It's been another good week in the garden, although the sun comes up later and the air is cooler, I have still been able to get outside and make some progress. We've had another couple of loads of chipped wood delivered by the local tree surgeons (two different tree surgeons now drop off chippings to us), so I have been able to move ahead with making pathways around raised beds.
I've struggled to keep on top of the weeds growing through the cardboard layer that I've put on the pathways between raised beds and they've been rampaging through the vegetable beds. So I've made the decision that for the first couple of years I will have weed supressing membrane on the paths, covered with wood chippings and once the raised beds are more established and the pernicious weeds are killed off, I will lift the membrane, replace it with cardboard again and a deep layer of wood chippings.
I would rather not use plastic in the garden, but I need to find a balance between what I'd like to do and what I am physically capable of doing. If I spend the time and energy keeping on top of the pernicious weeds in non-productive areas, I won't have energy to either tend the productive areas or to develop further areas of the garden. On balance, this seems a sensible compromise, long term the plastic membrane will be removed, but in the short term I am giving myself a chance to get the rest of the garden developed.
After laying out the paths and giving them a three to four inch layer of wood chippings, I covered the area that will be the raised bed with a layer of cardboard boxes and then covered the cardboard with well composted wood chippings. Next I will put some topsoil, garden compost and mixed them together and top it with another layer of well composted wood chippings. This bed will then be ready to plant up.
Having decided on next year's planting plan I have realised that some of the options I've selected just won't work. I've allocated one bed to have broad beans in it, which will need planting in the next couple of weeks if I want to have an early crop next year, but that bed still has purple sprouting broccoli, carrots and spinach in it and they will sit in the ground over the winter. So I will need to re-jiggle my plan again and put the autumn planted vegetables into beds that are vacant or becoming vacant very soon.
I've been back to see my GP this week to discuss the results of last week's blood tests. It looks like the short Hashimoto's attack that I had a few weeks ago took it's toll on my thyroid, as it's function had dropped again. Although my results showed 'within normal range' I have learned that I feel best when the TSH level is around or just below 1. The normal range for the tests that my GP uses is 0.3 - 4.2, so in theory anywhere in that range is acceptable. I'm not sure who it is acceptable to, but it's certainly not right for me! When I can get my TSH to around 0.5 (together with some pretty careful management of what I eat and when, and what activities I do and when) I feel close to normal in energy and general health, last week's test showed it had increased to 2.38, which explains why I have been feeling less than sparkly for the last few weeks. My lovely GP, who is happy to work with how a patient feels and not just the numbers on the screen, was happy to increase my medication to help put my TSH back to where I feel I good as I can.
I'm aware that I am very fortunate to have a GP who works with a patient in this way, so many people that I've spoken to are told that they have reached 'normal range' and that's that, they are left struggling with a thyroid still not being supported to the extent that it needs to be for them to feel healthy. Hats off to my GP for listening to my request and being happy to work with me as I try to take some control of my well-being.
Hashimoto's is an auto-immune disease, my body has mistakenly decided to attack itself and in particular, attack my thyroid gland. I have a couple of other auto-immune issues lurking away, but thankfully they don't effect my every day living and hopefully they never will.
Growing my own food is part of managing the Hashimoto's disease and the hypothyroidism that it's caused. Reducing the synthetic chemicals and toxins that I eat has gone a long way to helping how I feel and Mr J says that he is feeling healthier too. Added to the reduction in substances that were causing problems, the increase in fresh air and gentle exercise has also helped me feel better. It's a win-win situation.
Earlier in the week my brother-in-law telephoned me to see if I could make use of some grapes that a friend of his had. So mid-week we went to my sister's home and collected two huge carrier bags filled to the brim with sweet black grapes.
I have washed them and sorted through them, picking them off their stalks and discarding unripe, over-ripe and mushy ones. The first bag yielded almost 9lbs (4kgs) of grapes ready to cook.
I used 4lbs of fruit to make some grape jelly, which tastes wonderful and will be a lovely accompaniment to cold cuts of meat or roast duck. The remainder I have frozen and will use to make syrups and wine when there is a little less to do in the garden.
Over the weekend, we started to put fence stakes into the ground in the chicken field. Until now we have been using flexible chicken netting (the type that can be electrified), but two long rolls of this netting were on loan from Helen at Valerie Chicken. We need to give the netting back to Helen for her to use to keep her pigs secure and although she doesn't need it back until December, there is no point in us waiting until last minute to put in our permanent fencing. So using the recycled fence stakes that came from my sister's home, Mr J has put in the first row of stakes that I will then fix metal chicken wire onto and that will divide the field in two (as the flexible netting does now).
We have decided that it would be sensible to then plant trees and shrubs along each side of the new fence. This should provide us with more fruit, nuts and berries and give the chickens some shade, but most importantly it will offer more wind protection and as the plants grow, the hedge should slow down the wind that whistles across the chicken field for most of the year.
Last night (Sunday) we moved the Australorp pullet that was hatched at the end of June into the chicken coop that houses the other Australorps that were hatched at the end of July. As they are from different breeders, the eggs from the older bird will be ideal for breeding additional members of the flock and for providing us with hatching eggs to sell.
This morning she doesn't look wildly happy about being in a new enclosure and her former companions are looking rather put out that she is now in an adjacent space, but it won't take too long for either her or the others to settle down again.
Once the new fences are in place we will also create a separate enclosure for the Jersey Giants. I had said that I'd finished hatching eggs for the year, but I changed my mind and decided to hatch one more batch of chicks which can over-winter in the shelter of the stable and venture outside at their own pace.
So I have found another breeder of Jersey Giants (photo of his young birds above) and ordered six eggs which should arrive in the next few days. Hopefully this clutch will give us another female or two and if we get a cockerel then it will be going to the breeder that we bought the first eggs from to put some fresh genes into his flock of birds.
I have tried to build good relationships with the breeders of birds that we have bought eggs from, because there is nothing quite like asking advice from folks who know the breed well and it's nice to be able to offer something in return, like birds from different bloodlines. We are still learning (an awful lot, thick and fast) and I feel that knowledge and experience are the greatest assets we can acquire.
We are heading back outside this morning to continue installing the new fencing for the chickens. But first, as always, it's time for a cuppa!
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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.
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It's been a very positive couple of days, I've started harvesting more and more vegetables and on Tuesday evening we had a meal made from ingredients entirely from our garden. This included onions, patty pan squash, peas, beans, spinach, chard, herbs and eggs. It felt rather special to have a our first completely home grown meal.
Yesterday morning after I'd let the chickens and ducks out for the day I started to create the next raised bed. I laid cardboard across the pathway, for the base of the bed and the next pathway. I've found that it is easier to put the cardboard down for the pathways as I go rather than to go back and try to tuck it underneath the soggy cardboard at a later date. Or worse still, don't go back and cover the paths with cardboard and then have to deal with long grass and weeds growing all around the beds which, I have discovered, becomes a home for countless slugs and snails which then feast on seedlings and young plants.
On the cardboard I put some hops and then some composted wood chippings in readiness for the top soil.
Earlier in the week I finished planting up the last raised bed with young leek plants that had been growing in a nursery bed.
The vegetable garden is looking colourful and productive (which it is) and although we won't have any butternut squash as all the young plants were eaten by slugs, we may have some pumpkins. I am not as keen on pumpkin as butternut squash but it will help to give us additional food in the winter months as they store quite well.
I've also been having a battle with creatures that like to eat the brassicas. They seem to be being devoured from slugs from the surrounding ground and caterpillars from above. Each morning I walk around picking slimy slugs and green caterpillars from the cabbages, kales and purple sprouting brocolli. I hope that it's not too late to plant out more as I don't think there will be much left of the cabbages at the rate that they bugs are getting through them. Many of the cabbages look like lace doilies and the black kale looks like little cream sticks where the green of the leaves has been completely stripped away.
We've put in hoops and covered them with netting to deter the cabbage white butterflies, which made me very happy until I noticed that they can fly through the holes in the netting and lay their eggs on the purple sprouting brocolli before flying off again. Protection fail! So the next batch of brassicas will be covered with fleece to try to keep those pesky butterflies away from them.
While I was starting the raised bed yesterday, the wind started to get a little breezy and by nine o'clock it was blowing quite strongly and the rain started in earnest. So I turned my attention to tasks indoors.
I disinfected the incubator in readiness for the next batch of eggs. Mr J and I are so taken with the two ducklings that we have and have had several requests for ducks and so, in light of this, we've decided to incubate a batch of duck eggs. I've bought two sets of six Aylesbury duck eggs (so I'm not relying on one breeder to have fertile eggs) and we have three from Frederick and Mrs Warne. Our hatch rate for ducks last time wasn't very good, just two from six eggs. I was very disappointed with this as two of the unhatched eggs were moving around from day twenty-five onwards, but the poor little things just weren't strong enough to break through their shells. So working on a similar basis of hatch rate, I hope that we have five or six ducklings hatch from this batch, but we shall see. The eggs are due to hatch at the end of the month.
During a pause in the rain I moved the chicks from their box in the boot room to the nursery pen in the stable. It was still very windy and the rattling and banging of plastic sheeting and other bits and pieces in the stable made them even more wary of their new environment, but after a couple of hours, they had settled in well and were running around and trying to fly with their tiny half-feathered wings lifting them a couple of inches off the floor.
I could spend hours watching these little birds, they have a natural curiosity and are surprisingly quick to learn. It didn't take them very long yesterday to discover that they can't quite all fit into their food dish at the same time.
As the day continued the wind speed increased and the forty mph gusts became more and more frequent, so I decided that I wouldn't be doing much more in the garden for the rest of the day except to gather some vegetables to roast for supper.
The stony poor soil here means that carrots and other root vegetables are unlikely to grow straight and just as expected I lifted several twisted and curly carrots. I like to think of the yellow carrot as doing press ups and the white carrot as being a member of the cast of The River Dance.
The cylindrical beetroots are now about four to five inches long and have a delightful marbling through them. They are very sweet and not too earthy, I boil them for a few minutes and then roast them in the oven with a little sea salt, coarse ground black pepper, garlic and rosemary.
Late yesterday afternoon I noticed that one of the ducklings was behaving oddly and I suspect that all is not well. I have searched for information on the internet and it could be one of two things. Neither are brilliant but one has a better prognosis than the other. The treatment for both is the same and so later today I will ask Mr J to take me to the farming supplies stores to buy some additional vitamins and minerals to supplement the ducklings' feed. It could of course, be neither of the things I suspect but I feel I need to do anything I can to help it. I will update if there are any changes in the duck's progress.
This morning the broody hen has decided that it's chick is now old enough to start exploring outside the confines of the hen house. I walked around the corner of the stable this morning to go to the chicken field, to see whether the girls have laid any eggs, to find the broody hen and the little pale yellow chick pecking away at the grass in the run of the hen house. It feels rather special to see mother and baby in these first exploratory moments.
I am tired today, I've been trying to do as much as I can between rain bursts for the last few days and tackled several tasks indoors but as so often happens, I have over-done it, so this afternoon will include the quick visit to the farming supplies shop and some sleep. Mr J will be home from work shortly so I'm going to put the kettle on and make a cuppa.
The more I learn about permaculture the more it makes sense for what we are hoping to achieve here at home. Over the last couple of days I have made use of the excellent scratching job that the chickens have done near their houses.
In early winter, not long after we moved in, I piled a large amount of wood shavings, hay and manure in what became the chicken field. They have spent the last few months scratching through the heap, leaving their droppings on it and turning the heap over and over. The vast majority of the light and fluffy compost has now been used in the raised beds, which left us with an area that we know has been well composted and should be full of nutrients. So, it doesn't seem to make sense to leave it to grow back as grass or worse still, super-charged weeds and to that end, yesterday I sectioned it off from the chickens using four feet bamboo canes and some chicken wire.
I've planted it with Maris Piper seed potatoes, I have no idea if it's too late to plant them as I've never grown potatoes before, but it will be interesting to find out later in the year how they have done. Having watered them in well, I then covered the area with straw as a mulch to help reduce weed growth and in the next few days I will plant a few squash plants through the straw into the soil beneath. This should make this nutrient rich area a highly productive one.
Back in the kitchen garden proper, I've been working on the next raised bed. Earlier in the week I part filled some more cardboard boxes with top soil and homemade compost and yesterday I divided the soil mixture even further so that there was just a small amount in each of the 16 boxes that make up a raised bed.
We then went to my sister's home to collect some more composted bark that she has had in a field for a couple of years and doesn't need. I topped up each of the cardboard boxes with this composted bark and mixed it in well with the topsoil and our homemade compost.
This morning I have planted one seed potato in the corner of each box and a squash plant in centre of each box. So in this bed there is a mixture of Maris Piper potatoes, both green and yellow courgettes, yellow and white patty pans, butternut squash and pumpkins. The latter two I have planted at the ends of the beds so that they have room to run riot along pathways.
Yet again, I have no idea how the plants will do in this growing medium, it certainly isn't soil as I'd normally think of it, but as long as there are enough nutrients in it and as long as I can add to the soil mix to increase the nutrient levels if I need to for this year, then that will do me.
These boxes will be watered well and then mulched with straw to keep the moisture in and suppress weed growth. At the end of the growing season, all the plants will be cut down and either left in place to rot down or added to the compost heap and the soil will be given a good layer of compost from the oldest heaps to improve the soil and build up the level of soil in each bed.
Building a new vegetable garden is an interesting process. Almost all of the ideas that I had when we put in the offer on the house (but before we moved in) have been laid aside because the soil is so poor and having lived here for a while, I am more aware of the local weather conditions, which areas are more shady and which just get baked by sun and dried by the wind coming up from the estuary. What is being created is actually so much nicer and more fun to work in than the kitchen garden space I had imagined.
I'm learning all the time, I spend a while each morning reading and watching informative videos and just as importantly, I spend some time thinking about how the information that I'm gathering can be applied to our garden and still have it look as attractive as I'd like it to be.
I am delighted that the seed potatoes I planted in old tractor tyres last month are now growing. I've started to top up the soil level in the tyres and as we collect more well rotted compost from my sister's home and our next compost heap is ready, I will add more.
This evening we were supposed to be going to see the Stereophonics in Cardiff, I have been looking forward to it for months. I had tickets for their last tour but wasn't well enough to go, actually at that time I couldn't get out of bed, let alone be up and about or dancing. So I was delighted to have tickets for tonight's gig and sensibly I had bought seated tickets so that I didn't overdo it and have to leave early. Well it seems my body is conspiring against me because shortly after planting a few seed potatoes and squash plants this morning, I started feeling unwell and have spent most of the day on sofa, either asleep or feeling very weak. Hey-ho, that's the way it goes sometimes. And, so the tickets weren't wasted, we have given them to our neighbours who are delighted to have an unexpected evening out. Because I don't feel up to venturing out, I intend to spend the evening watching more videos and reading about organic gardening and about permaculture.
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