RIP Terry The Turkey :-(

I've decided to try a slightly different format for my blog posts from now on. At this time of year I'm incredibly busy with sowing, mowing and growing... and that's not to mention looking after all the animals. At the end of the day I'm often just too whacked to keep up with the blog. So I've decided to go over to a diary style blog with occasional longer posts devoted to one subject. That way I get to keep a record of everything I do on the smallholding (and you get a true sense of everything that is involved). Hopefully I'll catch up with myself within a week or two.
22nd April
The broad beans are finally up. I used seed collected from last year and it's always an interminably long wait for them to poke their heads up. I don't plant in the autumn like many do as I don't see the point in such an early start. Besides, if the cold and wet didn't get them, the chickens sure would!
One of our Muscovy girls has started sitting already. I did read that they were very prolific, but she can only just have had time to lay enough eggs before plonking herself down on them.
She's in the corner of the big chicken house.
Two nights ago I got fantastic views of a Short-eared Owl hunting down in the young woodland I have planted. This is an infrequent visitor to the farm and must be on its way back to its breeding grounds. Anyway, tonight it was back again, swooping into the grass hunting voles. Unfortunately I've not seen the barn owls for a while now, not since the farmer who bought the field grubbed up all the scrub in the corner where the barn owl box is. As he did this during the breeding season, it's odds on the owls will have abandoned their nest. Let's hope they return.

23rd April
I'm trying Mangetout outside again this year, but I've bought a variety called Golden Sweet which has yellow pods. Hopefully they'll be easier to spot when harvest time comes around. I constructed a frame for them to grow up made of bamboo sticks interwoven with semi-dry willow which I harvested from around the farm during the winter and I planted them out this morning. I raised them in pots in the polytunnel and have been hardening them off for a couple of days. I prefer not to plant straight out as I've lost them all in the past, either to voles, slugs or pigeons. I've planted them close to a large water butt too so I can prevent them becoming too dry.
I also sowed some Salsify and Scorzonera today. Closely related, these plants have very different roots. The scorzonera has been sown in some of my new 'mini-permaculture' beds as this plant is a perennial and if the roots don't develop enough in the first year they can be harvested at the end of next year instead. If they were sown in with the root crops, that space would be needed by potatoes next year.
Next to them I sowed some Sokol Breadseed Poppies. These should give a harvest of white poppy seeds, as well as a fine display of flowers. The seed heads don't have holes around the edge so the seeds are easily collected.

24th April
Time to sow the sweetcorn. This year I have 100 sweetcorn seeds. I am growing a supersweet variety again. The past two years my sweetcorn harvest has been disappointing after rats moved out of the fields before the corn was ripe enough to harvest. So this year I'll be growing some in the polytunnel and some further from the field edge in my main vegetable plot. I'm planning to undersow it with my prize mangel wurzels!
I'm also giving Minipop another go. This is harvested for miniature cobs before the tassels develop and hence before pollination. Therefore it shouldn't cross pollenate with the maincrop, which would risk spoiling it.
25th April
I have started some cucumbers off earlier than normal this year and this evening I took the plunge and planted three seedlings into the polytunnel beds. I grow Burpless Tasty Green - it's the bulk standard variety but serves me very well indeed when grown in the tunnel. I have tried others but found the yield inferior and the skin tougher. I will grow my cucumbers in two or three batches to extend the harvest period.
26th April
Mangel Wurzels and Finch Seed Mix.
Today I got a very big sowing job done. I have a 'spare veg patch' away from the main one, where I grow tougher crops which require more space. The soil is heavy clay here and pretty compacted, having been arable in the past. One quarter of this area is reserved for fodder crops. They only make a small donation to the animal food bill, but are a top up treat in the winter. I grow mostly Mangel Brigadier, but have sown some Yellow Eckendorff too. In all I sowed 1400 seeds, two every 15 inches or so!
Another quarter is, for the first time this year, reserved for the wild birds. I have sown a finch and bunting seed mix which should help out some of our disappearing farmland birds during the winter and early spring. Luckily this mix was simply broadcast and lightly turned in with the rotavator.
27th April

Hail and snow today and some pretty tasty thunderstorms. So I spent much of the evening in the polytunnel. I potted up all my tomato plants. These are the ones to go outside, always a bit of a gamble in our climate but I'm determined to manage them properly this year, taking off lower leaves and nipping sideshoots to give them the best chance of ripening and avoiding blight.
While I was potting up, I pricked out the celeriac seedlings too. Some of these won't be ready till late next winter so I don't want to hold up their growth even one little bit.
The storms obviously grounded a few migrant birds as my first Whitethroat for the year was calling scratchily from the dyke and a Chiffchaff was calling from the ash trees.

28th April

What a terrible start to the day. Sue was up at a ridiculously early hour and came back in to tell me that she thought Terry The Turkey had been killed. Terry is, or was, our turkey stag, a gentle giant who followed me everywhere. Only yesterday he had been stomping around in the kitchen with me. Up to now he had led a charmed life, firstly surviving Christmas and now settled with a wife and poults on the way. I went outside to investigate, but it was clear from the trail of feathers that something awful had happened. We had given up putting the pair of turkeys in housing at nights since they started roosting in random places. I often got a face full of flapping wing when I tried to move them. We've only ever lost one goose and a couple of guinea fowl to the fox, so this was a bit of a shock. He may even have died trying to protect his hen, who has been sat on her nest in the planter at the front of the house and only has 2 days to go until the chicks hopefully hatch out.

Going back to my roots

  

Friday 29th June 2012
The clearest of morning skies

Remember those carrots that never came up? No, I'm not going to tell you that they've all magically and mysteriously sprung up in the last few days. Quite the reverse. They've been an unmitigated disaster. The spring onions have fared just as poorly, as well as a couple of my beetroot varieties. A combination of three factors has caused this. First, my own miserliness, trying to use old seed that had been poorly stored. Second, the washout spring and early summer we've had. And third, the plague of slugs we've encountered this year.

In fact, things have been so bad I've been avoiding this quarter of my veg patch, letting the onions, shallots and garlic get on by themselves. They're planted to deter the carrotfly!
Of course, the easiest way to deter carrotfly is to have no carrots!!!

My root beds (after a tidy up)

Back to my roots
Today's job was to go back to my roots. I ventured in, equipped with shears, hoe and trowel. At least if I could tidy up the edges and weed out the weeds, with the sun shining I might just see a chink of light at the end of the tunnel.

... And there it was. My salsify was flourishing between the sage plants I've dotted around for the general well-being of the veg patch.

Salsify and Sage doing well.

Celeriac
The other end of the salsify bed was waiting for my celeriac seedlings, and they went in today too. This root is in fact a form of celery where the base swells up and is the part to eat. I prefer it to celery as I find the taste more delicate. Besides, those whiskery, bearded roots always make me smile when I pull them up in the autumn. Celeriac needs a long season to succeed in this country, and home-grown plants never quite achieve the clean lines and the stature of those in the shops, but it is nevertheless a crop which I find well worth the effort.

Carrots
Spurred on by my discovery of a thriving salsify crop, I uncovered just a few carrot plants, borne of the toughest seeds.

The idea of some beautifully sweet, early carrots is a distant memory now. So too the multicoloured succession of roots plucked straight from the ground and lucky to make it back to the kitchen before being munched.
But I figure it's not too late to try for a crop to enjoy in the autumn and to store through the winter. So I've resown some of my beds with seed purchased this year. The slugs are more under control, the weather seems less inclement and I reckon things might just turn out OK.

Mixed success in the beetroot bed.

Beetroots
Over in the beetroot and onion bed, the Red Ace beetroots have fared pretty well. About three quarters of the line has come up, so I filled the gaps today. The Chioggia, those wonderful beetroots with their rings of colour, were much more sparse. And the Burpees Golden, Sue's favourite... Two plants in a twelve foot row!
I've resown the seed I had left over from the last two varieties in seedtrays to give them as much chance as possible of at least getting a start in life, and I used any leftover seed to partially fill the gaps. I may just get a few extra plants if I'm lucky.

Scorzonera
(please don't ask me exactly how to pronounce it. I've done well to spell it!)
The scorzonera and maincrop carrot bed is difficult to fathom at the moment. There's certainly no carrots come up and it's hard to find more than a few young scorzonera plants, but they do look so like grass and are terribly difficult to pick out in amongst the stray blades. Since my veg beds were carved out of a lush sheep paddock, eradicating the couch-grass and dandelions from them has been a drawn-out process, but one which I am definitely winning.

Scorzonera and salsify are usually grouped together as sister crops, so it won't be a disaster if I only get salsify this year. Last year I only bothered with scorzonera and was delighted to harvest a good crop of ridiculously long, gnarled black roots at the end of the year. If you can get past the fact that they are stubbornly difficult to peel (best done after coooking), you really should give scorzonera a chance. I love the taste and texture, though I can't even begin to describe it.

Thinning out the 'snips


One of last year's parsnips which I must have missed!
I do like to leave some vegetables to flower .
Salsify is a particularly good one, as is rocket.
I may try collecting the seed, though I won't rely on it.

The parsnips are, along with the salsify, the stars of the root bed show this year. I've grown lines of them interspersed with garlic and a few pot marigolds. They're supposed to be good companions. There are a few odd patches where germination has failed, but on the whole my 'snips have done well. I do know that parsnip seed is one that really doesn't stay viable for more than a year, so each year new seed is used.

I learned a valuable lesson last year, when I failed to thin. I was rewarded with a crop of long, skinny parsnips which didn't make much impact in the pot. Where I was lucky and a seedling had germinated all on its lonesome, I got the most fantastic long, chunky roots. So today I bit the bullet and thinned. Most of my plants were growing in pairs or even triplets, as I had sown the papery seeds in clusters at stations every six to eight inches apart.
(While just looking something up, I came across some valuable advice about sowing parsnips. Two bits of advice really. The first was to sow by scattering seed along a four inch drill rather than at cluster stations, as the latter often leads to gaps in the rows - I can bear testament to this. The second was to ignore the seed packet instruction and wait till early April to sow rather than February. I never make February anyway!)
Anyway, back to the thinning out. This process pains me greatly. I find it like pulling my own teeth, though I know it has to be done and is for the best. But today I pulled a couple of dozen perfect, tapering roots. I can only hope that my attempt to leave the strongest plants means that there are even better plants left in the ground with room to expand.

It just seemed such a shame, and especially with all those gaps, but I really couldn't imagine that such long, thin roots would transplant well into the gaps. So instead I filled them with a few spare celeriac plants.

Hamburg Parsley
I've saved the worst till last. Nothing. Zilch. Rien. Last year I spilled all the seed before I could sow it and had to buy in an emergency packet. In the end it didn't get sown till June 18th, but I still got a decent crop. The roots look like parsnip but have  a nuttier flavour and the leaves can be used just like normal parsley. I do like a plant with two uses.
So today I rotavated the bed and started afresh. A bit late, but I'll push my luck and see what happens.


Just one bed left to sort out now. I grow my leeks and celery in the roots quarter of the veg patch and I have some young plants thriving in seed trays at the moment. They'll move into their final positon in a couple of days time.