Back in late March I planted my seed potatoes out, under cover. If you didn't see how I did that you can watch my vlog about it here. The theory is that you don't need to earth them up because the covering excludes the light and the potatoes sit just below the covering, on top of the soil, so you don't need to dig down to find them. And today I peeled back the covering for the first time to see how my no dig potatoes have grown (or not).
If you cannot play the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here. So I will definitely be doing this again next year, with the addition of woodchippings as you can see the difference it seemed to make. All in all I would say that so far it's a success, the final reveal will be in two to four weeks when I harvest the crop for storage.
When I went to bed last night I felt as though I hadn't achieved very much in the garden over the weekend, but as I talked it through with Mr J, I realised that I had managed to do quite a lot really. It's strange how our sense of achievement can so often be well under the reality (having said that, I know plenty of folks who also over-estimate what they have achieved!).
On Friday morning I spent a very happy hour in the area behind the piggeries starting to clear some of the semi-wilderness. I had been dreading tackling this, but the recent rain had softened the ground enough to make lifting the weeds a very simple task. Armed with leather gauntlet-style gloves, I was able to pull up stinging nettles, general weeds and brambles. I piled them into separate piles of compostable matter, stinging nettles (to use to make a feed and tonic for the plants in the kitchen garden) and pernicious weeds that I don't want to go into the compost heap and end up in the garden.
I cleared a space about twelve feet square, which hardly made a dent in the chaos, sorry the wildlife area, that we've let grow while we started the kitchen garden and other areas of the smallholding. The soil at the back of the piggeries is probably the best in our garden, years of leaves falling from the trees and rotting down have made the soil dark, rich and friable. So, rather than letting this good soil stay unused, we've decided to plant it up with some oca that I was given. Oca is an old vegetable that was replaced in popularity by potatoes, but in many ways they are easier to grow and less hassle than potatoes. They don't need to be earthed up as they don't go green and they store very well.
I also spotted a couple of nice seedlings in the kitchen garden that have self-sown (volunteers). Amongst the onions I spotted what I believe is a Virginia Creeper. It has just one large leaf and another smaller one just forming, so I'm going to leave it until it's about a foot high and then transplant it into a pot before deciding where it's final home will be.
I also found this seedling, which looks like some sort of fern. It is growing in the pea bed and I will leave it for a while yet to try to work out exactly what it is before deciding whether to lift and transplant it or dispose of it. If you know what it might be, please leave a comment to let me know. There's a fairly strong smell of 'countryside' in the kitchen garden at the moment and we realised that it is probably coming from the pile of compost made from spent grain, straw and chicken manure with wood shavings that is in the open rather than cocooned in a pallet sided compost bay. So, to tackle the rather unpleasant aroma I decided to cover that compost pile in straw to try to keep the smell contained.
Mr J and I enlarged the bed to fill the allotted space and then to make use of it, as a productive area, before covering it in straw. And below is a short video of what we did. (If you can't view it on this blog page, you can find it on YouTube here).
On Sunday the weather forecast said it was going to rain for a greater part of the day, so we got as many chores done as we could early in the day and then headed to my sister and brother-in-law's home. They had offered us some waste wood as the roof of their house is being replaced and they offered us the old battens from their roof. So after a nice cuppa and catch up, we loaded up the van with two by one battens and then some old fencing posts that they didn't need. My brother-in-law kindly used his chain saw to cut a pointed end to each post so that they are ready for us to use right away and then, to my delight, he also gave us almost a full roll of chicken wire. It's a win-win situation, they no longer want the wood or wire and we do, so their garden is cleared of unwanted materials and we have more resources to enable us to complete even more tasks sooner rather than later.
While we were there, my sister asked me to 'go and have a look behind her shed'. When I'd finished laughing and double checked that this wasn't a euphemism, I duly wandered around to see the area behind the shed. It is absolutely filled with foxgloves and as a result, was alive with bees feasting on the nectar. She has invited me to lift some young foxglove plants for the garden which I will do in early autumn and transplant them to the young hedge that surrounds our plot. I won't put them into the herbaceous border as I have white foxgloves there and would quite like to keep them as white ones as long as I can, so to avoid too much cross pollination, the pink ones will be planted away from them.
After lunch the predicted rain paused for a couple of hours, so I headed back out into the garden to get as many plants as I could into the ground before the next downpour. I have a lot of young plants that have been hardened off outside the greenhouse and they are starting to show evidence of stress as they will have used all the nutrients in the soil in their pots. I planted this lovely ornamental cherry tree that my daughter gave me for Mother's Day. It arrived in the post as a ten to twelve inch high sapling and has now more than doubled in height and is strong and healthy. Around the tree I have placed a layer of cardboard and mulched it with straw, my main reason for doing this is to protect it from the strimmer or lawn mower rather than to reduce competition from weeds (which is also a useful side effect of the mulching layer).
Over the weekend one of the Cream Legbar chickens started to become broody, she sat in the nesting box of the henhouse that most of the chickens sleep in for half of Saturday and most of Sunday. Mr J and I talked through our options, it would after all, be nice if one of the chickens would raise a brood of chicks rather than us being surrogate parents, but we currently have 18 fertile eggs in the incubator which are due to hatch in eight days time and we weren't sure that we'd have enough quiet spaces for this broody hen to live while sitting on some eggs. It was good to talk through our options and work out where we could or would put the chicks from the incubator and a broody hen space. We have a small henhouse that could be used for a broody hen, so very carefully I moved her to the small house and we put water and food in it and left her there to settle down again. This morning, she was scratching to come out, had kicked the eggs all around the little house and was decidedly unimpressed with being in the small house. So for yesterday at least, that was a broody fail. I will keep a close watch on her in case she decides to nest in the large henhouse again and I'll have another try at moving her to a quieter place.
I've just been out to check on the chicken that was in a broody mood, she is back in the larger henhouse again, puffed up, low down on the wood shavings making little bok bok noises. The eggs that were in the small house that I moved her to (and that she abandoned this morning) have been attacked by the other chickens. I have no idea which of them started it, but when I walked around the corner of the shed to see what the commotion was, there were three hens and the cockerel in the small house having an 'egg fest'. They haven't touched the eggs that have been laid today in the usual nesting boxes, so perhaps they pecked at them because they were in an unusual place and there was a small container of chicken food in the house too.
Today we plan to start making the nursery area for the chicks that are due on 28th June. Once they are hatched they spend the first 24 hours in the incubator and will then be moved into the small secluded pen that we have set up in the boot room. This will only be large enough for them for a few days (it was fine for just the two chicks that hatched last time, but it won't be for more than four or five chicks for long) and then we plan to move them to the chicken condo that we've created in the old stables. They can have a slightly larger space with their water, food and the brooder in it (an electrically heated platform that they can nest under to stay warm that acts as a surrogate mother, for the warmth at least). They will live in their nursery area until they are four weeks old and then we'll move them into their own house and run in the chicken field until they are eight weeks old and can join the main flock.
So, it's time to go and start drawing up a plan of how we'll make the nursery coop and of course, have a cuppa!
Broody hen update - she spent most of the day on the nest again, coming out a couple of times for food. Tonight she is still on her chosen nest space with the other hens going to sleep around her, it hardly seems like a restful space. We will think again about finding a dark and quiet place for her to be moved to.
Yesterday was a gentle day again, I spent much of it asleep or curled up on the sofa, popping outside to do a bit more when I woke up, only to need to sleep again shortly afterwards. But I did manage to get some more cardboard laid out in the kitchen garden to cover the grass in readiness for creating another raised bed and pathway.
I also ordered another ton of topsoil which, with super efficiency, the company delivered in the afternoon. I moved three barrow loads of soil and put it onto the cardboard base, but have left the rest for another day when I have less pain and more energy.
This morning I took a phone call from the local brewery to say that another load of spent grain and hops would be available this afternoon, so Mr J drove us to the brewery to collect it this afternoon. The brewer has now kindly agreed to only half fill each bag, so that Mr J is able to lift them into the van easily (even half-filled they are too heavy for me to lift). Back at home Mr J unloaded the van and the hops and grains are now in bags in the paddock waiting for us to build new compost heaps. As it's four days since I put the first small heap together, I thought it would be a good time to turn the heap, put some more air into the pile and assess how the grains are decomposing. As it is a fairly small pile of straw and grains it was a quick job to turn it, putting the materials from the top of the pile onto the ground, shaking the straw a little to fluff it up and sprinkling the grains evenly over it. In just four days the grains have turned from a pale golden colour to nutty brown and there is already evidence of some fungal activity. I was pleased to find that it wasn't the stinky, slimy mess of grains that I had anticipated that I might find and there is still plenty of heat in the pile.
I don't know that I've got the correct ratio of grains to straw and think that we probably need to add some animal manure to the mixture to put different micro-organisms into it. If we get a chance we may go and collect some horse manure from my sister's home in the next day or two, which we can add to the heaps as well as to the top soil that was delivered.
Anyway, it was but a ten minute task to turn the smaller heap and create enough space next to it to build another heap with the new batch of grains. Hopefully by the time we get to autumn there will be plenty of well rotted compost to add to the raised vegetable beds, around the fruit trees and if there is enough left over, to the herbaceous border. Decorative flower beds need to come second to the productive areas of the smallholding.
Here's a view of the kitchen garden that I don't often see. I took the photo from the centre of the shrubbery looking straight along the central pathway towards the Second Severn Crossing. It seems funny to think that six months ago there was only grass in this paddock and since then we have laid out paths, dug and planted a herbaceous border, created 10 raised beds, and planted them with plants grown from seed, started the pallet fence, made 6 compost bays and filled them, fenced off an area for the ducks and then another for the chickens (who have half the paddock!), planted a natural hedge along the back and left side of the paddock and started planting up the hedge on the right hand side. That doesn't seem too bad for a couple who are having to learn fast, learn by their mistakes and work around me being out of action for chunks of each day!
In those periods of the day that I am out of action, if I am not sleeping, I try to make use of the time by researching, reading and watching helpful videos and vlogs. This morning I had an odd moment. Sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cuppa and watching yet another vlog about starting a permaculture garden, I hooked my foot around the chair leg, an action that lots of us do regularly, but as I did it I heard a loud crunch and had a shooting pain whizz up my leg and I felt ever-so-slightly sick and then, I was pain free. I have spent the last six months hobbling around on a walking stick at some point of most days, with a swollen ankle and shooting pains with almost every step. I haven't been able to turn my foot in a circle and I've woken myself each night in pain as I've knocked my foot on the bed or on my other leg and some days the only way that I have been able to get up stairs is to crawl. I don't want to speak too soon, but I think that crunch may just have sorted out whatever the problem was! My foot is still a bit stiff and achy, but after so many months of being 'crook' that's hardly surprising. So for today, I am going to celebrate and enjoy my foot feeling, well, not feeling anything very much.
Regardless of any plans that I may have thought we had for tomorrow, like moving a ton of topsoil, the task will be to build another compost heap or two using the spent grains that we collected today. I may record some of the process and a tour of our compost heaps, then spend a little time trying to edit the footage into an interesting video. I am starting to toy with the idea of making a weekly vlog to go along side this blog, because sometimes a picture really can not only paint, but also replace, a thousand words. Please leave a comment to let me know whether you'd be interested in seeing a weekly vlog of the developments on our smallholding as we try to build a healthier, cleaner life for ourselves.
I feel like I should apologise to straw, I have underrated it for far too long. Since moving here I have come to understand just how useful it can be. We use it as bedding for the chickens and ducks, to create walls to section off areas for the chickens, for mulching, for covering pathways and for making compost.
Yesterday was a busy, but fun-filled and satisfying day. After feeding the birds and mucking out their houses, I continued weeding the herbaceous border and I am so pleased that I let the weeds grow to see what was growing in the land. By seeing what weeds grow, I can start to assess the condition of the soil and I also wanted to see if there were any seeds of hidden gems in the soil. And what I discovered was that there were lots and lots of field poppy seeds just waiting for the right conditions to germinate and flower. The first of the cheerful red flowers with their delicate petals opened yesterday morning, so I have weeded around the poppies and hopefully the plants will self-seed all through the herbaceous border.
The potatoes growing in the old tractor tyres are coming on very well, so I topped up the growing material to the rim of the tyre. This would be called earthing up, if I had any earth to use that is! With a lack of fertile, useable soil in the garden, I decided to use wood chippings that are partially broken down. I watered it well to moisten all the chippings.
Inside the house, a little bit of tidying and sorting was followed by baking a Cinnamon Marble Cake (click on the link for the recipe) and checking on the progress of the Elderflower Wine that is quietly fermenting in a five gallon bucket in the kitchen and on the water in the incubator which is now on day 4 of incubating our next batch of eggs. Both Mr J and I have commented about how much nicer it is with our new incubator to not need to be turning the eggs every few hours as it has an automated turning facility. I don't think my daughter knows just what a fabulous present she bought for us.
As rain had been forecast for the afternoon we were keen to get the roof onto the shed to prevent the internal walls from getting soaked. So while Mr J tacked the first strip of roofing felt onto one side of the roof, I started to strip the old felting off the second side. It became clear that the second side of the roof needed more than just a fresh layer of waterproof roofing felt, one of the internal struts was rotten and about half of the roof's wood (that the felting is fixed to) would need replacing.
We had so much to do yesterday that we realised that we weren't going to get the repairs done as well as the other jobs, so with the help of a neighbour we lifted the one side of the roof into place. We then covered the shed with a tarpaulin to prevent the rain from getting in through the open side.
Then we headed off to the farm shop and filled the van with straw bales once again. We can fit eight bales into the van, it makes the journey home is rather smelly and dusty, but it doesn't take too long. This morning I have discovered a much closer farm that sells straw and hay, so we will explore that one next time we need to buy more straw.
After that we ate a late lunch of a cheese salad made with lettuce, herb fennel and mint picked from the garden with homemade elderflower cordial and cake. It's great that we are starting to eat produce from the garden and I feel like our plans and hard work are really starting to show results now.
Later in the afternoon we went to the local brewery to collect our first batch of spent hops and grain. Good grief, the bags of grain were heavy. The brewer helped us loads the bags into the van, but he won't always be there so Mr J and I will have to summon up big muscles when that happens.
When we got home, we emptied part of each bag into the wheelbarrow and emptied the van half a bag at a time and created two piles of used grain in the garden.
One smaller pile (two and a half bags of grains seen above) in a space between the herbaceous border and kitchen garden and one large pile near the compost bins (four and a half bags of grains). I mixed one bale of straw with the smaller pile and heaped it up to create a large pile leaving the larger pile of grains so that I could tackle that this morning. When we have some more topsoil (hopefully at the start of next week) I will cover the smaller heap in soil to keep the moisture in and add some bacteria and I'll leave it for a couple of months or so to rot down. The bag of hops will be put directly onto the soil in the raised vegetable beds and should break down readily while feeding the soil and improving its structure.
I mulched the tractor tyres that have the potatoes growing in them with straw to keep the moisture in and to raise the level of the 'earthing up'. As the wood chips and straw settle in the tyres I will add another layer of straw and keep it topped up.
This morning after I'd let the chickens and ducks out of their houses and mucked them out, I started to make a compost heap with the large pile of spent brewery grains. Using wedges of straw about three or four inches thick I lined the sides of a compost bay and put a layer of loose and fluffy straw on the base.
I did this because I understand the smell of composting spent grain can be pretty pongy and the straw casing should help to contain it. I then made a lasagne style heap inside the straw casing.
A layer about two inches thick of the spent grains was followed by three or four inches of fluffed out straw. At the top of the heap I added a thick layer of straw as a lid.
I really like the way this looks, it reminds me of a summer pudding, the contents hidden away. And, despite the straw that it poking out of the sides, I think it looks rather neat too. All of this covering things with straw gave me an idea.
So I topped the previous compost pile with some straw too. There are steady plumes of steam rising from it especially from the aeration holes that I've made in it, to allow more oxygen into the heap. When I first turned this pile earlier in the week (and added some more freshly cut grass clippings into it) it came to the top of the blue pallet that you can see on the left, so it's shrunken down by a good six to eight inches in that time. I imagine that is this due to compaction rather than the materials breaking down (although that would be very nice). The heat of the compost pile can be felt at the top of the pile and it's almost uncomfortable to put my hand into the pile. The ideal composting temperature is somewhere in the region of 140 - 150 degrees F, I don't have a compost thermometer, but one may well feature heavily on my Christmas wishlist.
We've had a constructive couple of days and we both needed a bit of a break from the non-stop shovelling of materials around the smallholding so I was quietly pleased when it started to rain at lunchtime and had the perfect excuse to come inside and curl up in front of the telly. Shortly after putting on a DVD, I fell asleep and slept deeply for a couple of hours - bliss!
Yesterday was exciting, not only was it grandson number one's birthday, but I also had two good pieces of news. In the afternoon, Mr J and I went to Bath to give my grandson his birthday gift. We gave him a selection of garden tools suitable for a five year old. My daughter and grandson are creating a small garden area for him to grow flowers and vegetables, so these should help him to create and look after his garden patch.
In the morning I received a message via Twitter (and if you don't follow me on Twitter, you can click on the button on the right to follow me), it was someone who lives reasonably locally asking whether they could come and volunteer on the smallholding.... well yes please! In exchange for a day of labouring, they'd like me to show them how we do everything here. Perfect swap, some physical help for those of us who struggle to get things done and an exchange of ideas.
This is really exciting for me, I am flattered that someone thinks our little smallholding is worth visiting to learn from and delighted that it is someone fairly local. Part of our plan when we moved in was to offer WOOFing opportunities, but I feel that we need to find a caravan or small wooden lodge for people to stay in if we want to do this, so a local resident who can visit for just a day or two without having to stay is the ideal start.
I've been thinking about sources of material for composting to help build our dreadfully poor soil. The compost heaps that I've been making are great and will certainly be useful for improving the quality of the sand and clay soil that we have here. The soil goes concrete hard in spring and at the moment (well over a week since it rained), it is cracked, looks baked, is pale and when I can scrape at the top of the soil, it becomes a dry, dusty powder. When it rains the soil becomes water logged and shows just how compacted it is. Neither of these situations are very good for growing luscious crops. So the answer is to add mulch, lots and lots of compost mulch, the ground is too hard to be able to dig it in, so placing it on top of the soil and letting the worms and microbes do what they do naturally is the best answer to the issue.
What I could really do with is a source of wood chips. We have enough space here to be able to leave large piles of wood chips to rot down and form lovely compost. I've contacted a couple of tree surgeons locally, but neither was terribly interested in bringing chipped trees. I can't find a municipal source (I know that in some places people can go and collect chipped trees for use in their gardens) and so I have had to think about other sources of materials for composting.
Yesterday I phoned a local small brewery to see whether I could have some spent hops and grain. The joy of talking to someone locally is that there is an instant connection because of proximity. I'm also keen to source local materials because there is less transporting. They explained that they currently give their spent hops and grains to another smallholder in the area, but that they would be happy to spread the love and they agreed to give us some spent hops and grain too. The brewery has to keep records of where its waste materials end up and there has to be traceability, so from their point of view a local smallholding is ideal. So now I am waiting for a text to say that they are brewing that day and then we'll need to drive to the brewery, which is just under two miles away, to collect the bags of spent grain and hops. Apparently each brew day will give us about half a bag of hops and seven bags of spent grain.
Spent hops and grain are green materials for the compost heap, rich in nitrogen and other minerals. I will need to make compost heaps by mixing the spent brewery grains with brown materials like sawdust, straw, wood chippings or dried leaves. Looking online, it seems that I will need to make a mixture of about one part spent grains to three parts brown material, so I had better speak to my neighbour and see if they have any more used wood shavings that I can have!
I will need to get the spent grains into compost piles pretty quickly, if I just leave them in a heap on their own after a couple of days they will start to ferment and smell nasty. So, it looks like I will need to find another source of brown material to mix with the spent grain. I am very excited at the prospect of being able to create large amounts of compost over the next few months and look forward to being able to improve the soil not only in the kitchen garden, but also the herbaceous border and shrubbery.
The other thing that I can do with fresh spent grain is to give some to the chickens. Not in vast quantities, but in small amounts to start with. I can offer them some grains in the field and allow them to scratch around to find them in their 'circle of love' - the name that we have given to the area we've made from straw bales and use to put the chicken's kitchen scraps, weeds, wood shavings etc. because the chickens love scratching about in it looking for tasty morsels.
So today, we are off to collect some more straw bales to use to mulch the vegetable beds and in readiness for the spent grains arriving next week.
