Our mini rainforest

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

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

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

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

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

Respect your Elders

Elder is one of my favourite trees. It has beautiful creamy flower umbels early in the summer which are a magnet for insects followed by deep purple berries, plates of juicy jewels which wild birds love, especially blackcaps. Maybe it's how the males top up the colour of their shiny caps.

When cut back, elder grows a multitude of dead-straight vertical new shoots which are perfect for lopping off and poking into the ground to become new bushes. Elder wood and leaves have a unique, indescribable smell which I love too. I don't know what the chemical is, but it's said if you poke a stem into a mole run it will drive the mole away - not that I'd want to do that. Elder twigs can be hung in fruit trees to deter insects and the leaves have long been used to keep flies away.

Elder is intertwined in folklore too, with strong links to witches.

But practically, the elder makes a great addition to the hedgerow, woodland or the forest garden. Where it is not quite so welcome is growing in the small space between my sheds and stable block. One has grown up and reached high above, up to about 20 feet tall. I left it as it was still doing more good than harm, but it has grown so much that the trunk is obstructing necessary repairs to the shed rooves.

So I was going to chop it right back and maybe even take it out completely until the turkeys had other ideas. They roost on the stable and elderberries have become their breakfast of choice.

The view from on top of the shed.
They are chopped elder branches on the ground below.

But with the berries finally ripe the easiest way to harvest them was to climb onto the shed rooves and dismantle the tree. Sorry turkeys!

In the early summer we use the flower umbels to make elderflower cordial and elderflower champagne, an excellent drink which tastes fantastic and packs a punch. The flowers are popular for fritters too, though we've always prioritised the alcohol.

We have plenty of elders splashed around the smallholding so every few years we harvest ripe berries too. These can be used for many things, though not eaten raw, but for us there is one product which is unique and trumps all others - pontack sauce.

Pontack sauce is a rich, aromatic sauce full of umami. It's like a fruity Worcestershire sauce and adds a wonderful depth of flavour to stews and slow-cook recipes. Like a good wine, it develops with age. The batch we made in 2017 is just coming to its best.

The downside to all this is that I now have no reason not to get on with fixing the two shed rooves. I also have a mountain of elder branches to process. They don't make great fire wood so most will be chipped and either spread on the perennial beds or added into the compost.

Nothing goes to waste.

Good King Henry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Springing up

On a similar note to the previous post, giants are stirring below the ground and stretching their leafy arms to reach the sky, revelling in the first sunshine of the year.

These are THE HERBACEOUS PERENNIALS, a remarkable group of plants which basically hibernate. At the end of the year, after flowering and producing seeds, their leaves and stems wilt, dry up, rot down, and they disappear for the winter, dormant just below the surface. But their strong root systems, which increase year on year, are a remarkable store of energy which is unleashed when they sense lengthening days and warming soil. Through the soil poke the most luscious of leaves, nothing like the weedy and vulnerable seedlings produced by annuals.  Herbaceous perennials are ready to go. 

So as I walk around the smallholding, particularly the forest garden where young perennials were planted last year, every glimpse of an emerging strong plant brings joy. If they survived that first winter they will be here to stay. Every few years they can be divided to make more plants and in exceptionally cold winters I might mulch them as protection, though most are selected for their hardiness (and my laziness!)

So here's a quick gallery of what's coming through.

From top left, Globe Artichoke, Wild Strawberry, Garden Sorrel, Red-berried Elder, Dock (baddy), Caucasian Spinach, Babington Leaks, Lupins, Day Lily, Crocus, Bronze Fennel, Angelica, , 

 

From Sombreros to Pigeon and Potatoes

I've just got back from Mexico! It was a birdwatching trip with friends, well timed to avoid all the storms. The smallholding was left in the capable hands of my wonderful wife.

The only sombreros I actually saw in Mexico were the cheap ones in the airport. I did however take a great interest in the plants of the volcanic highlands. Many were familiar to me, either as garden flowers or forest garden plants. There were tree lupins, Mexican tagetes, salvias and lobelias.

This gave me a new idea for livestock
on the smallholding!

Esculenta, Taro, Dasheen, Eddoe, whatever you want to call it,
growing wild along a stream

Of even more interest were what appeared to be yacon plants growing wild - I never got round to digging up the roots to check. There were small-scale farmers growing very much in the style of a forest garden, melons draped over flowering bushes visited by the hummingbirds I was really there to see.

I even got to watch a farmer harvesting his oca, which was obviously unaffected by early morning light frosts in the highlands.

A farmer harvesting his oca

Back to Icy Blighty

Now I'm back I need to get back into the swing of things PDQ as blossoms are starting to appear, bulbs are shooting up and seeds need to be sown, among many other jobs.

Waste Not Want Not
Today we headed off to a friend to pick up 50 pigeons shot by a farmer in the morning. We'll prep some for ourselves and the dogs will enjoy them too. Waste not want not.

Spudulicious plans for 2022
I also went to pick up this year's seed potatoes. 1kg each of ten varieties. I was going to try one new variety this year, Homeguard, but it was not available, so I am sticking with familiar old favourites. These pretty much select themselves. Primarily they need to cope reasonably well with blight (though the resistant varietis I find disappointing in taste). Next, they need to be relatively unattractive to slugs.

Some do better in wet years, others can cope with drier conditions. That's unpredictable and one reason why I grow so many varieties.

Going back to blight, this year I plan to grow my spuds in smaller patches as I have sort of abandoned the strict rotation system. Hopefully this might help to control the spread, Secondly, I intend to use a milk-based spray. Even if you wanted to use them, there are no sprays available to the small-scale grower now, so hopefully this harmless solution will help. (Large-scale potato farmers spray up to 30 times during the lifetime of a potato plant. I'm not sure I'd want to eat that! I know they can't risk blight destroying the nation's crop and people don't want scabby potatoes full of bugs and tunnels, but there must be another way.)

For now I'll be planting a few early potatoes straight into the polytunnel and rest rest will be set to chit on a windowsill, the process whereby you encourage them to form strong young shoots without exposing them to potential frosts and cold, wet soil outside.

To finish, here's the list of potatoes I'm growing this year.

FIRST EARLY: 

Casablanca, Duke of York, Home Guard, Red Duke of York. 

SECOND EARLY: 

Charlotte, Kestrel, Blue Kestrel

MAIN CROP: 

Cara, Desiree, Kerrs Pink, King Edward, Pink Fir Apple and Valor.

Actually, that's 12!

Well that's 2021 out of the way! A Review.

Who'd  have thought  I'd be sitting here in 2022 with the world in such a strange place?

Just for a while it seemed like everything was getting back to normal but the Covid waves just keep coming. I think there's room for optimism for 2022, though I'm not sure the world steadily reverting to its old ways is really such a great thing.

Blog-wise, I've  been very quiet for 2021. It's not that I've been inactive, quite the opposite in fact, but it has on occasions needed a steely resolve to keep optimistic. But as ever I have been very much looking to the future, researching, learning, trying new ideas and moving forwards with our self-sufficiency. I find that making plans for the future is a great way of dealing with the present when it's not going too well.

2021 - An overview.

LOCKDOWN. FLOCKDOWN. DELTA. ZOOM. FOREST GARDENING. A NEW PUPPY.  HAYMAKING. POOR HARVESTS. APPLE PRESSING. TWITCHING. NEW FRIENDS. FLOCKDOWN. OMICRON.

A bit more detail, if you want.

My life is split into three parts: Teacher; Smallholder; Twitcher. 

So here are the three stories of 2021:

School Report, 2021
We began the year in lockdown, teaching by Zoom from an improvised office in the living room. The world was a very uncertain place. Along came vaccines and by the summer all felt back to relative normal. But then we jumped from Delta straight to Omicron and insecurity returned to take us to the end of the year. 

School has been very tricky and was finally hit by Covid in a significant way right at the end of 2021. Even Zoom briefly raised its head again! Fortunately it was inconvenient, stressful but never quite felt as life-threatening as pre-vaccine and pre-booster times. The children have been absolutely brilliant and, with the help of some very caring and hardworking adults, have as ever been inspirational with their resilience and adaptability. For the most part they have come through and bounced back in style, hopefully to become a wiser generation than what has preceded them.

For the time being though, masks have made a comeback and the twice weekly tests seem more important again.

Smallholding 2021
The year started with lockdown and flockdown. Add flooded fields to the equation and it really was a bit of a struggle. Spring put in a brief early appearance to raise hopes but from there - and I don't want to put too much of a dampener on it - the growing year really failed to ever get going.

In fact I have never managed to produce so little from the plot. We somehow managed to have precisely the wrong weather at precisely the wrong time all  through the year. By October I was already looking ahead to 2022.

It wasn't all bad though. A major new venture began with dipping my toes into the world of perennial crops. Before I knew it I was diving headlong into creating a full-scale forest garden. I needed something to get my teeth into to distract from what was metaphorically (and sometimes literally) a year of trudging through mud.

This has been a wonderful journey and I have created the beginnings of a very special food-growing area, a kind of forager's supermarket. Being almost all perennial crops, it will take a while to establish which is all well and good as it's going to take a while to learn to make the most of all the new foods, most of which even I had not previously heard of.

One reasonable success in 2021 was the orchard, particularly the apples. We finally acquired an apple press and quite fortuitously managed to get hold of an unused second hand pasteuriser for the juice.

I also got quite distracted by the acquisition of 160 paving slabs, which were quite an effort to transport in several journeys along Fenland's bumpy roads. This came after being gifted a boot load of rather smart edging stones.

As a consequence the polytunnel has undergone quite a transformation, as has the herb garden.

Early summer saw a new arrival on the smallholding. Meet Monty, a real bundle of energy! Despite their shared Dachshund genes Arthur took a while to accept him. Boris on the other hand has been rejuvenated. Monty absolutely loves  him.

Into the summer holidays and I got into full-scale practical mode. A protracted spell of dry weather tempted me into producing some of my own hay using the scythe. The actual grass cutting was hard but honest work, but the process of turning and drying the hay was lighter work than I had anticipated. For me, producing our own hay by hand is one of  the holy grails of self-sufficiency. I know it's a bit romantic and nostalgic. I know it would be easier with machinery, but scything is a magical activity. Not just good outdoor exercise, but it is somehow quite meditational, a great mindfulness task.

With the decision that scything and haymaking will be firmly on the calendar in the future, I decided to make a hand baler. This developed into a labour of love and I have created a truly beautiful monster!

Spurred on by this, I decided to refurbish all the chicken houses and to put them on wheels - not just any wheels though, wheels which can be raised and lowered. Woohoo! It looks simple but believe me it was quite a learning process. We now have three very mobile chicken houses as well as a mobile bird hide (ex rotting shed) which is currently residing halfway down the land.

We have cut down on poultry numbers this year, mainly because bird flu and winter confinement seems to be an annual occurrence now. So we brought in meat chicks and meat ducklings at  just a few days old and raised them 'for  the table'. This way they have a short but happy life and we cut down on housing and feed costs over winter, when the daily routines of looking after livestock do occasionally lose their appeal as you trudge around in the  mud breaking ice with numbed hands.

The turkeys however have different ideas. They have been intent on taking over the smallholding. Our two experienced hens found fantastic places to sit on eggs and produced 21 youngsters between them. Two younger hens shared a nest and managed to produce three. We raised some of the young for meat but sold quite a few as young birds to fellow smallholders.
But then, while I was away on Shetland in early October, a presumed lost female, one of the experienced hens, appeared with 16 more poults for us!

We did not breed the sheep this year. We had quite enough stress without lambing to add to it. The older ewes need to go on a journey now, as does our ram who is related to all the girls. So they have spent the year as lawnmowers and are currently eating their way through the world's supply of hay.

We have always been very involved with the local Smallholders Club, but 2021 was a very bumpy year. Somehow I have gone from dropping my involvement early in 2021 to standing again as Co-Chair with Sue for 2022. Just don't ask!

We did manage a couple of meetings in between the waves.

I have met some fabulous smallholders this year with a wealth of experience and a huge spread of knowledge. We have enjoyed learning form each other and planning the self-sufficiency revolution. I have even learned how to use my chainsaw and am now not quite so scared  of it!

So that's my smallholding year, not a hugely successful one but one where many acorns have been sown (not literally). I am full of optimism for 2022.

Twitching 2021
It was an odd year for birds but as usual it gave me some great excuses to disappear off to far flung corners of Britain. We had a few absolutely mega rarities, including a real crippler from America which had us tiptoeing around Covid regulations early in the year and a first for Britain which earned me a speeding ticket in a race to Devon for an evening charter boat to Lundy Island. It was worth it as the bird did an overnight bunk. An albatross settled on Yorkshire cliffs for the summer and proved very popular. 

But the autumn migration, what we all wait for, was almost non existent on the East coast, hardly a bird to be seen. Every few years I make the pilgrimage to Shetland for a week in the autumn. This year our accommodation was grandiose, a lighthouse nonetheless. Birdwise it was quiet, with bird of the trip going to a butterfly, a Monarch all the way from across the Atlantic. 

For my second trip in a row we found ourselves scrambling to get off the islands with news of a rare bird back in England. An unlucky combination of weather and school holidays meant we were slow to find a way off but all  turned out well in the end as we connected with  a Long-toed Stint in Yorkshire, a bird so overdue that I was beginning to doubt I would ever see one.

The year ended with a bird which left me incredulous when I first saw the news, a Varied Thrush from America found on Papa Westray, one of the Orkney Isles, only the second ever in this country and a bird which many doubted would ever turn up again. Quite a stunner too!

So that was 2021. If you've got this far, sorry if I've left you depressed. 

The year ended with balmy record temperatures on New Year's Eve. The bees came out for the day and we spent the day in tee-shirts. 

And to finish, a couple more doggy pictures for those who like them.