Getting the plot ready for a new growing season

Winter is a time to catch up and to get everything ready for next year. 

Last year's failures and disappointments can be left in the past as we optimistically plan for the year ahead, a year of bountiful sunshine and rain in perfect proportion, a year where we finally keep up with sowing schedules, remember to keep seedlings watered but don't drown them, keep on top of the weeds, keep up with harvesting and even keep on top of succession sowing and planting.

And that will all start with getting the beds prepared in plenty of time for spring. For some that will mean digging over so the frost can (allegedly) break the soil down or rotavating to start the year with lovely, clear beds. The conscientious will work in manure or ample compost. 

None of that for me though. I want to keep the soil covered to protect it from being beaten down by the worst of the winter weather. It won't be turned, but protected from the elements it will emerge from the winter with a crumbly surface. Most of my annual beds are currently covered with homemade compost or, when there wasn't enough of that, for there never is, a deep layer of straw. This was a choice which was made for me thanks to the cheapness of straw in this area - we should always aim to use whatever is locally available. If it's not sufficiently rotted down by sowing time, I'll rake it off the surface and add it in to the compost piles. 

Rhubarb is already coming up, though it may get nipped back if we get anouther cold spell

In the forest garden, most of the herbaceous plants have retreated under the surface for the winter. But as the rays of spring sunshine hit the ground strong, fresh shoots will appear. For the moment I am keeping the perennial beds well mulched. For this I use woodchip, which I now have in more than plentiful supply. 

Plenty of woodchip and logs to be getting on with!
Can you spot the robin?

Under the fruit bushes I am actually using freshly shredded leylandii. It's still producing a lot of heat, but this will quickly dissipate once it's spread out over the ground. The primary purpose of this is to suffocate the weeds, starving them of light and stealing their nitrogen as the decomposition bacteria get going. Keeping on top of weeds, especially grass growing up through thorny gooseberry bushes would be a nightmare without mulching. 

Woodchip makes an excellent mulch for the raspberry beds.

It will decompose quite quickly and put its goodness back into the ground. I won't need to dig it in, for the worms will do that and its nutrients will be made available to all my plants by the magical processes which are allowed to go on in the soil when it is not repeatedly turned and disturbed by constant upheaval. I'm talking not just worms and minibeasts, but fungal mycelia and bacteria. For the cycle of nutrients, with a little encouragement from us, is much more efficiently handled by nature. No need for simplistic additions of fertiliser backed up with liberal dowses of herbicide and pesticide to eliminate all 'competition'. Nature achieves all of this in a much more complex way. I don't even need to completely understand everything that goes on, in the same way that I don't have a clue how my car or this computer actually work.

Logs and woodchip are now being delivered to the smallholding with alarming regularity! I don't want to turn it away and have plenty of use for it, especially the woodchip, but it is keeping me busy redistributing it around the whole smallholding. It might help me with my resolution to shed a few pounds.

The logs will of course be handy for heating the house, but some are just too big to handle so they will be left for wildlife. Much of the wood needs to season too and I am not keen to use the leylandii in the woodburner. It needs at least a couple of years of seasoning otherwise it's guaranteed chimney fire! Given the amount of wood now coming in, I won't need it for this, so we have multiple woodpiles appearing all over the smallholding. The wildlife will love it. 

I've found another great use for the leylandii logs though. It makes a great edging for perennial beds. It's not too formal but does just enough to define the areas so they don't seem too messy amd random. I don't really do formal, but a degree of organisation and layout is necessary to aid tending plants and harvesting. 

I have decided to create some beds which come somewhere between annual veg beds and forest garden. These are my beds for perennial veg. Here will live Jerusalem artichoke, Turkish rocket, herbs, perennial kales, 9-star perennial broccoli, Chinese artichoke (crosnes). Many of these don't need the intensive input of labour demanded by annual crops, but they don't really fit into the randomness of the forest garden, especially as the canopy closes over and sunny edges become more limited.

The only things that stop me getting more done during the winter are the limitations of my ageing body and the frustratingly short days. 

But as you can see, I've been a bit busy. Before I know it though, the sowing schedule will be ramping up. At the moment it is mainly perennial seeds which are stratifying, the process by which they are sown early enough to experience a protracted cold period. In nature, they need this before they germinate. It is nature's way of making sure that seeds shed in the summer and autumn don't germinate too quickly before spring arrives.

My seed potatoes are arriving this week, which is a sure sign that the main sowing and planting season approaches. Fortunately hours of light increase roughly in line with the amount of work which needs doing... thinking about it, it's probably the other way round, it's the increasing light which heralds the need to prepare beds and get sowing seeds.

And so 2023 is under way!

Good luck everyone.

The Joy Of Sausages

It's hard to believe that we've never in 12 years of smallholding made our own sausages. You need a certain amount of equipment for mincing, mixing and stuffing. This can get very expensive for industrial scale equipment, or you can go to the other end of the scale and sausage-making will be a nightmare if you're making more than half a dozen.

Then there's all the bother with mixing in rusk and choosing the correct skins. And that's before the somewhat suggestive but risky procedure of getting the stuffing into the skins. Anybody remember The Generation Game..!

We've not kept pigs for quite a few years now. They cost a lot to feed and you get a lot (and I mean a lot) of meat.

But for a while we'd been wondering about turning some of the older sheep into sausages and burgers. Shetland sheep are a native breed and are best kept through one winter to go for meat in their second year. This is known as hogget and has a stronger taste than commercial lamb. It is much sought after.

Sending off intact males can be problematic with some species. Goats  and pigs especially can come back with a strong taint to the meat which personally I don't find very palatable. But we've  never had a problem with intact Shetland rams. We keep them away from the females before their final journey and try to make sure they go in late summer, when they have had the opportunity to fatten up on the pasture and before their hormones get going in the autumn.

Rambutan had to go off as he was related to too many of the ewes. And three of the older ewes need to go off soon. Rambutan is about four. The older ewes about nine, so they will definitely be classified as mutton, a rarely sold meat these days as it's not economical to keep livestock that long.

So Rambutan went with a younger castrated ram and we got both of them minced with lamb and mint burgers and merguez sausages in mind. In the end there really was no discernible difference between the mince we got back from the two sheep.

Kill weight for Rambutan was 25.0kg and for the other 17.5kg which is about right for a native breed sheep. Commercials are bigger, but natives are tastier and have longer lives.

We got nearly 17kg of mince from Rambutan and over 12kg from the other, giving us plenty of mince to play with. We weren't sure about the fat content of the mince. Most recipes call for minced shoulder and belly. I reckoned that the whole sheep minced would come back about right and it certainly looked about right.

I did a fair bit of research into recipes for lamb sausages and lamb burgers, tallied up the ingredients we needed and made a visit to the ethnic stores of Peterborough to stock up on spices. Some of the mince we kept back for other recipes.

Day 1 - Mixing the ingredients

We spent an evening mixing up ELEVEN different flavours!

These were: 

BURGERS: Greek, Middle-eastern, Spicy Indian, Thai, Minted and Basic with rosemary and thyme. We mixed up each batch by hand, working the spices and other ingredients in thoroughly, then put them in the fridge overnight for the flavours to blend and the meat to chill.

These were the SAUSAGES: Minted, Lamb Massala, Rosemary & Red Wine, Merguez 1 and Merguez 2.

Day 2 - Burgers and Meatballs

We have a burger press so it didn't take too long to make about 120 burgers. A quick try of a couple of the mixes and we were absolutely delighted with the juiciness and the flavours. We used some of the various mixtures to make meatballs too.

Day 2 - Sausage Making Attempt 1

There is a mysterious aura surrounding the dark art of sausage making. Secret recipes, do it like this, don't do that... It was an art we had thus far never dabbled in.

A while back we had purchased a grinder and sausage stuffer attachment to go on our stand mixer. Even if the sausage making went badly, the mincer is a happy medium between something hefty and commercial and something clamped to the side of the kitchen worktop and cranked by hand. We ordered some sheep casings for the sausages. I had ordered two sizes as I really wasn't sure what we actually needed, what would fit the three sizes of sausage stuffer tube we had and what would work best. The casings come in brine and need rinsing and soaking. They are a bit slippery to handle so we paid a tiny bit extra to get the ones which come on a spool. This makes it easier to load them onto the stuffing tube.

We started with the Rosemary and Red Wine mixture. It went incredibly well. To our amazement the sausages came out almost perfectly. But it turns out this was beginner's luck! When we switched to a smaller diameter skin and tube things started to go wrong. The meat mix was backing up and just wouldn't go into the skins. We tried all sorts with no luck. We even went back to  the wider skins and tube but our problems continued. A brilliant start had somehow come to a stuttering and very frustrating halt.

Day 3 - The Joy Of Sausage making

We figured that our problem had been when the meat mixture warmed up. So we kept it nice and cold and put the metal grinder parts into the freezer for 10 minutes before each batch. Hey presto! Back to successful and easy sausages. 

We tried switching back to the thinner tube. It was better than the previous evening, but still not easy so we settled on the 24/26mm casings.

It really didn't take long to finish making the last three batches of sausages. When I say sausages, I mean 2m long sausages! We still had to figure how to twist and tied them into strings.

This is where YouTube really came into itself. Scott Rea Productions is a fantastic channel. We had used it to solve our initial sausage problems and the slo-mo sausage stringing video was perfect. It wasn't quite as easy as he made it look and we adapted the method a little, but it wasn't long before we were both enjoying great success... to our surprise.

This certainly won't be the last of our sausage-making and I am very happy using sheep instead of pork as the basis for sausages and burgers. In the end we didn't use the rusk we had bought in. It really wasn't necessary.

So, my five pieces of advice:

Sausages don't have to be pork (in fact lamb makes excellent meatballs and burgers too)

Do a bit of research and get everything ready

Give yourself time

It helps to have two people

KEEP EVERYTHING REALLY COLD

Sheepskins

Someone noticed that alongside the two boxes which came back from the abattoir were two sheep skins.

It is fairly easy to get the sheepskins back and to process them. You need a special licence from Defra to collect Category 3 animal by-products, but this is a simple process and only needs doing once. 

Then there are two options. The first is to return to the abattoir on kill day (as you usually take your animals in the day before) to pick up the fresh skin, then get it home and salt it immediately to prevent any rot setting in. Alternatively our abattoir were happy to salt the skin for us for a very small fee (£3 per skin) which meant we could pick them up at the same time as picking up the processed meat. This was nine days after we dropped off the live animals.

We then topped them up with fresh salt, getting right to every edge but not onto the wool side. The skins just need laying out on a surface. They don't need any special stretching or anything.

This is all Sue's department. When she is ready she will scrape any surplus fat off the skin - we have a special scraper but a knife will do. There shouldn't be much scraping to do if your abattoir have done a good job. Then apply a tanning mix which is purchased off the internet. There are three different stages to this, the last of which is an opportunity to soften the back or stretch the skin if you wish, but this is not vital. 

Scraping the skins.

You can send the skin off to a tannery to be processed but the cost is fairly high, especially if you need to pay return postage. You will get a really good result, but the homemade version is quite acceptable.

I'll add to this when Sue does the next stages.

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.

Magic Oca Tubers

At the back end of 2020 I purchased some oca tubers.

Oca is a South American tuber crop. They look a bit like small potatoes, but they are in a totally different family. Whereas potatoes are in the same family as tomatoes (hence the susceptibility of both to blight), oca grow like an oxalis.

I'm not going to pretend oca is a perfect crop to grow. Firstly the tubers are stupidly overpriced, often around £1 each for tubers an inch round if you're lucky. Who is going to eat something worth that much? No, I'd rather grow them on and sell them for 50p each! But come the day when I end up with too many to sell and everybody else has had the same idea, then I will start to treat them more as a crop to be eaten.

Those first tubers I purchased could not have been more of a disappointment. They had been either harvested too late or not stored frost-free after harvesting, causing at least half of them to just wither and rot away. The rest I tried to store over winter but by the spring they were just empty shells of decomposing skins.

And therein lies one problem with oca. It doesn't form tubers until late in the year but they do not survive a heavy frost, so it's a tuber on the edge of its range. But as with wild birds, insects and plants, that range is creeping ever further north as our climate changes.
In fact it is this climate change which drives the need to rethink some of our crops. It's an unusual year now when my potatoes aren't hit by blight due to our warm, wet summers.

Anyway, back to the point. Not to be put off, I found some reasonably priced oca tubers on ebay. I am still experimenting with how to store such tubers overwinter. Since oca are so small, I don't want them drying out. My standard storage for potatoes is in a wardrobe in the garage. This keeps them cool and dark without exposing them to frost. The wardrobe offers protection from rodents too. I just store my potatoes in thick paper bags. I decided to store the oca in a mix of coir, perlite and sharp sand. For an insurance policy, I also stored some in a tub of peat-free compost in the fridge. I occasionally had a rummage around during the winter just to check their progress - all was fine.

I don't want to wait till May, when we are frost-free, to start my oca tubers growing, so instead my plan was to pot them up indoors to give them a head start. Besides, it would be difficult to stop them sprouting of their own accord if I waited too long into the spring.

So in mid-March I released my stored tubers from their hibernation. They had all stored really well. No softening of the tubers and no rot. The ones in the fridge were more ready to go, probably because there is more humidity in there, even if the temperature is more controlled.

What amazes me about tubers is how such a tiny, insignificant ball of plant material can throw up so much growth and replicate itself so efficiently over a year. Just take a look at the emergent growth from these tiny little tubers!

Coming up for mid-April now and oca plants seem really strong. A couple have shot away but most are throwing up really strong young shoots. They are in an unheated conservatory so that I can check their growth until they can go into the ground outside. That way we get sturdy plants.

The original plan was to grow the oca in with the perennials on the edge of the forest garden. However, the soil is still a bit too clayey in there which makes for difficult harvesting. So instead they are going into some of the conventional vegetable beds - these are more and more becoming a mix of annual crops and perennials anyway. 

Hopefully by November I'll be pulling handfuls out of the ground a bit like this hill farmer I witnessed harvesting his Oca recently in Mexico.

Maybe I'll even have enough to eat a small plate full.

I'll keep you updated.

Good King Henry

A ground cover plant which grows in the shade, is edible and perennial. It's a forest gardener's dream.

What about one whose local name is Lincolnshire Spinach, though I've never knowingly seen it being cultivated here. It's more commonly known as Good King Henry. What it tastes like I'm yet to discover. I've read that the stems are a bit like asparagus - how often have I read that! The leaves are unsurprisingly supposed to be like spinach, though some people report bitterness. It has obviously gone out of fashion, but so often that is because crops don't fit in with modern mechanised farming practices or easy one-pick harvesting and storage requirements.

Good King Henry can be tricky to grow from seed, though one problem seems to be that there is no consistent advice. I had a few false starts and tried various approaches. It seems to do best sown into modules or trays outside. In fact, the best results I had were from a packet of asparagus! Goodness knows how but I must have somehow mixed up the seed packets. I think the asparagus got discarded in the belief that it was unviable Good King Henry. 

The asparagus was slow to germinate but turned into Good King Henry! I must have had close to 100% germination!

The seedlings were very, very slow to grow. Eventually I took the plunge and planted them in the big wide world of the forest garden. They continued to grow extremely slowly until, one day in late autumn, I couldn't find them any more.

I clung to the hope that, as they are perennials, they would be strong enough to survive the winter in a dormant state, but I really was not sure they would.

But look what I found today. The photo does not quite betray how small they are, but look how healthy and strong they look, nothing like the spindly weedlings I last saw. Hopefully it won't be too long till I get to do a taste test.

Springing up

On a similar note to the previous post, giants are stirring below the ground and stretching their leafy arms to reach the sky, revelling in the first sunshine of the year.

These are THE HERBACEOUS PERENNIALS, a remarkable group of plants which basically hibernate. At the end of the year, after flowering and producing seeds, their leaves and stems wilt, dry up, rot down, and they disappear for the winter, dormant just below the surface. But their strong root systems, which increase year on year, are a remarkable store of energy which is unleashed when they sense lengthening days and warming soil. Through the soil poke the most luscious of leaves, nothing like the weedy and vulnerable seedlings produced by annuals.  Herbaceous perennials are ready to go. 

So as I walk around the smallholding, particularly the forest garden where young perennials were planted last year, every glimpse of an emerging strong plant brings joy. If they survived that first winter they will be here to stay. Every few years they can be divided to make more plants and in exceptionally cold winters I might mulch them as protection, though most are selected for their hardiness (and my laziness!)

So here's a quick gallery of what's coming through.

From top left, Globe Artichoke, Wild Strawberry, Garden Sorrel, Red-berried Elder, Dock (baddy), Caucasian Spinach, Babington Leaks, Lupins, Day Lily, Crocus, Bronze Fennel, Angelica, , 

 

Apple grafting and wax workshop

Most weekends I stay on the smallholding but last weekend Sue and I had booked to go along to a beeswax workshop in West Norfolk, courtesy of the brilliant WNKLBA (read as Winklebar, West Norfolk and Kings Lynn Bee-keepers Association).

But late on Thursday evening I came across a Facebook post on the East Anglian Landworkers Alliance Group to the effect that there were places left on an apple tree grafting day.

Not only did the timing fit in perfectly but it was in the same direction as the other course. Time is valuable. Petrol is priceless.

A couple of emails later and everything was sorted.

Easy Graft
Apple grafting is something I've not tried before. I've just never really got round to it. It's not only used for apples. The principal is that you put the fruit tree you want onto the rootstock that you want. It means you can control factors such as the size and vigour of the tree. These will be determined by the rootstock. February and March are the time to do it.

And so,  in a polytunnel on the site of Norfolk Farmshare on the outskirts of Norwich, I first learned the theory and then got to try the art of grafting. First I chose my two apple varieties. You just use what is basically the end of a twig. This is the scion, the cutting which will be joined to the rootstock. I wanted something new, so I went for Queen Cox on a small rootstock so that I can squeeze it into the forest garden. Secondly one which I'd never heard of, Gloucester Underleaf,.. I was attracted to this as it is a Cider Apple. I went for a larger rootstock on this one as we'll want lots for juicing.

I could get into this grafting business. It's a great way of being able to propagate and play with my favourite fruit trees. 

While I was grafting, Sue was exploring Norwich. Come lunchtime she picked me up and we headed back west to a village hall in West Norfolk. 

Waxing Lyrical
West Norfolk and Kings Lynn Beekeepers Association really is a fantastic group. Today's meeting was about using old wax from the bee hives. We joined in with a series of demonstrations, from lip balm to candles, wax wraps to furniture polish. We even got a sample of each to take home with us.

Smallholding is about using every little bit of what you produce. It's about doing things sustainably. After today, thanks to some people kindly sharing their knowledge, I am a little closer to that.