Strawberries, brassicas, bees wax and hedgehogs

Strawberries are delicious, but they are not as easy to grow as it might seem. The problem is that the strawberry bed loses productivity over the years.
So I have abandoned our old strawberry patch which really hasn't been very productive for a couple of years. But I cannot turn over a new area to strawberries every few years.

The old strawberry patch

Instead I have come up with a cunning plan. I purchased three dozen new plants of three varieties to spread the harvest period and have allocated them three beds in with the roots quarter of my rotation. Next year they will stay there and I will use the suckers to populate three more beds in next year's roots quarter. Then the same the next year. In the fourth year, the first beds will come out and as the strawberries rotate around the beds I will change which beds they occupy.
Incorporating the strawberries into the vegetable rotation is an idea I got from the legendary Lawrence D Hills, founder of the organic growing movement.
There is a big potential downside. I have also read warnings not to do this as strawberries are susceptible to verticillium wilt, a disease which also affects other crops, notably potatoes. But it is a risk I am going to take. The rewards outweigh the risk.
I purchased my strawberry bare root strawberry plants back in January. This is a bit late so they may not produce fruit this year but that doesn't matter too much as Wimbledon is cancelled anyhow! I potted them up for the roots to develop and waited for the worst of winter to pass.
Today they moved out into the big wide world. Hopefully they will like their new home.

The rest of the day was spent preparing veg beds. Under the no dig regime this should just be a matter of a quick hoe then piling compost on top of the beds. It should have been done back in the autumn or winter. However, I was pretty much incapacitated due to my back. Also I did not at the time have sufficient compost to achieve this, though cardboard could have been used to block the light.
And so the most neglected beds are now well on the way to reverting back to grassland! The transition to no dig is a gradual one anyway. Although in theory you can eradicate nasty perennial weeds over time by continual covering and pulling, I find that it is better in the first instance to dig out the really tenacious ones like couch grass, dock and creeping buttercup. This takes a lot of time and effort when the bed has been neglected.
I spent too much time on it in one day and my back suffered as a result. I find I need to do lots of different jobs and avoid too much of any one task in a day, especially if it involves bending down too much. I am not very bendy any more!

A quicker job was hoeing the beds with easier weeds, such as feverfew, dead nettle, groundsel and chickweed. With the soil surface dry and compost not yet applied, this was an easy job with the oscillating hoe.

Before my body gave up I covered the new beds with a thin layer of compost.

Next morning it was time to plant up some turnips and radish plants. I sowed these a while back in modules. The turnips are Snowball and Purple Top Milan. I also grow Golden Ball but this is an autumn turnip. The radishes are a right old mixture, including a new variety called Watermelon Radish. Unfortunately these need covering as a physical barrier against flea beetle and turnip root fly. I was already using the turnip netting to cover my new plantings of onions, calabrese and spinach.

Erecting netting takes time, mainly configuring the limited selection of poles to fit the new space each year. I was very happy with the system I came up with this year. The turnips have a higher mesh which will give them space to grow underneath and give me space to weed, thin and harvest from both sides.



Where the turnip mesh was has become my brassica cage for this year. This covers four beds. The main purpose is to protect against cabbage white butterflies, though I have invested in a biological solution this year so it doesn't need to be quite so watertight. It does however provide good protection against pigeon attack too.
I use soft butterfly netting. It is slightly more expensive but much tougher and less prone to ripping. It's quite an investment so needs to last from year to year.

Today I evicted the chickens and ducks from the veg patch too. Their services are useful for slug control but they also have a penchant for soft young spinach and brassica leaves!
I have put all the poultry together in the big pen. Fortunately there was no aggro. The four ducks set straight to work snuzzling through the grass and the six ex free-range hens stick together and are more than capable of looking after themselves.

Moving them out of the veg plot also means I can leave the polytunnel doors open now, as temperatures soar above 40 degrees whenever the sun comes out.



While I've been starting to fill the veg plot with crops, Sue has been using her time to sort out her bee frames. The bees are starting to produce honey now and we need more frames for them to store their honey in. The old frames are pretty gunky with honey and wax and propolis. Sue cut the old wax frames out and melted down the mixture in a special vessel to produce clean wax. The cloth that she strains the mixture through makes fantastic firelighters

Next the wooden frames needed cleaning. Sue boiled up a washing soda solution in her cauldron  and in went the frames. With all the gunk loosened she was able to scrape them clean.
I've made this job sound simple but with so many frames it kept Sue busy for a couple of days.
Now I just have to help her put the new wax foundation sheets into the frames. This is a job for evenings.




Arthur has been busy too. He is obsessed with hedgehogs
Arthur rarely barks unless someone passes the front gate. He doesn't bark if he is stuck in somewhere or if he needs to go out. But he does bark at hedgehogs. So a single bark heard outside was a sure sign that a hedgehog needed rescuing. Arthur has learned to pick hedgehogs up without getting a nose full of spines so I was not surprised to find this scene on the back lawn.
Unlike our labradoodle Boris, Arthur rarely plays with toys or chases a ball. But there is one exception. Notice anything about his favourite ball?