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.

The Drought Is Over

138.8mm of rain for Holbeach - that's us!

Last night it rained. Proper rain. More rain than we've accumulated in the last 4 months.

It's the first we've had for a long, long time. In fact I think it's only rained a few times since the beginning of April. and only once this summer.

[ed. I knew it rained a lot and the fields were full of standing water, but it turns out that on a wet day countrywide, Holbeach was the wettest with a staggering 138.8mm of rain!!!] 

Unfortunately there is an obvious pattern in recent years of all our rain saving itself up for the occasional deluge which surrounds uncomfortably long periods of aridity.

It's made for a difficult growing season (to put it mildly) and we've had to think about how much feed we need to bring in for sheep to overwinter.

In the veg plot, crop after crop has failed. Beans, sweetcorn, potatoes, onions, cabbage.... the list goes on. Those planted earlier in the year have mostly come to nothing and it hasn't even been possible to plant out any young plants sown in late April and May. For the most part the rain has come too late for another attempt at things. At least it's a good opportunity to empty the freezers and in reality we never go short of food.

The barley crop next door has been baled. Just look how dry everything is.

If temperatures of 40C and prolonged dry periods are to be a feature of our lives then I can only guess that plums are going to take over the world! Every single plum tree is literally dripping with fruit. Thank goodness we have several varieties which don't all ripen at once.

The forest garden has fared better as that is designed to be a sustainable system which can deal with weather extremes, though I've lost a few young perennials which were tricky to source in the first place.

The controlled climate of the polytunnel will give us some crops this year and I've a couple of new greenhouses too. We'll be living on squashes, peppers, aubergines and tomatoes.

I mentioned winter feed for the sheep. That's because we've already had to start dipping into it.

We are careful with our stocking levels and try to leave some paddocks long to prevent the worst excesses of drying out. But months of dry weather and a couple of intense heatwaves have left the paddocks looking a touch bare and scorched. We bought in our winter hay from a fellow smallholder a few weeks back - the first hay harvest was incredibly early this year, but we've already had to start topping up the sheep's diet, in particular the rams.

So it was fortunate that one of our local smallholders was having a clear-out and we were able to purchase a whole load of old hay and straw. Shetland sheep are not bothered about the quality of their hay so it doesn't matter that it's not this year's.

I've got more straw than I need for animal bedding so I decided to lay some of it onto all the veg beds which I've abandoned for the year. Sometimes it's best to cut your losses and start preparing for next year. The straw will protect the surface, keep in moisture and gradually rot down and be incorporated into the soil by the worms. Over the winter the ducks will sort out any slugs which try to use it as cover and will further fertilise the beds.

I might have a go at some straw bale gardening too, then let the straw bales rot down into the beds. I'm thinking especially about some of the potatoes.

Cats and dogs... and fish and frogs

Finally it rained!
A little at first, on my birthday. Just an hour or so, but enough to wake the grass up a little.

We had been enjoying temperatures regularly in the high 20s and even up into the 30s. As much as I like hot weather, the ground was like concrete and getting much work done outside was absolutely exhausting.

But then, on 27th July, two months since the drought began, the heavens opened. The temperature plummeted by 10 degrees and months worth of rain fell in a couple of days. The water butts filled within an hour, quite unprecedented. I got soaked unblocking a couple of gutters, but soon had the ponds full again courtesy of diverted rainwater.
The rain was the right sort too. A little heavy maybe, but there were gaps between downpours for the soil to soak up the moisture.

Within a couple of days the top 3 inches of soil became workable again and the air was cool enough for my old body to work outside. Only problem - I had one day before we were off on our summer vacation.

ed again... now back from our week away and we are pretty much back to square one. No more rain and temperatures back up in the 30s.
While we were in cool damp West Wales, Fenland was baking again.

Turkey Surprise

Another catch-up post which should bring us to mid July.
The drought continues... enough said about that. It is becoming a real problem.

Linseed field casts a blue shimmer as if reflecting the constant blue skies

The field next to us is almost always wheat. When it's not it's rape. The field behind us is almost always sugar beet. But this year we have something different, presumably because of the poor sowing conditions early in the year. Instead we have maize in the back field, as opposed to sweetcorn. This is a biofuel crop - astonishing that some of Britain's most fertile land is used to feed our energy consumption rather than our bellies. This change of land use did mean that we had two pairs of lapwings which I presume attempted to nest. I think the crows got them though.
And in the field next to us we have a delightful blue see of linseed. It is certainly attracting the cabbage whites at the moment.

In the veg plot, I have harvested the garlic and should really do the same with the shallots and onions. All these crops tried to bolt this year, unsurprisingly.

The broad beans are processed, mostly blanched and frozen and their place will be taken by Purple Sprouting Broccoli plants just as soon as it rains and I can dig even the tiniest holes in the soil. I almost missed the calabrese but caught it just before the buds opened. This freezes really well so I grow the crop to mature in two groups rather than over a long period.

Blanching Calabrese

Raspberries and Blackcurrants went mad this year. We are picking bags and bags of them. Every available space has now gone in the freezers.
When this happens Sue hunts through for last year's produce and digs it from the bottom of the freezers for wine and jam making.
She has just set a blackcurrant wine going and we were excited to be informed that raspberries make just about the best country wine going.



I always reserve one or two veg beds for bee crops as well as letting some parsnips go over to flower in their second year. These are a wonderful magnet for hoverflies.
This year I planted a cornfield mix with added barley and wheat. It hasn't quite turned out as I expected, for the whole patch filled with phacelia and borage. I am not sure whether this was residual seed in the soil or whether it was in the cornfield mix.
Anyhow the proper cornfield flowers are coming through underneath now and the whole is a blaze of colour and buzzing with bees.


The Pekin ducks we bought as 10 day olds are growing at stratospheric rates. Now big enough to be safe from crows, we let them out a couple of days back and herded them into the veg plot. The pond in there has dropped right down and is rather green, so I put the hose on to top it up. I didn't expect them all to just go diving right on in, but by the time I returned from the tap they were having a whale of a time. They were looking a bit green though!
We put some tyres and old planks in, for ducks are quite capable of getting waterlogged and drowning if there is no easy way out.
Amazingly having a proper bath and a thorough preen instantly changed the ducklings into ducks. There yellow down was superseded by creamy white and they suddenly look all grown up.

The meat chickens we had are now gone - don't ask if you don't want to know! They reached their weight in a much shorter time than we had anticipated. They only got a stay of execution as we did not have finishers ration in. This is the non-medicated pellets they are fed for the last week or two as the growers pellets need to be withdrawn.

Chickens just hanging around waiting to be plucked.
(they are not alive).

'Processing' the chickens was a big job, spread over two mornings. Let's just say that Friday 13th was an ominous date for the last seven. It is made much quicker by wet-plucking. We dip the carcass into a giant pot of water at 160F for 45 seconds. This loosens the feathers just enough without meaning that the skin rips easily. It reduces plucking time from over 20 minutes to under 5. You don't get a perfectly neat finish, but nearly all of our chicken is joined anyway so that it more easily fits in the small spaces in the freezer.
This time I boiled up the chicken feet and made a jelly stock which I divided up to go in the freezer. A good stock makes all the difference to so many recipes and I begrudge paying for those little foil packs.

The other chickens, the ragtag bunch of old ladies which we sentimentally let live on to old age, they are laying no more than two eggs a day between them. It is always a lean time and the drought isn't helping. Here are two of them and a Muscovy duck sat tight in the nest boxes. Between these three they were sitting on a grand total of one egg!


Last weekend we went along to our Country Winemaking group, again part of the Smallholders Club. Tonight we were doing blind wine tasiting. Sue's contribution was some elderflower champagne.
Fortunately we still had some left, for earlier in the week one of the bottles had exploded with such ferocity that it smashed a hole in the side of the plastic bin we were keeping it in.


We returned from Wine group to a big surprise. Four baby turkeys wandering around with the others. I didn't think they were due for another week yet. We had planned on removing the older poults before this happened, but all seemed to be getting along ok so we left them.
The next morning, quite by chance, I got a message from somebody in need of two newborn turkeys as her hen had accidentally destroyed all the eggs she had been sitting on. This was fine by me, for we are going to have excess turkeys this year and some need to be sold anyway.
Getting them out from under mum was a bit of a challenge but the mission was successfully achieved late evening so that the chicks could be put under their new mum in the dark. I have just received news that mum has accepted them and both are doing well.

So that brings us up to mid July. Just a week to go until schools break up for the summer. I'd like to think that will be the cue for endless downpours, but I somehow doubt it. This drought feels like it's in for the long haul.

Not so Scilly

Tuesday 3rd April 2012

Only two days to go now till the hosepipe ban. Of late, my mind has been turning to last year, when we didn't get a drop of rain for three months. After the big freeze, it had seemed that Mother Nature did not approve of our smallholding plans and everything was an uphill struggle. The drought has continued, with the dykes empty and the meadow, last February holding standing water, this year covered in deep cracks. But, since last May, we have actually had just about sufficient rain to keep things alive, if not particularly flourishing. 
However, it has been getting harder and harder to remember the last significant rainfall we had, and the soil is on its way to concrete and dust again.

But today, so promised the forecast, we would get rain by the bucketload, and tomorrow too. 
I was supposed to be in Penzance to see the sun rise this morning, waiting to board the Scillonian III to take me to see a Northern Waterthrush. That's right, I finally buckled. My pager kept telling me it was still there, lurking in those pools at Lower Moors. If it didn't play ball, I was prepared to stay overnight  and give it another whole day....

That was all until we saw the weather forecast for the SW. Gales and driving rain. The Waterthrush will have to wait a while longer.

Hence, I am still here and spent the day sowing seeds, some to replace those I lost and plenty of new ones too. The dining room, the greenhouse, the coldframe, all are now full to the brim with seedtrays.

About five o'clock this evening, the rain (and hail) finally came, and did it come! I felt sorry for the man who got soaked making the short run from his van to the door to buy some pork! Not so sorry for the geese, who seemed to be in their element.
Within minutes the water butts were almost replenished, ensuring enough water for another week or two, whatever the weather. In fact, when it rains I fill everything I can with water. It's much better for the plants and animals when it's come straight from the sky.

As always when I sow seeds for too long, I have given myself an awful back twinge. I can dig all day long but the weight of those seeds!