture clumps. If you're still really hung up by wanting a strict rotation in place, you could always go to the effort of planning the whole plot out square foot by square foot. Depends how much spare time you have on those long winter nights, I guess.
I think, though, that I am more attracted to the former. That way, plants can be allowed to self seed randomly too. If there are too many, they can always be taken out, or moved to where you want them.

Polyculture also has a unique approach to controlling weeds. Firstly, it's basically a minimal digging system, which means that your perennials and self-seeded waifs and strays can escape the ravages of the rotavator. Instead, you scatter the ground with salad seeds (lettuces, radishes, mustard) mixed in with some seeds of plants which take longer to mature. You then cover it with a layer of compost. The idea is that the salad plants mature quickly and fill the ground. As you pick them, other crops mature to fill their space. Successional growing. (Not quite the same as successional planting, which is where you sow a crop every couple of weeks so they don't all mature at eh same time).
Now, I am not quite so convinced by this. Firstly, I would have enough lettuces, leaves and radishes to feed a small army. Secondly, even if I didn't turn the soil, my fenland soil is so fertile that I really don't think I could hold the weeds at bay. In a small vegetable plot, I could hand weed, but on a larger scale this would not be practical.

Anyway, apart from that, I really like the idea of polyculture. It is sort of what I was aiming for in the first place, except that it introduces the idea of mixing the crops.
So I have decided to experiment with one bed, where all my spare seedlings have gone. I have even scattered some salad seeds in a small area.
My suspicion is that I will end up with a mix of growing methods. Each quarter of the veg plot, which is arranged like a wheel, will still have sections devoted to roots, spuds, brassicas or beans 'n' peas. I will keep the beds devoted to flower mixes. They can stay there from year to year. But I will introduce a few polyculture beds too.
Hopefully the systems won't clash. That way I can continue to experiment and the best system will, eventually, make itself apparent.