The Corn Is Bleeding! | 50 Days of Harvest, Day 28

I harvested some beautiful coloured sweetcorn today and then had a big surprise!





If you can't view the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

July Homestead Tour Part 1

As it's the first day of August, it's time to look at the progress made by the crops and animals during July. To stop this being a very long vlog, I have split it into two, so the second part will be published tomorrow.


If you can't see the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Ready, steady, harvest! Abundance in our garden.

It seems that this has been a very good year for growing food in our garden. Hopefully this is a result of us improving the soil in the raised beds and an indication of things to come, that year by year the yield will increase as we enrich and enhance the soil.

 I've been picking blackberries, not only from the hedgerows of the fields surrounding us, but from the brambles that are quietly but steadily invading our garden.The area immediately outside our boundary is not being cut back by the farmer using the fields, this is a nuisance on one level because the weeds are growing very well and are now about four feet high and their seeds are blowing and dropping into our garden and chicken field, on the otherhand, it is supplying us with an amazing crop of blackberries. Now if I could just find a way to eat thistles, we'd be completely sorted!

 The elderberry tree is now starting to look purple, the birds are gorging themselves on ripening berries and I have started to pick as many berries as I can reach. I'm putting them straight into the freezer and, when I have enough, I will make some more elderberry wine. I'm also going to make elderberry syrup as I hear it is soothing for sore throats and the other symptoms of winter colds.

 The mirabelle plums are almost ready, one or two show the deep rich yellow of ripeness and I'm watching daily as the others turn from green to pale yellow to a darker, softer, buttery yellow.These too will be going into the freezer until I am ready to use them. Last year's crop were used to make some mirabelle plum and red grape wine which turned out to be a great success (unlike the elderflower wine that I made last year which is disgusting!).

Today's vlog continues the harvesting theme, if you can't view it on your device from this blog, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Food Forest Fruit year one

The Food Forest is starting to take shape and offering an abundance of fruit even in its first year. In this video I have a look at some of the fruit that is growing well at the moment.

It you can't play the video below, you can see it on YouTube here.

Year One part 3 Permanent Planting

   The Shrubberies were put in early in the year to make a colourful welcome as we drive along the lane into our yard.

 Our friend Jane gave us several shrubs and others were lifted from the area next to the piggeries and stables.

  I planted the perennial shrubs along the length of the border and have added a few more since. 

 After a few months of growing the long shrubbery has filled out and has given us some colour every month. Some of the plants in the shrubbery have uses in addition to looking attractive. The buddleia has attacted many butterflies and other pollinators as have all the flowers on the shrubs. I've harvested the lavender flowers, dried them and I will use them to make lavender bags, lavender sugar and to refresh the pot pourri in our home. The roses will produce rosehips which I will add to the rosehips gathered from the hedgerows and other sources (read about rosehips from my sister's home here).The fushia bush should provide us with berries, although as yet it hasn't produced very much and having never tried fushia, I'm keen to find out whether the berries from this particular hardy bush are sweet or have a bitter aftertaste.

The short shrubbery is still only half completed but is already starting to look good.

 We brought with us several pots of raspberry plants that had been lifted from Mr J's parents' home, together with shrubs, herbaceous plants and a couple of small trees.

Jane helped me to dig the turf from the area that would become the herbaceous border (actually Jane lifted the most of it) and we planted it with the plants that she had given to us and some that we had brought from our previous house. Over the year I haven't weeded the area anywhere near as much as was needed and as a result we've had a display of weed and wild flowers amongst the cultivated perennial plants.

The Food Forest

I decided that creating a permanent planting area filled with edible plants and supporting plants would be a good use of a large space. The more I explored the ideas behind permaculture and the way to use the land in harmony with nature, the more I realised it fits exactly with our thinking and a food forest should work really on this site.

I've had to make some compromises with how to start the food forest, but I'm happy with how it is coming along. Wood chippings have been poured onto the area and composted wood chippings used to make planting beds. It was a bit tougher than just pouring wood chippings, because finding a source of wood chippings took me several months. My budget for the garden is close to zero and it was important to find a free source of materials, but luckily I have now found a local tree surgeon who brings a trailer load of chipped wood on a reasonably regular basis. It gets dumped in the front garden and I then move it one wheelbarrow load at a time to the place I want it. 

 We made a small wildlife pond using a butyl liner that was already on the smallholding when we moved in. It's not very pretty, but as the planting around the edges grow, it should hide the liner and attract beneficial wildlife.

We've recently bought 17 fruit trees which I am in the process of planting and below them I've put fruit shrubs like currants and raspberries (lots and lots of autumn fruiting raspberries), herbs and ground cover plants like strawberries. I've been researching perennial vegetables to include in this area and in the meantime, for the next couple of years at least, I will use some of the food forest area to grow annual vegetables that will act as good ground cover (like some of the squashes I'd like to grow).

 It will take a few years for the food forest to establish and there will always be some maintenance tasks to do there, but it should be more productive in relation to the effort put in as time goes on. 

Hedges and boundaries 

There is very little hedging around the boundary and whilst that gives us fabulous views across the adjacent land, it also gives us no protection from the wind that whistles across the area from the Severn Estuary.

In early spring, Jane helped us to plant a hedge around the east and south sides of smallholding. It is mixed native hedging, that will be good for wildlife, pollinators and food and although still very small, it has started to fill out over the year and I'd imagine that by their fifth year, the hedge plants will be around shoulder high and knitted together to form a thick wind shelter and a good place for birds and other wildlife to live. I used weed supressing membrane and planted through it in an effort to slow down the invasive weeds coming through the stock fencing that surrounds the smallholding. 

I've put up some wind break fabric on the stock fencing to reduce the impact of the wind on the plants in the garden and as some relief for the chickens who were getting blown around by the wind. Much of the winter and spring brought winds of 30 to 40 mph and a few times it reached up to 60mph, which, if you are a small chicken (or a large human) is pretty miserable to be in.

We still need to plant some hedging along the west boundary and I've ordered some more native hedging to put in the ground later in the year together with some elderberry trees that we can lift from below our trees. I'm also going to add some fast growing trees like eucalyptus which I'll keep cut back so that they are large bushes rather than tall trees.

Now that we have divided up the paddock and are happy with the area designated for the chickens, we've put in a more permanent fence. I've started to plant some fruit canes along the fence that can be supported by it, offer more protection for the chickens, look attractive and be productive.

I've written further blogs looking at the vegetable garden and our animals . The best way to ensure that you don't miss them is to subscribe to my blog, which you can do below!

- - - - -

If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

Enter your email address:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Plants, trees and leaves

 We are heading towards the end of our first year on the smallholding and we are taking stock of what we've achieved in the last twelve months and thinking about what we want to do over the next year.

This week I've been planting the plants, rooted cuttings, bulbs and trees that we've been given, bought or propagated so that none are sitting in pots outside the greenhouse unless that's where they will be for the next couple of years. I have a few tree seeds in pots that can stay by the greenhouse where it is light but sheltered until they are large enough to plant into their permanent positions. There are also several pots and bags of plants that I've put there with the intention of getting them into the ground, but as yet they haven't made it into the borders or field.

Several of the perennials that need to go into the perennial border have been put into a raised vegetable bed that otherwise would be empty of a crop over the winter. I've heeled in some perennials that I've divided and that I've been given and will scatter some buckwheat seeds in too, to be a green manure and ground cover over the winter. Then in early spring when I've weeded the perennial border, I will add the new plants in spaces between the existing clumps.

The perennial border has had little or no attention from me this year, other than to appreciate everything that has flowered in it, including the weeds! I've been delighted with the show of colour that we've had throughout most of the spring and summer, even the feverfew-daisy type weeds have added a welcome splash of white and yellow. The border has had different types of grains growing in it, these are from the wild bird feed that the previous owners put out for the local birdlife and as my focus has been on setting up the vegetable garden, I've left the grains to grow, enjoying the structural element that they have added to the border.

 As I started to clear some of the pernicious weeds from the border earlier this week, I noticed that the seed heads from those grains and also the herbs that I've planted look very much like a firework display hovering above the rest of the plant growth. The dill and fennel seeds with their umbilical like seed heads and the millet and oat plants offer different shapes and sounds as the wind moves through them. I take such pleasure in these simple moments of observation and appreciation and I'm glad that this pleasure hasn't lessened over the years.

I'm still gathering crops from around the smallholding to store for use over the autumn and winter. The apple trees that were here when we moved in have had varying degrees of sucess. One hasn't produced any fruit at all, but then I can't remember it having any blossom on it either. One has produced some fruit but the whole tree has black spot and the fruits do too. The third apple tree has produced some nice fruit which I have gathered and stored in the barn and the last tree's fruit is still not quite ready to pick. When I try to twist the apples from their branches, they do not come away easily which means that they are not ripe enough quite yet, but they look fabulous. The six new apple trees which we bought earlier in the week are unlikely to produce any fruit next year, but in a couple of years time we should, I hope, have an abundant harvest of apples.

The huge sycamore trees that grow to the side and back of the piggeries are starting to lose their leaves in the early autumn breezes. Yesterday I started to rake them into large piles with the intention of using them to create leaf mould or adding them to the food forest to improve the soil structure there. I filled a large green compost bin with them, pressing them down to fit in as many as I could. When that was filled I started to pile them up on the ground. After half an hour of raking and piling I had still only partially cleared an area about forty feet by six feet and there was an awful lot more to go! The trees look like they have hardly lost any leaves and yet the ground is starting to get covered with dried crunchy leaves. I can only imagine how deep the layer of leaves will be once the trees have shed all of them.

I think the best approach to the leaf collecting will be to take the wheelbarrow to the area and fill that a few times, taking the leaves to the food forest area and the rest can go into a compost bin or be piled up on the vegetable beds to rot down over the next few months. Last year, by the time we had moved in and I felt up to wandering around outside, the leaves were soggy and I didn't have the energy to rake up most of them. I cleared a small pathway to the chicken field, but left the rest to rot where they landed, this year I hope to gather the majority of them to help improve the condition of the soil in other productive areas of the garden.

My daughter and grandson number two came to visit on Thursday and we spent a delightful couple of hours chatting, laughing and putting the world to right. She is coming back again on Monday with both my grandsons and I'll be asking grandson number one to gather some leaves with me and then we can choose some with which to make an autumn collage.

Today there is a distinct chill in the air and although the autumn sun is trying to shine, I'm finding it hard to spend much time outside doing gentle chores before I need to come back in for a cuppa.

- - - - -

If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

Enter your email address:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Rooty fruity

As part of our plans for the garden we want to surround the plot with native hedging and plant numerous trees. Although the smallholding is not very big, by careful planning and planting we will have space for plenty of fruit trees in the Food Forest.

Today we headed to a supermarket that had bare-root fruit trees for sale for £4.50 each. I expected to find small trees or whips, but to my delight they are healthy looking plants around four feet high. The roots are wrapped to keep some moisture around them and as yet I haven't inspected their root systems, but the top of the trees look good. They are grafted onto M26 rootstock and other semi-dwarfing rootstocks, so the eventual height of each tree will be around ten to twelve feet. For us, this is an ideal height, not so short that the trees look out of scale in the available space, but not so large that we'd need ladders to reach the fruit (or not for many years at least).

The fruit trees that I selected are

1 x Apple Cox's Orange Pippin (which were my father's favourite apple)
2 x Apple Elstar
1 x Apple Jonagold
2 x Cooking Apple Bramley

1 x Pear Doyenne Du Comice
1 x Pear Conference

3 x Plum Opal
1 x Plum Victoria

2 x Cherry Stella
3 x Cherry Morello

All these for a little over £75!

These will be the bulk of the fruiting trees in the food forest together with an apple tree from my neighbour (not sure what it's called but the fruits are delicious) and a mirabelle tree that I lifted from the root system of a mirabelle tree in the duck enclosure. I'll also plant some young hazelnut trees and elderberry trees moved from behind the piggeries. I'd like to find some quince, mulberries and a medlar tree, but those will have to wait until I find them at a reasonable price.

Tomorrow I will start to prepare for their planting by digging holes and incorporating plenty of well rotted wood chippings and garden compost, I will add a very little granulated organic plant food and prepare a mycrorrhizal fungi gel which should encourage root development and give the trees a good start. Where I can't dig down into the soil, I will build Heugelkultur mounds, piling old logs onto the ground with smaller branches on top, then cover them with a mix of topsoil and composted wood chippings before planting a tree on top of the mound. The mounds will be ideal on the areas where there are gentle slopes, so that water naturally gravitates towards the tree mound and the woody material will absorb the water, giving the trees access to moisture when they need it.

I plan to under-plant the trees with comfrey that has deep roots to draw up nutrients from the lower levels of the soil and leaves that can be used as a chop-and-drop mulch and also strawberries which will wilt quickly when they are lacking water and give me a hint that the trees may need a drink too.

Hopefully by next spring the trees will be settled into their new positions and will reward us with a lovely display of blossom.

If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

Enter your email address:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Moving the ducklings

 

This week I am being the guest tweeter on SmallholdersUK account on Twitter. Each week a different smallholder is featured, celebrating the diversity of smallholders' lives and this week I am taking a turn at sharing my plastic beads of experience (it feels like I haven't advanced to pearls of wisdom yet). I didn't have a grand plan of what I was going to write about, but I did make some notes of subjects I knew I wanted to include.

I am surprised at how much additional energy I have used up in tweeting throughout the day, how tired I am in the evening and how quickly I'm getting off to sleep. Sadly though, I am still waking up at silly o'clock in the morning and lying in bed wondering if it's too early to get up. This morning that process of waking, staring at the ceiling, getting over hot, then too cold, dropping back to sleep and waking up again started at 1.25 am. So by 5 am I gave up and made my way downstairs and, as I often do when it's too early to start rumbling around outside, I put the television on.

I spend quite a lot of time reading and researching. YouTube has become my go-to learning resource as I can find so many really helpful vlogs and films. Obviously I don't take the word of just one person who's posted a film on the internet, I make sure that I watch several (or lots) of films about any particular subject. The more that one certain topic is covered in the same way, the more I can trust it to be likely to be true. But in the end, there's nothing quite like first hand experience. 

The experience has once again been of making compost, raised beds, preserving food for the late autumn and winter and putting in a new fence.

On Monday Mr J banged some fence posts into the ground in the duck enclosure so that we could start to section off part of it for the ducklings to use. The posts were recycled ones from my sister's home. She had replaced her fencing and these posts were of no use to her any more. My brother in law had kindly cut points on the bottom of each post to make getting them into the ground more easily.

I then stapled chicken wire to the posts and used heavy duty ground staples to secure it along the base.

 We hung a gate that I had found lying around on the other side of the of paddock (there have been some very useful bits and pieces that I've found that were left by the previous owners).

 We moved the two ducklings from their outside nursery pen into the new enclosure and watched as they revelled in the additional space that they suddenly had. Frederick was less than impressed at having two new neighbours, but over the last couple of days he has calmed down and now seems more miffed than cross.

The vegetable garden is filling out even more as the squashes make a last ditch attempt to produce their fruit before the days get cold. The purple sprouting broccoli(on the left) is an early variety, I hope that it will withstand the howling autumn and winter winds and flower early next year.

 Mr J and I created the next raised bed late on Tuesday afternoon when the strongest heat of the day had passed. I had put down a layer of cardboard in the morning and we covered it in topsoil and then in composted wood chippings. 

I will plant this up today with some purple curly kale seedlings and rainbow chard seeds (because the chickens like the leaves and we like the stems).

I was delighted to find that the compost pile made in early July is now a deep brown colour and although it's still quite soggy and I think I may move it to around the base of some fruit trees and cover it in composted wood chippings to help feed the fruit trees which have been working so hard to produce lots of apples. I've made another compost heap using chicken manure and wood shavings given to us by our neighbours, grass clippings, kitchen waste (uncooked fruit and vegetable waste), spent brewery grain and straw. I also turned the drier materials from the previous compost heap into the new one. The last heap is starting to rot down, I can still see the individual components but the centre is going brown and I will top the new heap with the partly decomposed material to add microbes to it.

I've made several trips into the field that borders our smallholding to pick blackberries. I've been careful to walk on the scrubby edges of the field to avoid damaging the clover crop that the farmer has growing there. The field is buzzing with the sound of our neighbours' bees, so hopefully there will be some delicious clover honey available later in the year.

  I have also been gathering windfall apples from my neighbours' garden. They have invited me to collect as many as I like as they feel overrun with cooking apples. Their cider apples are also ripe and they will be pressing them in the next week or so. I like it that the neighbours have a surplus to different crops to us and that they make different products to us. We are starting to swap surpluses and produce which gives both of us a wider choice of food.

I have now ordered some bare-rooted fruit trees and more hedging trees to complete the hedge planting from The Woodland Trust, who have a Welsh Farm Tree Pack scheme, which enables those who farm in Wales to buy trees to create more woodland at a reduced price. They also offer help to other parts of the UK. You can find out more information here. 

It's time to put the kettle on.

If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

Enter your email address:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Abundance and Fruits of the Forage Jam recipe

As   we head towards the end of the first summer on our smallholding, the rhythm of my days is changing. Although I am up at around five each morning, I am no longer out in the garden right away because it's still dark. So for the first hour I'm now reading, watching and researching instead of doing that in the midday heat.

I've been gathering as much food as I can, to eat fresh and also to preserve. I have frozen kilos of mirabelles, fat juicy plums, elderberries, blackberries from the hedgerows, sliced runner beans, broad beans, chunky rainbow chard stems and mangetout.

In  the piggery I've stored the garlic bulbs and the onions will join them once they have ripened. Yet to come are the apples, potatoes, carrots, parsnips and a myriad of other vegetables. Some crops will stay in the ground over winter and should give us freshly picked vegetables throughout the winter and early spring.

By  sheer good fortune, my neighbours have a glut in some crops that either have failed in our kitchen garden or we haven't very much of and we have a glut of crops that haven't done too well in their garden. Being the sensible bunnies that we are, we have started to swap the excesses meaning that both families now have a wider selection of foods to eat now and to store for the winter.

Yesterday evening our neighbour dropped by with a carrier bag filled with plums which were a swap for runner beans that they have been having for the last few weeks. 

They've also said that I can help myself to windfall cooking apples which I am delighted about as I have been foraging blackberries from the hedgerows and can now make blackberry and apple pie filling to freeze. If there are enough cooking apples I will also make some blackberry and apple jam or jelly. The apples on our young trees are eating apples and there are not very many of them as yet because the trees are only four or five years old.

The success of some vegetables has inspired me for next year. I will plant many more beetroot (Boltardy) which have been very sweet and flavoursome this year, to make wine from next year. In the area between the perennial flower border and the vegetable garden I had planned to have cut flowers and herbs, but I will now have fruit instead. I will plant some fruit trees, underplanted with currant bushes, fruit canes and strawberry plants together with some complementary herbs. Some mint in a pot buried in the ground to go with the strawberries, some sweet cicely to help take the edge off the rhubarb, some licquorice roots, tarragon to go with the raspberries.

This afternoon I have made some of my favourite mixed fruit jam, which I'm calling 'Fruits of the Forage' Jam.

Fruits of the Forage Jam

Ingredients

3lbs of foraged fruit (I used 1lb cored windfall apples and 2lbs of stoned plums, blackberries and elderberries)
Juice of 1 Lemon
2lbs unrefined granulated sugar
1 glass red wine (optional)
7 fluid oz boiling water
1tblspn ground cinnamon
1tblspn ground ginger
2 dried cloves (ground in pestle and mortar)
1/2 tspn grated nutmeg

Method

Wash jam jars and put in heated oven to sterilise and put lids in a pan of boiling water, boil for 10 minutes to sterilise and leave in water until ready to use.

Wash and prepare the fruit, squeeze lemon juice over the fruit and put in a heavy based large pan with the glass of wine and boiling water. 

Cook until the fruit is soft stirring regularly to prevent it sticking to the pan. 

Add cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. 

Stir in the sugar until dissolved.

Cook rapidly stirring to prevent sticking until setting point.

Remove jars from oven and leave to cool a little.

Spoon or ladle the jam into the jars (be careful because the jars will be hot).

Wipe the outside of the jars if necessary to remove any spilt jam, but avoid putting your cloth into the jar.

Using tongs, remove the lids one at a time from the pan of water and seal jars.

Once the jam has cooled in the jars, remember to label them to help avoid confusion later.

Use a deep pan to avoid splashes

Ready to put jam into jars

Use tongs to remove lids from hot water

Don't forget to label your Fruits of the Forage Jam