Garlic and 'snips

Just a quick update on a couple of bits 'n' pieces.

Garlic and Parsnips
Firstly, as you can see. my garlic is doing pretty well this year. It will be out of the ground in early summer though, so in between I've sown rows of parsnip seed. I don't find a need to do this as early as some advise. Mid to late April is fine and I've always had sizeable parsnip tubers by the winter.

Until recently I allowed plenty of parsnip plants to go into a second year and flower. They are wonderfully statuesque plants and beneficial insects make a beeline for their flowers. The seed I collect from them produces next year's plants.

I will confess to having parsnips springing up everywhere! But I am having to put a curb on my parsnips. They are high up the suspect list for causing some rather nasty blisters which react badly for several years when exposed to sunlight. 

I can still grow them, but will only allow one or two plants, away from paths, to flower.

Adapting to a changing climate

We've had our third very dry April in a row. I'm beginning to adapt to this clear pattern of climate change by raising my seedlings slightly later as it's difficult to get them planted and established in dry conditions. Frosts have been few and far between this winter too and none have been harsh. My Chilean Glory Vine bears witness to this. It's not supposed to be hardy in this region, but mine has happily survived the winter.

As we head towards frost-freedom, the garden is springing to life. Below is my Snowy Mespilus hedge which always looks beautiful for a few short weeks in the springtime. 

And can you spot who photobombed this photo of red dead-nettle. One of my favourite wild plants alongside one of my favourite insects, the bee-fly.

2021 Week 5 - Pruning and Zooming

You've got to retain a sense of humour.

Pruning Orchard Fruits
This week's big job has been pruning the fruit trees and bushes.

These two apple trees (a juicer and a cider apple) form part of the canopy in the new forest garden.
They've had a good haircut!

You leave stone fruits alone at this time of year, but the apples and pears needed their annual trim. Pruning is always presented as somewhat of a science and for several years I would accomplish the task with my trusty fruit growing book with me. Unfortunately the trees didn't always grow as they were supposed to in the book.

As I have gained experience, I have come to understand how trees and fruits respond to pruning. I have realised that pruning achieves various purposes. Firstly, there is pruning to take out damaged or diseased wood. Then there is taking out any branches which cross as the rubbing of the bark leaves a route in for infection. Once these fundamental steps are completed, there is pruning for the sake of producing fruit and pruning to keep the shape of the trees. 

As far as fruit production is concerned, I have realised that if you cut back the small side shoots they will eventually, over a year or two, turn into what we call fruiting spurs. To put it another way, what would have grown into branches is stopped and produces blossom and fruit instead. 

Pruning for shape is not just for aesthetics either. You need an open structure so that air can circulate and you need to make sure you can reach the fruit for harvest. Increasingly as our weather turns warmer and wetter fungal diseases are becoming the biggest problems, those and problems associated with alternative periods of drought and excessive rain, so thinning branches and thinning fruit has become more and more important.

This year I felt confident enough to show another couple how I prune. I concentrated on a holistic understanding of how the tree responds and what you want to achieve. I hope it was useful.

Pruning the Soft Fruit Bushes
All the soft fruit bushes needed pruning too, blackcurrants, red and white currants and gooseberries (a prickly subject!).

You need to understand how they fruit and how pruning affects new growth, but the principles are very similar to those that apply to apple trees. 

Fruit pruning days provide a very special treat for the Shetland sheep.
They really appreciate all the cuttings, even the spiky gooseberry twigs.

The soft fruits have been festooned with berries and currants for the last few years. New plants are ridiculously easy to propagate too. As a result, I've actually ended up with too many bushes which have expanded leaving no room to get between or for airflow. So this year I have pruned them quite heavily (pruning is not a science and subjective decisions need to be taken). I thinned out a few bushes too. The only problem with this is that the open ground becomes a haven for grass and weed growth. However, since I want this area to become part of my forest garden, I shall put smaller herbaceous perennials in the gaps which hopefully will require little attention and give us some novel crops.

Imbolc

The week's weather has been generally good, typically late January weather, some days cold, some warmer and wetter. The bees ventured out on a couple of days and I've heard robins, great tits, blackbirds, a song thrush and skylarks in song. This made pruning a pleasant task.

I've seen much talk of Imbolc on social media. It seems to have become very trendy to acknowledge these ancient festivals. Imbolc is allegedly a Gaelic festival to mark the start of spring. I am all in favour of appreciating and marking the passing of the seasons, but come on! I think it's a tad optimistic to be talking about the beginning of spring so early in February. There is sometimes a gap between reality and hope. 

One of my favourite plants at this time of year is mahonia or Oregon Grapes. Ours has split into two plants and become quite statuesque. It flowers and fruits really early and is an important food source for the bees when they venture out of their hives on warmer days.

I won't say that spring is quite here yet, but there are hints of its approach. To brighten things up in future, I had ordered a whole load of bulbs to go in the hazel coppice as I have now moved the strawberries on from that area. Hopefully they'll survive and we will have the delight of snowdrops, aconites and bluebells coming through. Planting them all was a lovely job to do with Sue and the dogs helped by enthusiastically digging up some lawn.

The garlic cloves I set in the ground a few weeks back have all come through strongly now. Once they get their roots in I'll take the netting off. The birds do like to tug at them though.

But the week ended with more heavy rain and the water has come higher than ever before. There comes a point when wellies become standard wear and you give up trying to go round the mud and puddles. 

Covid update

It's been my week to teach from home so I have almost no direct contact with the outside world. This makes me feel safe. School staff are now taking twice weekly lateral flow tests. These are notoriously unreliable but they do give a little reassurance despite being pretty uncomfortable to self-administer. We now look forward to gag-tastic Sundays and Wednesdays!

I also received an oximeter in the post. Both Sue and I have been feeling unusually breathless at times but the oximeter showed a normal oxygen level so I guess it must just come down to getting old and maybe carrying a bit too much weight around the middle (me, not Sue).

I received my Google timeline update too.

124 miles travelled in the whole month and never further than 8 miles from home. I think this was 6 trips to work, one drive out for fish and chips and one trip to the hardware store.

A sign of the times.

Planting garlic cloves - the first job of a new decade

It was at the beginning of the last decade that we took the plunge and bought our smallholding in The Fens. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then.

And so we enter a new decade.

One of the things which we love about growing most of our own food is how our lives are now so entwined with the weather and the seasons.

The first bed of the year planted up with garlic cloves

New decade or not, the turn of the year has seen me planting garlic every year. This marks the start of a new growing season. The ancestors of the garlic cloves I planted today go right back to those three bulbs of garlic I bought from a greengrocer in London quite a few years back. Every year I select some nice plump cloves from last year's crop and each develops into a new bulb, multiplying itself by about 10.
And by my selection every year I get stronger stock adapted to growing here on the smallholding.

In keeping with the developing patterns of climate breakdown, this winter seems even warmer and wetter than previous ones. In fact, it would be good if somebody could tell the rhubarb to stay in hibernation for a couple more months. It really is quite confused at the moment.

Some very confused rhubarb

I had to wait for a protracted spell of dry weather before I could consider working in the veg plot. Even though I have gone no-dig, so no need for digging over sodden soil, even just walking around on the paths would create a mud bath.
Fortunately that dry spell has now come. The puddles are receding and yesterday I was able to prepare the first bed ready for planting up with garlic cloves. The whole family came out to help. Sue cleared the asparagus bed of its old stems, Gerry climbed a tree and the dogs went digging for voles.

My team of helpers.
Left to right: Boris, Arthur, Gerry and Sue

I have had to move the sheep more frequently to stop the ground from becoming poached - with water lying on or just below the surface, their hooves quickly turn the ground muddy and the grass is slow to grow. We have moved the rams well away from the ewes as we are not breeding this year. They were spending all their time frustratedly pacing up and down the fence-line turning it into a swamp.
We have had to feed more sugar beet and more hay this year. Hopefully the paddocks will recover with drier weather and we won't have to hunt for more hay towards the end of the winter.

The ewes are quick to move to a new paddock when I lower the electric fence. 

But the grass doesn't last long in these conditions. 

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!

The first green shoots of 2019

On the third Saturday of each month I now run a course on growing your own for people with high aims but little experience. I run it for members of Fenland Smallholders Club.
Last month I showed them how to plant garlic cloves - one didn't even realise that a clove of garlic would grow into a bulb, so there will be lots of magical revelations through the year.
I planted the cloves into  undug ground covered with a good layer of compost, according to my new no-dig regime. I then netted them before the ducks could snozzle them up again.

The group are over here next in a week's time so today I thought I had better check on the progress of the garlic. I am very pleased to report that it has taken well and is growing fast. Garlic is remarkably hardy and actually needs a period of cold to ensure that the clove splits to make a bulb.

Meanwhile in the polytunnel I am waiting for the mangetout Oregon Sugar Pod to get going. Germination has been slower so I decided to cover the seed modules with fleece to help things along. Mangetout should be my first crop of the year.

Mangetout just poking its head above the surface.

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.

Garlic and Shallots - Divide and Conquer

Tuesday 9th January 2018
The final order for ducklings from fellow smallholders was 226. I look forward to the day they all come.
Garlic and shallots in the ground
I got the garlic planted today as planned. The cloves are planted just below the surface. The more space you give each one, the larger the final bulbs (within limits). The main choice is whether to plant on a square grid pattern or in rows. Either way, you get roughly the same number in the same space. I prefer rows as it's easier to cultivate in between the plants later on when the weeds are running riot.
They should still catch a few heavy frosts which they need so the cloves divide later in the year.
Garlic gives a fantastic return, with approximately a ten-fold increase on your original investment in just half a year. If I had replanted all of the offspring from the original three bulbs every year I would be growing 300000 bulbs this year! I think I'll stick to the usual 100.

I got 30 shallots planted too, ones I saved from last year. These grow in a similar way to garlic, one set dividing into maybe 5 or 6 during the year. It's like free food every year.

The geese have been keeping the grass short in the orchard and have been wandering further up the land. It is nice to see them feeding in the young woodland.
There was a treat for them today as I discovered a few missed carrots in the ground as I was clearing one of the polytunnel beds.

The chickens 'helping out' in the tunnel.

The polytunnel is usually a strict no go zone

for the chooks as they can wreak havoc,

but I like them to scratch around when I'm having my annual clear out.

That's all for this post. Thanks shallot! (sorry, but it makes me chuckle every year)

2018 Veg - All Systems Go Go GO!

Sunday 7th January 2018
Poultry losses
We lost one of the ducks on Saturday, the male Cayuga. He just wasn't there when I went to put them away. No feathers, no blood, no body. I count my blessings really that whatever took him just took one. It rarely happens and always at this time of year, when food is short for predators.

And today one of the commercial meat chicks. I didn't count them in last night, but only 7 emerged this morning. I searched everywhere before the gruesome find of the poor little thing encased in ice in the paddling pool. This is the first bird we have lost in there, as we have placed bricks around the edge and a wooden ramp to aid escape.
Losses are always sad, but sometimes they are unpredictable or unavoidable. It's part of the price of letting the birds have more freedom.
Monday8th January 2018
Turning the soil
Onto more positive things.
I took advantage of drier and frosty conditions this morning to finally get the bed ready for the garlic cloves. They'll be going in tomorrow when the soil is a bit softer. 100 cloves to produce 100 garlic bulbs. This will be the fifth year I've used my old bulbs with no negative effect on harvest. Not bad considering I ignored all the advice to buy specialist stock and instead brought them originally from a small Asian supermarket in Harrow.

Mr Rotavator comes out for the first time in 2018. I love to see the chickens and robins grabbing the opportunity to rid my soil of creepy crawlies. I'm sure they eat some good ones too, but so be it. As long as they get the slug eggs.

Sue picked up some Early potatoes for me too yesterday. They are to go in the polytunnel immediately, to start the new potato harvest early.  So after I had rotavated the garlic bed I set to clearing out the polytunnel. I'm tight for time for a spring clean, but if I can get the tubers into the soil I can get the spring clean done before the leaves poke through the surface.

I need to plant my polytunnel mangetout seeds too - which means auditing what seeds I have and completing my vegetable seed order for the year.

Wow! All of a sudden it feels as if the 2018 growing season is upon us. It gives me a spring in my step. Between now and February half term I'll try to take advantage of any fine days when the soil is not sodden to work all the veg beds, emptying the compost bins and incorporating it into the soil.

This year I plan to stick to the basics. No fancy crops that we don't really eat. Besides, I've tried just about every exotic vegetable there is to try.

I have some major smallholding projects planned for the year, so I am going to try to make my veg growing more simple and organised.

Mud-dling along

Saturday 6th January 2018

A few dry days would be good so the water has time to drain

There is a fine balance between muddy and not muddy at this time of year. With the colder temperatures most moisture does not escape upwards but needs to drain down. Our land is not too bad compared to many, but well trodden routes can still churn up a bit.

So far 2018 has seen rain every day. Bizarrely Storm Eleanor did us a favour as the winds drove the moisture off the surface, but daily downpours since then have topped it back up.
On very well trodden areas, such as the entrance to the chicken feed shed, I have laid down paper feed bags so we are not splodging around too much.
The moles are doing their best to help with the drainage which is a good thing.

I still haven't got my garlic in. I am waiting for a frosty morning so I can turn the soil. It will still be a muddy job, but the sooner it is in the better. It needs to experience some low temperatures in order for the cloves to split later in the year, so I can't delay much longer.

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.