2021 Week 3 - Seeds of Hope

The Passing of the Seasons

It's been a quiet week here. Mornings zooming into school and darkness by 5 means that I have to squeeze the smallholding work in when I can.

One problem with this time of year is that one or two days of bad weather, if they coincide with my free time, can set everything a week back. And so it's been this week, with the clear, cold air replaced with wet and windy conditions, even a little bit of snow, though we escaped very lightly compared to those hit badly by Storm Christoph.

There were some slight hints of Spring with Great Tits and Robins warmed into song with every odd ray sunshine that forced its way through. But just to remind us, the flooded fields and hawthorn hedges are still jumping with winter thrushes.

The five roe deer have reduced to four, which is a little sad. They spend much of their time sat out in the open, occasionally bounding across the landscape when something spooks them. But a couple of days back I was watching these four and then, scanning across the fields, I came across another three. Each group has one stag with their wonderful suede-like antlers. I guess this is the result of the rutting I observed a while back now. A happy ending.

I have invested in a simple rain gauge which indicated some very significant evaporation after the heavy rain on Tuesday night - either that or the ducks have found a new place to drink from. I'll need to find a new site for it.

I've been shifting compost from the heaps onto the beds. The polytunnel is as empty as it's going to be so I am topping up the beds in there as a priority. I've been cutting and chipping wood too. The woodchip goes onto the perennial beds to keep the weeds down and gradually to be naturally incorporated into the soil. I've had to se some on the muddy paths too, as mud skating is no fun when you're trying to push a barrow full of compost or animal feed. 

Seeds of the Future

Outdoor work has been a bit splodgy of late and has quickly resulted in numb fingertips. This is where the polytunnel comes in handy. Early sowings have germinated well. The mangetout is shooting up as are the lettuce seedlings. They are already out in a mini greenhouse in the polytunnel.

I am most pleased that the coriander seeds I stripped from their stalks last week have already begun to germinate strongly. That's one more thing we will be completely self-sufficient in. Coriander is a bit of a marmite herb, but I love it.
I've sown some lupin seed which I collected last year too and the first four varieties of onions have been started so they will hopefully have plenty of time to bulb up later in the year.

In preparation for the imminent tide of sowing and growing my peat-free compost delivery arrived this week too. I order for a few people so I can get it delivered. I do the same with animal feed, ordering for half a dozen smallholdings. It saves everybody having to drive a long way to pick up stock feed and it's a nice way to keep in touch with each other, in a social distancing manner of course.

All three of my yacon buds have thrown up shoots too. More about some of these novel vegetables I am growing in future posts.

I'm glad I was super-organised this year and ordered all my seeds very early, for again this year seed companies are already closing their order books. Wouldn't it be fantastic if this renewed interest in gardening continued when the new normal emerges

Carrot clearance

A more familiar crop is carrots, though I do grow many different colours. The outdoor crop got a bit forgotten again this year, mainly because they were bountiful in the polytunnel. Before I lost them all, we pulled the carrots from the wet soil and Sue did a sterling job of processing them. When picked so late, there were plenty of rejects and cut off ends to keep the geese happy for a while too. There is one variety called Resistafly which is unattractive to carrotfly. Unfortunately they don't yet do one called Resistavole. In fact I think mine are of the variety Irresistavole!

Judging from these two carrots, there should be plenty of baby carrots next year - well, I think that's how it works anyway.

Covid news
Sadly this week we experienced the highest death figures of the pandemic so far. All hope lies in a successful vaccination roll out. Locally we've been aware of more cases than previous and I must admit to feeling much safer on the weeks I am teaching from home rather than in school.

A Glint of Light

There has been reason for hope this week too. We are finally rid of Trump. It was uplifting to hear Joe Biden's inauguration speech. Things need to calm down and many poor decisions and angry policies need to be reversed and the damage mended. 

Hopefully we can see the way out of a very dark winter.

Towards the end of the week, a couple of very late evenings had me researching my newest project, edible perennials. My plans have, as usual, escalated. I don't really know how to do things in a half-hearted way.

This will be the main subject of next week's post.

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!

Parsnips and Leeks allowed to Flower

Thursday 1st June
A few images from the veg patch

We never got through last year's bumper crops of parsnips and leeks

so I have left them in to flower.

They are a great attractant to predatory insects such as hoverflies.

Globe artichokes in amongst the grasses, poppies and Scorzonera flowers

The geese protect their two goslings along the edible hedge

A hoverfly doing its job

on one of the

polytunnel melon flowers

Friday 2nd June
Sue did a mega rhubarb pick again today, probably the last harvest of the year. We will leave it now to capture some energy for the plants.
I am looking forward to sampling the rhubarb and fig chutney when its ready. Meanwhile I'll have to settle for a nice bit of rhubarb crumble.

While Sue was busy with that, I put the finishing touches to the brassica netting, where I will grow the members of the cabbage family which demand a long period in the ground, cauliflowers, winter cabbages and Romanesco.

Peppers sweet and hot - Saving the seeds

A redesign of my polytunnel space this year gave me a central bed just ideal for sweet peppers and they have responded admirably. I already have plenty of fruits, though there'll be a wait if I want to eat them red. But just look at this one, appropriately named Purple Beauty.

This year I am growing five varieties of Sweet Pepper. There are:

Lamuyo - an F1 variety, great for chunky green peppers
Hebar - from Reelseeds.co.uk - produces an abundance of very early, pale yellow peppers, turning red later
Yellow Ringo - A long, yellow variety, very sweet
Purple Beauty - from Realseeds.co.uk again - as it's name suggests. Another early cropper, so good for UK
Hungarian Hot Wax - really a chilli, but mild enough to be eaten as a pepper, especially when young and lime-yellow. Slightly hotter when they turn orange and then red, but still won't blow your head off

Hungarian Hot Wax

Lamuyo

.

Hebar

I tried to grow Red Marconi too, a lovely long red pepper, but the cheap seed I bought had clearly lost its viability as two attempts to germinate the measly 8 seeds I received both failed.

And therein lies a problem. For pepper seed (both sweet and hot chilli) does not stay viable for long. It is slow to start, taking up to two months for some of them to germinate, so if it fails you are really pushing it to start over. Having said that, with the aid of the polytunnel I do start my peppers off much later than other people. Many start them in January, when you need at least artificial heat and maybe even artificial light to get them going. I really can't see the point of this. Instead, I start my sweet peppers off in the first week of March and my chillis even later, in the last week of March. I have no trouble getting them to the ripened fruit stage and the seedlings certainly appreciate the extra heat of late spring and early summer.

The chillis that I grow are Jalapeno, Habanero, Scotch Bonnet, Cayenne, Paprika and Tabasco. Nothing special. In fact, I got most of them in a reduced priced packet of mixed chillis from a pound shop!
But all my original purchases of pepper seeds are now rapidly losing their viability. I had to sow plenty more than I needed to take account of this and even then I failed completely on the paprika. Luckily a friend had some to spare.
Not that I am tight, but I don't really want to go out and purchase a dozen packets of seed next year just to use a few from each packet. So the obvious answer is to save my own seed from what I have grown.
But chillis and peppers will readily cross, producing unpredictable offspring. That large sweet pepper could conceal the heat of a Jalapeno and that fiery Scotch Bonnet could be a completely damp squib.
Short of growing them a mile apart, or constructing special net cages for each variety, there has not really been a way to save my own seed.
However, here's where I sing the praises of The Real Seed Collection, a not-for-profit company which aims to actively encourage its customers to save their own seed and not need to keep going back for more. Without getting on my high horse too much, it makes commercial sense for the large seed companies (and some, like Monsanto, are truly global corporations) to discourage this sort of activity. After all, if we all acted like the thrifty gardeners of old and saved our own seed, how would they make their money?
Here's the header from the Real Seed Catalogue:

You'll find no F1 hybrids or genetically modified seed here - just varieties that do really well and taste great when grown by hand on a garden scale.
The name of the catalogue reflects what we are working to provide: real seeds for real gardeners wanting to grow proper vegetables.

Many are rare heirlooms, and because all are open-pollinated (non-hybrid) , you can save your own seed for future years, using the instructions we supply. There's no need to buy new seed every year!

 

The Real Seed Company have lots of great advice about seed saving on their website. They have also come up with a way of saving chilli and pepper seeds by isolating individual flowers on a plant.
Basically you make small bags out of old tights (stockings will do too, though not fishnets as they need to keep the insects out!). They say to sow, but I just tied the ends. You then place this over a flower which is just about to open and use a peg to close the end of the bag. This way nothing can get in or out. More precisely, no insect can transfer pollen from another plant to your chosen subject. Fortunately peppers will readily self-pollinate, so all you are doing is making sure that your chosen pepper develops in this way.


Obviously you want to be choosing a pepper on one of your best plants and it doesn't work on F1 varieties, as if fertile they will not produce true to type, most convenient for the companies which push them so hard. You also want to make sure that you bag your flower early enough in the season for the fruit to eventually ripen properly, otherwise you'll have no seed to collect.

After about 5 days, once the fruit has set, you remove the tights, marking the stem with a plastic twist tie so you know which fruit to eventually collect the seed from.
Once you collect the seed, dry it well and look after it through the winter (more very useful advice on the RealSeeds website). And that's it. The following year you'll have plenty enough seed for you and your friends.
Of course, if you've got an axe to grind with any of them, you could always try to cross a sweet Yellow Ringo with a Scotch Bonnet and give them that seed instead!