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.

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.

Chips with Everything ... and Mulch Mulch More

The turkey survived and recovered. I have blocked the offending gap between door and fence panel so she can no longer poke her head through and get stuck.

Before I continue on the main subject, here's a parasol mushroom I happened across today. Incredibly by late afternoon it was withered up and gone.

And here's a lovely picture of Gerry with his head in some catnip.

The new chipper / shredder has proved so popular that I have hardly seen Sue. She has slowly chewed her way through piles of thorny hedge trimmings, prickly roses, willow cuttings... In fact if you stay in one place too long you are likely to be picked up and thrown down the chute!

We have plenty of use for the chippings.

Firstly there is the comfrey patch. Last year's duck destruction meant that for once the comfrey was outcompeted by the grass. It is just poking back through again so a thick layer of mulch chippings will redress the balance.

It won't be long before the comfrey comes through and shades out the grass.

The chippings will give it a helping hand though.

The perennial beds suffer from grass incursion too, so a good few wheelbarrowfuls have gone into there.

And finally I laid fabric protection down for the new willow holt but I used cheap stuff, mainly because I don't like the plastic membrane which leaves long threads of unbreakable plastic in the environment. However the new stuff is thin and the grass has already started poking through. It does half the job, but is really designed to take a mulch - which is exactly what most of it now has. A mixture of grass clippings - a most convenient way of disposing of these right at source - and wood chip has been deployed to make sure the willow cuttings get a good start in life.

In fact mulching is the name of the game this year. But it is important to carefully select what you use to cover the ground and smother the weeds.
For the blackcurrant bushes, it was the bedding from the goose stables since they require a heavy injection of nitrogen.

Blackberries appreciating a heavy feed

The chicken escape committee

have decided that the paths should be mulched

as well as the raspberry beds.

It's easier just to go along with them.

For the raspberries it is grass clippings. Again it is a handy place to empty the mower. The mulch smothers the weeds, especially the invading grass and rots down to feed the soil. It saves hours of weeding in between raspberry canes.

The last two mulches I mentioned, straw and grass clippings, are also ideal for slugs. If I used them on my vegetable patch there would be no vegetables left, even with the help of the duck squad. But soft fruits seem largely unaffected by slugs and the ducks will keep the numbers sufficiently down so this wont become a hotbed of terrorist slugs making nightly incursions into the neighbouring vegetables.

For the vegetables I am mulching instead with compost. The weed-smothering action should again save hours of hands and knees weeding while at the same time the worms, newly encouraged by my no-dig regime, incorporate this black gold into the soil. The mulch will conserve moisture too and feed the plants.

The only problem is producing sufficient quantities of compost to cover all the beds. so I make sure that every single compostable piece of waste makes it onto the heaps. More than that though, I am growing short rotation willow to chip and bulk up the compost heaps. The sheep appreciate stripping the leaves and bark first and the extra supplement they get from this is worth losing a little compost material.
I also have, at great expense, a hundred rhizomes of elephant grass arriving soon. This is a non-invasive variety which is grown commercially to feed biomass energy systems. But I will be using the biomass to bulk up the compost.

If all goes well, we will have mountains of compost. My only worry is that we have too much carbon content and not enough nitrogen content for the compost to rot down sufficiently quickly, but hopefully the weekly addition of old chicken bedding will solve that one.

No digging, plenty of lugging!

With Spring hurtling towards us, there is plenty to do to get ready for sowing and growing. The ground has been pretty much frozen for a while now, so I have used my time to do some of the more physical jobs on the smallholding, mainly moving piles of stuff from one place to another.

Firstly an offer of woodchip rapidly developed into collecting 6 trailer loads of the stuff over several days. It's not heavy, but that's still a lot of shovel fulls to load and then unload at this end.
Considering how much I shifted, it seems to have gone nowhere. I do at least now have some nice woodchip paths between my new no-dig veg beds.
Not all the beds are ready yet as there are leeks and brassicas still in the ground holding up my redesign of the bed system, so the last couple of trailer loads are piled up waiting to go to their new home.

While the trailer was on the car I used the opportunity to collect a couple of loads of straw bales. We are fortunate that a couple of very local farms still do conventional small bales which are far easier to handle than the massive agricultural scale ones which mostly go straight off to be burned for energy these days.
They are still only £1 per bale here, which is ridiculously cheap compared to other areas of the country.

I've continued moving compost onto some of the new beds too. The asparagus bed is looking particularly swanky. I hope the asparagus plants appreciate my efforts and throw up a forest of lovely spears this year.

Final job, and one which Sue excels at, was to clear a year's bedding from the goose stable. We run them on a deep litter system and have a good clean out once a year just before they begin laying, which traditionally happens on Valentine's day (give or take a couple of weeks).
This heady mix of straw and goose poo goes by wheelbarrow straight down to the soft fruit patch. I had to hurriedly prune all the currant bushes before it went down.
I pile it around the base of each bush and then the chickens come along and spread it everywhere!
This practice seems to reward me with ample currants. The blackcurrants especially thrive under this system.

While I was down in the soft fruit patch, I finally finished

cutting back the summer raspberries.

 

I laid cardboard on the grass (thanks Big Dug) and covered it with 

goose bedding. This will create a new bed into which I intend 

to plant more blackcurrant bushes which I raised from cuttings two years ago.

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.