From Sombreros to Pigeon and Potatoes

I've just got back from Mexico! It was a birdwatching trip with friends, well timed to avoid all the storms. The smallholding was left in the capable hands of my wonderful wife.

The only sombreros I actually saw in Mexico were the cheap ones in the airport. I did however take a great interest in the plants of the volcanic highlands. Many were familiar to me, either as garden flowers or forest garden plants. There were tree lupins, Mexican tagetes, salvias and lobelias.

This gave me a new idea for livestock
on the smallholding!

Esculenta, Taro, Dasheen, Eddoe, whatever you want to call it,
growing wild along a stream

Of even more interest were what appeared to be yacon plants growing wild - I never got round to digging up the roots to check. There were small-scale farmers growing very much in the style of a forest garden, melons draped over flowering bushes visited by the hummingbirds I was really there to see.

I even got to watch a farmer harvesting his oca, which was obviously unaffected by early morning light frosts in the highlands.

A farmer harvesting his oca

Back to Icy Blighty

Now I'm back I need to get back into the swing of things PDQ as blossoms are starting to appear, bulbs are shooting up and seeds need to be sown, among many other jobs.

Waste Not Want Not
Today we headed off to a friend to pick up 50 pigeons shot by a farmer in the morning. We'll prep some for ourselves and the dogs will enjoy them too. Waste not want not.

Spudulicious plans for 2022
I also went to pick up this year's seed potatoes. 1kg each of ten varieties. I was going to try one new variety this year, Homeguard, but it was not available, so I am sticking with familiar old favourites. These pretty much select themselves. Primarily they need to cope reasonably well with blight (though the resistant varietis I find disappointing in taste). Next, they need to be relatively unattractive to slugs.

Some do better in wet years, others can cope with drier conditions. That's unpredictable and one reason why I grow so many varieties.

Going back to blight, this year I plan to grow my spuds in smaller patches as I have sort of abandoned the strict rotation system. Hopefully this might help to control the spread, Secondly, I intend to use a milk-based spray. Even if you wanted to use them, there are no sprays available to the small-scale grower now, so hopefully this harmless solution will help. (Large-scale potato farmers spray up to 30 times during the lifetime of a potato plant. I'm not sure I'd want to eat that! I know they can't risk blight destroying the nation's crop and people don't want scabby potatoes full of bugs and tunnels, but there must be another way.)

For now I'll be planting a few early potatoes straight into the polytunnel and rest rest will be set to chit on a windowsill, the process whereby you encourage them to form strong young shoots without exposing them to potential frosts and cold, wet soil outside.

To finish, here's the list of potatoes I'm growing this year.

FIRST EARLY: 

Casablanca, Duke of York, Home Guard, Red Duke of York. 

SECOND EARLY: 

Charlotte, Kestrel, Blue Kestrel

MAIN CROP: 

Cara, Desiree, Kerrs Pink, King Edward, Pink Fir Apple and Valor.

Actually, that's 12!

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.

Yacon

Eight months ago I received a small package in a padded brown envelope. Inside I found four small chunks of tuber and a set of instructions.

The package had come from The Real Seed Company, a great little organisation who sell seeds and tubers and positively encourage growers to propagate their own from this starting point. They are one of the few sources of a tuber called Yacon. It's not cheap, but they promise to supply three tubers with an absolute guarantee that at least one will grow.
As it was, I received four tubers and all of them grew! As with other similar perennial crops, such as Jerusalem Artichoke, Chinese Artichokes and Comfrey, I have found that a modest initial investment gives me a crop for life which I can increase by division as much as I choose.

A little bit more about Yacon, also known as Aricoma or Poire de Terre (Pear of the ground). It is another of those Andean tubers. Looking like an overgrown dahlia tuber, it gives rise to an attractive plant which grows to about 4 foot tall with large, architectural leaves. Late on in the year it is topped by small yellow flowers which belie its relationship to sunflowers and Jerusalem Artichoke. And like the latter, the sugars contained in the tubers of Yacon have special qualities (though so far at least not the flatulence inducing qualities of 'Fartichokes'!)
The tubers contain fructooligosaccharide, (fruck-toe-olli-go-sack-a-rides... I think) which taste sweet but which contain virtually no calories. As you can guess, there is a lot of interest in such a crop from the diet industry as well as potential uses for diabetics. Furthermore, fructooligosaccharides (that word again) have a prebiotic effect, meaning they are used by beneficial bacteria that enhance colon health and aid digestion.

The yacon plants just after they had been hit by the first frosts

But of course, what you're really wondering is "are these just another trendy crop which doesn't actually grow very well in this country or taste very nice?"

10 kg of yacon tubers

Well I'm pleased to report a crop of 10kg from my four plants. The tubers appear to have more uses than I anticipated. Firstly, they really are very refreshing eaten raw. A very subtle taste, but sweet, juicy and fresh. I have seen the taste described as anything from pear to apple to violet. I guess it's subjective, so I won't even try to compare it.
The most attractive feature for me, though, is its texture. It is wonderfully crisp and stays firm and crunchy even when cooked, a little like water chestnuts. Many sources recommend cutting it julienne style and incorporating it into stir fries. I have tried this and it worked very well, but I have also tried it diced into vegetable dishes and it has added crunchiness and taken on the flavours and spices of the rest of the dish. Overall an exciting new addition to the kitchen larder.
The only downside I have found so far is that it browns on cutting so needs to go into lemony water, but it is browns nowhere nearly as badly as, for example, an apple.

As for storage, I am treating my yacon tubers like potatoes. They are sacked up in a dark cupboard in the garage. I am hoping they keep well this way.
The tubers I refer to are the large tubers found growing under the crown of the plant. But above that are a different type of tuber, the growth tubers. These are next year's plants.

The advice on the delivery packet was to cut these into 1 inch segments and store in cool, dark conditions protected from frost. When it came to it, there was a very grey area where growth and storage tubers all seemed to merge into one large mass. So I have stored what I can - if I've got it right, I could end up with about 100 viable plants next year! Then I read somewhere else to store the whole crown until next spring. Fortunately the part of the crown nearest the growth points was very tough to cut, so I actually ended up with a couple of crowns anyway. All of these are now stored in compost and sand filled containers hanging from the beams in the garage to protect them both from frost and from rodents.




Unfortunately none of my livestock seem to relish the taste of yacon as much as I do. The geese, the chickens and the sheep have all turned their noses up! I may try some on a friend's pigs though, as I know that Jerusalem artichokes are supposed to be an ideal food for their digestive system. If they like it, I may well be finding a space to grow all hundred plants next year if the tubers make it through.