Dry January

January 2022 has brought us some beautiful, crisp weather
and hardly a drop of rain.

This time in 2021 we were very much waterlogged. The ducks enjoyed it! As did the birdwatcher in me, though not quite so much the smallholder.

This year the contrast couldn't be greater. I can't actually remember a drop of rain in January - if there was, it was very early on. 

The ground is delightfully dry. It's so nice not to be squishing, squashing and squelching, slipping and sliding around the smallholding. It's such a treat to be able to work the soil and have it crumble rather than sticking in giant clods to the soul of your gardening shoes. 

I've been cutting back on of my wildlife hedges. These are cut on a three year cycle so there is a variety of stages of growth. It also means they give me more hedgerow fruits.

When we moved in there was not a hedge in sight. Now they are home to all sorts of wildlife. Nests are buried so deep inside that it is only when the leaves drop and I cut the hedges back that I notice them all. One was even used by some type of mouse as a rose hip storage basket.

Cutting the hedges back produces a surprising quantity of cut material. Without a chipper, this would be impossible to manage. But I am able to turn it into valuable woodchip which covers the ground in the forest garden. Any spare is used to ease the way over any muddy stretches of path or goes to bulk up the compost pile. Nothing goes to waste here.

The Rewards Flow In

What a great time of year it is!
Growing and rearing has slowed down considerably, the summer lull is over and now the activity picks right up again as we harvest and process all the wonderful produce from the smallholding. The dehydrator is on almost constantly, the freezers are bursting at the seams, the juicer is squeezing the life out of fruit and vegetables and the preserving pan is bubbling away.

Produce comes in thick and fast and is so varied. Here's just a few images to whet the appetite.

 

Winter's nearly over - quick, take cuttings

Saturday 10th March 2018

Quick to the cuttings

15 degrees today. What a contrast to last week.
Heavy rain last night left some fairly substantial puddles on the land. The water takes a while to sink through the clay, especially when the water table is already high after the snow melt last week.

I am running out of time to move last years cuttings and to take new cuttings. Everything is springing into growth and the pace of gardening is hotting up.

Last Wednesday I planted a new mixed hedge of about 100 plants.

Next on the list were the yellow willow cuttings which I poked in the ground last year. Most of them had survived and some had really flourished. With the ground wet, they were not too difficult to uproot. My plan was to plant them closely in a line along the boundary of the land. I will pollard them so they form a colourful boundary, especially during the winter. During the summer and autumn they should provide shade and shelter to the sheep paddock. 

I had quite a few spares, so decided to plant them even closer in amongst a wild area of nettles. This area needs taming a little - there are plenty of nettles elsewhere so nothing will suffer. The idea is to form a willow spinney.

Not much to see now, but my new area of willow coppice will be an attractive

part of the wildlife garden behind the bug hotel

Next a bit of sorting out. The pallets which make the compost bins make great storage for canes, stakes, guttering and hazel poles. The added benefit is that these form a more solid wall to keep the heat and moisture in the heap.

With that job completed, I moved on to seed sowing, potting up and moving some seedlings into the polytunnel. The spring conveyor belt of plant rearing is truly in full swing now

Sunday 11th March 2018

The Pest from the Zest!

Some days I seem to get very little done. Some days I get a lot done. Some days I get loads done!

Today was one of the 'loads' days.

The day started with identifying what is wrong with our small lemon tree. It has been secreting a sticky sap for a while now and the leaves have started to yellow. Some have sooty mould on them and the baby lemons have turned black and fallen off. A close look and an internet search identified the culprit as brown soft scale. These are flat, armoured insects which suck the lifeblood out of the plant. 

Now that we know the problem, we should be able to solve it with careful cleaning of all the leaves, repeated applications of insecticidal soap (just a weak solution of castile soap) and occasional wipes with surgical spirit to penetrate those armoured shells.

Butterfly Heaven

Transplanting continued with 25 buddleias. They had rooted really well. Final home for these was to be weasel ridge, around the living willow chair and overlooking the veg garden. First though, I needed to dig out a load of nettles, roots and all. This is a satisfying job but it is hard work and can be painful at times.

I was pleased to be distracted halfway through by buzzards calling overhead. When I looked up there were seven circling over together - quite unprecedented here.

I didn't intend to use all the buddleias on the mound, but in the end I planted them close. They should be absolutely alive with butterflies later in the year.

Plenty of help from the chickens today as I planted up the buddleia bank

While I was doing this, Sue was cleaning out the chicken houses and equipping them with fresh straw. I knew her every move as I have fitted her with a new wife-tracking device - aka very squeaky wheelbarrow!

Mr Motivator goes for a spin

With a little warmth in the air, I decided to give the rotavator a try while Sue took the dogs for a long walk down to the river. The broad bean bed, the turnip bed and the bed for the early potatoes all needed to be prepared. The soil was just about workable and the rotavator increases the air and surface area so it should warm up and dry out much quicker now. I gave a couple of other beds a preliminary tickle too.

This is a turning point in the year. Over the next month the winter veg patch will be transformed as beds get worked and borders neatened.

Another duck pond to dig

The ducks are moving back into the veg garden too - a decision I made after I had dug them a new pond!

This is all part of the Spare Veg Patch being turned into a paddock for sheep, pigs, goats, whatever. The heavy soil was too difficult to work and a haven for slugs, which made their homes deep down where the ducks couldn't reach them. This has been most apparent this week when I have been digging up cuttings. With the clay soil being so heavy it is not practical to keep it worked frequently enough to unearth the slugs and expose them to the attention of the ducks and chickens.

And so I spent the last hour of daylight making a start on a new duck pond. It was just a start as I had a place to put the excess soil but it needed wheeling away.

A busman's holiday

I received an email today confirming our summer holiday plans. For the second year in a row we are getting a week away, thanks to Sue's friend who has volunteered to come and look after the smallholding. The plan is to spend the week in West Wales... on a smallholding!!! We really are suckers for punishment.

The day ended on a possibly sad note. Putting the Muscovies away, I noticed that the brown female was not with the other three. Thinking about it, I don't recall seeing her for some days now. There is a very small possibility that she is holed up somewhere sitting on eggs, but I think it is more likely that she has come to some sort of mishap. 

I'll have a good look around in the morning, but don't expect to find her.

The first goose egg of 2018

Monday 5th March 2018
An authentic Lincolnshire myrobalan hedge
When they still had proper orchards in Lincolnshire, myrobalan hedges were very much a local feature. Myrobalan is another word for Cherry Plums which produce small red or yellow plums, perfect for jams and country wine. The hedges would act as a windshield for the orchard and provide an alternative crop.
The cuttings which I took last year have done very well indeed, but now needed moving. I had about two dozen flowering currants to find a home for. I also needed to move the bird cherry hedge which I put in last year, due to a lack of foresight on my part and a change of plans.

My cuttings bed last week in the snow.

This area will be making way for a small new paddock soon.

So I had the idea of a mixed Myrobalan, flowering currant and bird cherry hedge. It will provide wind protection, food for us, food for the birds and it should look pretty for at least  part of the year. To add even more colour, I dotted in a few red dogwoods, again from cuttings.
The only missing feature is the Cherry Plums, on order from the interweb. They should arrive just in time, for bare root plants need to go in before Spring really kicks in.

Mid-job

I was relieved to finally sort out the blackberry support frame too. The weight of the plants and the effects of the wind snapped off one of the posts last year. It was all too heavy to lift back up, but today I managed to cut out all of last year's fruiting canes and to disentangle this year's from the cross wires. The new structure is much more substantial so hopefully it will stand for a lot more than a year. It won't take long for the blackberry harvest to repay the cost.

Tuesday 6th March 2018
Time for seedlings to look after themselves.
A big day for some of the seedlings. Broad beans, leeks, tomatoes, peppers, all have got off to an early start in the conservatory. But they prefer the polytunnel, where there is even more light and better air circulation. Now that the temperatures have lifted and Spring may finally be here, with a little overnight protection they should survive and harden off nicely.

Broad beans coming up strong.

Leeks and coriander looking

a bit straggly but should grow on

stronger in the polytunnel.

As soon as the soil is workable, 

the broad beans will go out.

If the weather holds good,

they should quickly harden off.

Tender young tomato plants and peppers.

The mini greenhouse within the polytunnel

should give them enough protection.

The polytunnel mangetout seedlings.

These should give one of the first harvests of the year.

More cuttings
Today it was the turn of the dogwood cuttings to be planted out. A few went into the new hedge yesterday, but I had about thirty to place. The first batch went beside the new pond and I took some time out to start naturalising the edges. It is starting to look really good.

With the cuttings bed cleared and rotavated, I trimmed back the buddleias and took fresh cuttings. Again I got distracted and ended up digging out a sizeable patch of nettles.

Spring was really in the air today. Skylarks sang high in the sky and Sue's honeybees were out in force. The geese and the turkeys were mating - actually the first time I have ever seen the stag turkey 'on the job'.

A quaint place for a meeting
I had to stop slightly early since Sue and I were off to the Smallholders Club committee meeting. Gerry did his best to ruin our plans by disappearing under the killing bush with his first rabbit of the year. It's about time, as the rabbits are already causing a lot of damage in the garden this year.
We had a new venue for the meeting. The committee room the club used to use was being refurbished, which did us a big favour. For it forced us to look elsewhere and we came to The Bridge Coffee Shop in a place called Three Holes (wonderfully descriptive). The owner was happy to open especially for us. We only expected a room and tables, but she was happy to serve us the menu. I must say, a meeting with pizza and herbal tea was much more civilised and comfortable than a stale meeting room. At the end there was a decisive vote to hold our next meeting back at the coffee shop.

Wednesday 7th March 2018
The first goose egg of the year!
I did a bit of general tidying up today, trimming back bushes and tidying beds in readiness for new growth. I started collecting up all the bits of ash tree which have fallen over the winter. The lawn is littered with sticks and twigs right up to small branches. They don't take long to dry out and make excellent wood for getting the fire going.
Sue appeared with a big smile on her face, clutching the first goose egg of the year. Not quite the latest date for this annual event, but last year the first one plopped out on 16th February. That was the last I saw of the egg as it was quickly poached and gobbled up!

Almost a Valentine's Goose Egg

16th February 2017
A typical day on the smallholding, with all sorts going on. It is the variety of tasks every day that I love.
In no particular order:

Trip to Holbeach to stock up on nails, disinfectant, fencing staples and onion sets.
Carrots and turnips sown in polytunnel
Stables cleaned and disinfected
Blackberry posts erected
First goose egg.
Pyrethrum arrived.


A few words about some of these. First off, the first goose egg of the year! Just two days after Valentine's, the traditional start of laying. Sue snaffled it as goose eggs are her favourite. We'll take the eggs for quite some time before leaving the females to sit on a few eggs. After trying goose for the first time a few weeks ago, we'll definitely be aiming for a few young birds this year.
The carrots and turnips are the first seeds I have sown directly into the soil this year. I only grow very early turnips in the polytunnel as when it becomes a humid jungle later in the year the turnips are very quick to rot.
Meanwhile, the mangetout plants are shooting up and will be ready to go into the beds when they are 3" high.

The pyrethrum arriving is very exciting. Pyrethrum has always been a favourite of organic gardeners. As with any chemical it is still a last resort, always being better to encourage natural predators. But as I have said before, the polytunnel is hardly a natural environment. Pyrethrum has only just come back onto the market, having disappeared due to crazy and prohibitively expensive licensing rules clearly designed to favour the big multinational peddlers.
Although harmful to bees (it is after all an insecticide), if applied in the evening it does its job and won't hurt the bees in the morning.

I am trying a new way of erecting the blackberry posts. The problem is that when you strain the wires which will support the canes, they inevitably pull the posts inwards and the wires slacken off. This time I am using an idea from a very old book, nailing underground cross-braces onto the posts. They greatly increase the surface area which is pushing against the soil and should hopefully limit movement.

17th February 2017
I put up bird houses today. A colonial nest box which I hope the sparrows will find. It will probably be the house sparrows, but I am really hoping it is tree sparrows. Both these species are colonial nesters. I moved another old bird box which was incorrectly sited - facing south-east west, into the sun and the prevailing wind and rain.




Finally, an open-fronted teapot nestbox designed for birds such as robins, wrens and wagtails. I have tucked it against an ivy clad trunk near the house.
While all this was going on, unbeknown to me Sue was shooing a Sparrowhawk out of the hallway.

Next job was to finish off the blackberry posts using a system called Gripple to tension the nylon wires. It works by passing the nylon through a little gizmo which completely prevents it sliding back the other way. This is okay until you pull it a little too far onto the wire! Fortunately they provide a small wire tool just for this situation... until that gets stuck as well. Eventually I managed to extricate it with brute force and a screwdriver.
I took out my frustration on the edible hedgerow, applying the annual severe haircut. It seems drastic, but helps the hedge to bush up. Done at this time of year, it has minimal impact on the birds. This is a perilous job as the blackthorn has a habit of biting back.

Last job for the day was to rearrange the heras fencing to create an area for the turkeys to live in when they are allowed out. It needs to be netted, as otherwise the turkeys will just hop the fence and be wandering everywhere. Even with some of the restrictions lifted, this would still not be permitted.

18th February 2017
I spent some time in the dyke a the end of the land today. The reason being that, after 6 years, I spotted 3 drainage pipes leading into it from my land. I guess they must have become more exposed last time the drainage board cleared the dyke. There was quite a trickle of water coming from each pipe, but the entrances were clogged up. I cleared them, then spent some time playing with the water levels in the dyke!
I got a new species for the farm too, for there were two one inch long fish in the shallow water. I have no idea what type.

The Ixworth trio, who will lay the eggs which will become our meat chickens for the year, have settled well into the small stable. They are laying (well, the two hens at least) but today I erected a hay feeder in the corner in the hope that they start laying in there.