Spring Frost Threatens Seedlings

Well, we're seven days into spring and I think we've had more frosts than we did all winter. I guess that's what's happens when the Jetstream shifts that little bit further south.

Typically, the first rather sharp frost was the very same night when I chose to put my newly emerged tomato and leek seedlings into the polytunnel. There is a certain excitement when the first seed of the year germinates. It's all systems go until about November. To see it withered and frostbitten would be somewhat deflating. Okay, they'd gone into a polytunnel in a minigreenhouse over a hotbed. But this could be the shortest lived experiment ever. The day before it had reached 88 degrees in the microclimate I'd set up for them, but a dip to close to zero might not be good news for a tender day-old shoot.

I tentatively stepped inside the tunnel, unzipped the minigreenhouse and found...

Happy as Larry. Not just that, but they'd come on quite a bit even since yesterday. The day ahead was absolutely glorious too. In fact, it's been quite some start to spring with blue skies during the day and stunning clear skies at night (hence the frosts).
The seedlings continue to do well and I've been busily sowing tray upon tray in the dining room. As soon as they germinate I'll throw them out into the polytunnel so the conveyor belt can keep moving.

The only problem with the hotbed idea so far is that it has given rise to a plague of small flies. But I'm hoping that's just a reaction to going into the warmth of the polytunnel and that it will soon disperse.

First Frost Winter 2013/14

The title of this post seems somewhat precise compared to my usual organic style.
And there's a reason. For I wrote about this same subject last year and I probably will next year too!

Working the land as I do, the seasons shape my life more than ever before. Each has its merits, each has its problems. But there's no point moaning about the heat in summer, the wind in autumn or the cold in winter. They should be embraced, as long as they're not too extreme.

As the seasons cycle by, I have found it more difficult to blog this year as I seem to be in constant danger of repeating myself. Having said that, I enjoy this annual cycle. I look forward to the first frost, I look forward to sowing seeds in spring, to earthing up potatoes, to the first rhubarb, the return of the swallows to their nests, long summer evenings, harvest time, Autumn gallivanting after rare birds and, dare I say it, the first frost come round again.

So it was that one morning this week I stepped out of the door and the crisp air instantly invigorated my lungs. A frosty morning means clear skies, still air and a beautiful winters day.
These winter frosts are welcome. They get rid of nasty diseases and they break up the soil. They sweeten up the parsnips and take the bitterness off the kale. They announce a fine day - it may snow but it probably won't be a soggy day.

Come May, I won't be waxing lyrical about Jack Frost any more, for he'll be threatening my young seedlings and stopping me planting my beans and squashes outside.

But, for the moment, winter is here and I'm looking forward to it. I'll have to find a good way to fill those long, dark evenings in front of the fire. I've got lots of projects in the offing and now I'll have some indoor time to get them rolling.

Not the sharpest of frosts, but the first of the winter.

The Ice Sets In



Tuesday 12th December 2012
12.12.12

Today started cold and got colder! Freezing fog lasted all day as temperatures stayed on the wrong side of zero. But as the day progressed, so the moisture in the air settled, crystallising on every surface.




The back road is always delightfully isolated
on days like this.

 

One of the local roe deer.
The group seems to have dropped from five to four.




A group of teal
mooching around in the misty dyke.

South Holland Main Drain
Perfect stillness

First Frost

Sunday 14th October 2012
The First Frost

"Come on! It's freezing.
Budge over, there's room for all of us in here."

What a day we had today! I had my first slightly crunchy stroll down to the chickens this morning, my wellies leaving a line of melted footprints in the lightly frosted grass. Elvis's chicks weren't particularly impressed by this, so they went back to cuddling into mum. But it didn't take them long to get back into adventurous mode. These chicks are absolutely delightful, jumping all over my hands when I feed them and regularly wandering away from mum into unexplored areas. They really know no fear.

The chicks have discovered how to feed from the grown-ups' feeders.



Meanwhile, the guinea family
goes from strength to strength



Not forgetting this character



A new auction
After dropping the pigs off in the morning, we paid a visit to an auction which has just opened up just down the road. Yesterday I spent more than I wanted on an axe, so what should I find sitting in a cardboard box about to be sold for next-to-nothing? Yes, three lovely old axes, wooden handles and full of character. Just typical! We did, however, buy a little veg stall for gate sales. Very cheap and saves me a job.

Back to that axe.

Hatch, Catch and DispatchSqueamish readers may want to fast forward now. For I have to admit we have been struggling with dispatching the chickens. Breaking their necks is not as easy as it sounds, particularly with the cockerels. It requires a knack which we clearly don't have. Then there's the fact that it's very difficult to tell when the deed is done. We always knew that they continued to flap and run around, but are they really supposed to keep blinking their eyes??

So we decided that beheading would be more efficient, better for the chooks and for us. Hence the axe. So today our French Copper Marans cockerel put its head on the chopping block, quite literally. It was quick and efficient and we were both happy with the way it went. This is the way forward for us.
We were also relieved to see that yes, even with the head severed, the chicken still kept blinking. And it was weird, even though we expected it, to literally see a headless chicken running around.

35 lbs of Green Tomatoes
It was still relatively early in the day, so I decided to tackle the tomatoes. We've managed to eat about half a dozen juicy, ripe tomatoes this year, from a total of about a hundred seedlings! That's not good. It all started with disastrous germination, then poor growing weather. Then we couldn't get the polytunnel up in time, so all the tomatoes went into the open ground.

The good news is that, had we not had the delays, I reckon we would still have got quite a lot of tomatoes as many of the plants were covered in flowers and small, green fruits.

The bad news is that halfway through October the fruits are just not going to develop any more. Add to that the fact that blight has now begun to bite them as I was loathe to remove the leaves while the fruits still needed every ounce of energy to develop.

So today I decided to pull the lot up, disposing of any fruits from plants with withering leaves and keeping only the most perfect of fruits, green as they all were.

I still ended up with 35lbs of green tomatoes. Sue has already started processing them with a large maslin pan full of ginger and green tomato jam.

Seven Bramblings and a Tree Sparrow

It wasn't too late in the day for a birding highlight either.

When I came in for a late afternoon break a sparrow coming down to the pond to drink caught my eye. It was a tree sparrow, the first of the winter. These delightful birds were regular at the feeders during our first winter here but have been scarce since. Let's hope this is the forerunner of more.

But then, in the branch just above the sparrow, a superb male Brambling sat bold as brass. And above him two females. Quite possibly one of these was the bird we heard drop in with chaffinches yesterday.

The local goldfinch flock were coming down to the pond too, absolutely delightful to watch, and I wondered whether the bramblings might have joined the finch flock which spend most of the day commuting between the safety of the ash trees and the recently harrowed neighbouring field.

So I crossed the dyke and aimed my telescope at the feeding finch flock. As the field has been worked perfectly flat I had stunning views of every goldfinch and chaffinch, along with SEVEN bramblings, including two handsome males.

I would be very pleased to see this many brambling feeding with finches on any day out birdwatching in Britain, but on my own doorstep was outstanding. Only problem is that these birds are most definitely a harbinger of winter, as were the forty or so Redwings which flew across the garden earlier in the day.

Tomorrow I tackle the pumpkin patch.

The Last Frost???

Monday 7th May 2012 (bank holiday)

Scary stuff!
Thought I should dress up for what is hopefully the last frost of the season.

Friday night's promised frost never really materialised, though it did appear overnight on Saturday, but nothing to match this morning's. Hopefully it will be the last significant frost of the year.

I forgot to mention yesterday, I did manage to completely mangle one of the fleeces I had placed over the young potato shoots. I just caught the edge in the mower and this was the start of an unstoppable, cataclysmic reaction which saw the fleece spiral into the mower blades and come out in tatters until the blades eventually ground to a halt. 

Some of the potato shoots got caught by the frost. Not too many, and I will use the opportunity to see how much damage is caused. That way, I'll know for next year how much effort to put into protecting my spuds.

After the sunrise photo, I came back into the house to give the sun a chance to warm the ground. I was delighted to glance at my phone and notice the following two comments posted to this blog. Due my my tinkering with comments systems, I've lost them again, but am copying them here as they really cheered me up and made me feel proud of what we are doing here.

 

Found you yesterday. In the interests of research, bacon for breakfast and roast shoulder of pork for dinner today. We are very difficult to please but your product is SENSATIONAL. Keep up the good work and we look forward to being regular customers. Very Best Wishes ~ Sue and Steve

Have just enjoyed reading your blog.I
It was nice to meet you earlier today. Hope we didn't take up too much of your time. Thanks for letting the girls feed the piglets they loved it.

As I fed the chickens, I was lucky enough to be able to watch two baby Mistlethrushes begging and being fed by their parents. What a lovely start to the day.

Chasing piglets
At 9 o'clock I received a surprise phone call which made the day considerably more eventful.
A while ago a couple of other smallholders had put a deposit down on three piglets and we had sort of arranged to hand them over on Monday 7th May, once they had been weaned. However, we had no further contact and had got the ansaphone yesterday.
Unfortunately, when it comes to piglets, lots of people profess a definite interest in acquiring them, but the promised phone call of confirmation never comes. So I never really felt 100% sure that we had actually sold three.
Anyway, true to their word, Bev and Stuart were coming shortly to pick up their piglets. Bother! I had already fed them. I say this because pigs are ten times easier to control when they are hungry.
I would shortly be faced with the task of catching three of my little piglets. To be more precise, three boars. Ideally I would be able to view them from the back so I could tell what I was catching.

However, just look at the state of their pen after weeks of constant rain. Old clothes would be required!

And just look how wary they look having just been separated from mum. Piglets are not stupid. In fact, they are rather smart, as well as being fast and strong. The extra people, the dog carriers and the second feed of the morning all spelled danger to them. They would not let me get within about 6 feet, and even then they made sure they were facing me. This meant I could not easily tell the boys from the girls, and it would take a most athletic lunge to grab a back leg, the best way to catch them.

Please excuse the lack of action photos, but it was not our main priority!

Fortunately Bev and Stuart had brought a large fishing net with them (note to self...buy one!) We were very lucky. The first three piglets we caught were all boys. They squealed to high heaven, but quickly settled into the carriers and seemed happy enough in the back of the people carrier.

 

The pair in the foreground,
three ganders in the background.

Bev was then kind enough to give us a lesson in sexing birds. Having scoured the internet, there seemed to be numerous different ways to tell boy from girl geese, most contradiciting each other. My birding experience convinced me, from their behaviour, that we had a pair and three younger ganders, possibly the offspring of the other two. This was confirmed on close inspection (the fishing net coming into its own again).

Bev also gave us lots of advice on looking after the geese.

Beetroots and Salsify
By midday we had already done what felt like a full day! But the weather was holding off so I took the opportunity to do some more planting in the veg patches. I finally got round to planting some beetroots, golden, stripy, purple and red. I interspersed them with onion sets, as these are supposed to be good companions. Then into another bed were sown salsify seeds with pot marigolds. A few weeks late, but it should be OK. Known as the oyster plant, salsify (purple salsify, Tragopogon porrifolius ) is a lesser grown veg in this country. However, it grows well and has a pleasant and unique taste. If a few plants are left to overwinter, they produce wonderful, spiky purple flowers in their second year, beloved of bees and hoverflies.

Asparagus

The asparagus bed, weeded and mulched.

I put thirty asparagus plants in last spring and they struggled in the bone dry conditions. However, they eventually grew well producing their feathery fronds late into the autumn. Asparagus cannot be harvested in its first year, since the plants need to build up their strength. A few spears can be taken in the second year (though I will be patient and let the plants continue to build their strength). From the third year on, and hopefully for quite some years after, spears should be produced in profusion. 

This year, the asparagus has been slow to grow. A dry winter, a hot March but then a cool, wet April and start to May have not been ideal growing conditions. But now the spears are starting to emerge in larger numbers. Unfortunately the weeds are growing even faster and asparagus does not like competition. 
So, with the soil wet but not sodden, it was the ideal time to pull the weeds without the need to cultivate too deeply. 
I read somewhere that asparagus loves a mulch of hay, but did not want to do this earlier in the year as it would block the rain from watering the soil. However, this is not now an issue and the mulch will lock in the moisture and hold back the weeds. 

At the end of the day, we gave the four chicklets an hour of freedom in the whole chicken pen. These four chicks have very strong characters and love to explore. Off they went through the long grass with no fear whatsoever. It was lovely to watch them.

A piglet peers through the fence at Guinea Guinea.

Here Comes A Frost



Friday 4th May 2012

The weather forecast today warned of two nights of unusually extensive frost. I guess I got spoiled living in London where the urban air protected the garden from this menace. But here in rural Lincolnshire, Jack Frost strikes more frequently and more deeply, and he can quite easily still come in May. For this reason, patience is most definitely a virtue when it comes to more delicate subjects such as beans. In fact, even in the greenhouse my first sowing of Borlotti beans was decidedly bitten, along with a few nasturtium seedlings. I thought some had been tough enough to survive, but over a week or so they all succumbed, stems slowly collapsing and leaves wilting brown.

Seedlings and staging come back inside.

Bearing this in mind, the bottleneck of seedlings all took a step back today. From outside into coldframe, coldframe to greenhouse, greenhouse to inside. And improvised night blankets for the spuds too. I began earthing up, but this was not so easy as the textbooks make out. For starters, the marigolds, nasturtiums and California poppies just emerging in amongst the trenches would not appreciate the upheaval. And secondly, the soil is more water than soil, virtually immovable with a rake or hoe.

Improvised frost blankets for the spuds



A protective film of bubble wrap in the greenhouse.

Fingers crossed, my evasive measures will work. If not, I will learn more valuable lessons for next year. 

Winter, Spring or Summer? ...No, It's April.



Monday 16th April 2012
An icy start to the day - ice inside the greenhouse could spell trouble

 A gardener faces difficult decisions at this time of year. Plants have to get growing so they have time to produce a crop, yet start them off too early, or put them out too early and you can be set back a month.


Prompted by the possibility of a house full of nasty fumes on Saturday (see Nasty Bugs post) I decided to give my tomato and pepper seedlings a taste of fresh air. I seem to have avoided the mistakes which led to the total loss of my first batch of seeds, and have learned not to kill them with kindness! More precisely, that their need for plenty of light cannot be made up for with plenty of water.


So out they went. The chill breeze would make them sway, but this would harden them up a little anyway. However, there is hardening up and there is hardening up!! For, while I was out watching the Black-winged Stilt yesterday, April's typical mix of weather delivered us a pelting of hailstones. Those poor seedlings!


Anyway, the strong and the lucky survived, which fortunately was most of them. Faced with the prospect of transporting all the trays and pots back inside for the night, I decided to take the plunge and move them to the greenhouse...

... where a growing queue of baby plants await their chance to go outside or to go into the bigger greenhouse and polytunnel (both still yet to be built!)

But that can't happen until this stops happening...

The nettles and thyme can withstand the icy night air, but for others there's a few more weeks to wait yet.

Laurels not Hardy

Tuesday 10th April 2012





I woke up to a clear, fresh morning. The air felt sharp and clean. To the South a glorious moon, to the East a fiery sunrise.

A layer of ice prevented the chickens from drinking until I broke through it for them, but as the sun broke the horizon I felt an instant warming on my back. It was going to be a lovely day.

I erected the "Piglets For Sale" sign. This sign caused untold controversy last time it was erected, with some selfish so-and-so complaining to more than one authority about it and a couple of apes from the Highways Agency ripping it from the ground under instruction from their useless boss. I retrieved it from the back of their van ready for the next batch of piglets. Spending cuts may not be welcome, but lets hope that at least they weed out the incompetent and the jobs-worths!

Anyway, rant over.

The sign is back up, firmly on our land. Because I've had to move it back a few feet, I had to take out a line of laurels which obscured it from passing traffic. A couple of these were LARGE and demanded some persistent digging, tugging, grunting and groaning before they finally gave up and released their hold from the earth. I couldn't save all their roots, but hopefully they will survive in their new home where they protect the greenhouses from the ravages of a south-westerly wind.

Some of the smaller laurels did not survive the night of the big freeze back in the winter, and it is becoming apparent that several of the more exotic plants succumbed too. The olive, a small bay, mahonias, the witchhazel, hibiscus, pawpaw and maybe the kiwi. There is a chance that some of these will spring back into life, but they have certainly been hit very hard and it is touch and go. We live and learn. If and when I replace them, I will protect them with straw if such ridiculously low temperatures threaten again.

Weasel Ridge

Sue worked hard again today. She managed to dig another strawberry bed under a fruit tree, then set to work on Weasel Ridge.

When I carved the veg beds out of the sheep paddock, pagan walls of upturned turfs needed a new home, so Weasel Ridge was created. After a year, the turfs have rotted down nicely. A couple of days ago I set Mr Rotavator loose on the mound, and today Sue extracted all remaining weeds and sowed it up with hundreds of poppy seeds. It should provide a huge splash of colour in a couple of months, and will only need cultivating at the end of each year to repeat the same show year on year.

By the way, I am hoping that the "Pork For Sale" signs will deter all those visitors looking to buy a pet pig who called in last time the Piglets sign was up.

Pet pig! Ridiculous!