Category Archives: Permaculture

Keyhole Garden

After six months of discussion (the “we should build a keyhole garden” phase) and three more of procrastination (one of my better developed skills) we eventually entered the final phase of pre-building – the “do a few hours and then stop” phase. We’ve had a circle of bricks and roughly chopped earth waiting for us for a bout a month now, but with trees and lambs and such we haven’t had time to get on with it.

At the weekend we decided we needed to start work again. There’s frost forecast for next weekend, and that’s just what we need to break up some of the lumpier bits. If that isn’t enough there’s a whole list of other reasosn to get on with it – planting time coming up, the need to focus and the upcoming “Kenya Day” we’re having.

You will search in vail for any Kenyan National Holiday on 9th May, we just seem to have chosen 9th May as a convenient day. I’m not sure what is being organised because I’m trying to avoid adding to my workload, but it’s pretty certainly going to involve a reduction in the goat population round here. What? You didn’t think we were rearing goats for fun did you? Farmers, as we always tell the kids coming round, don’t keep pets.

From the top left – The Start,. The next phase with drainage layer, keyhole and wood chippings applied and the compost cage in place. The compost cage lined with straw. My hard working staff starting to put soil on the layer of well-rotted pig manure. Close up of hard working staff, who by that time were starting to abuse the photographer and talk of tea. Final shot – most of the soil is in place – probably six to eight barrow loads for me and Julia to apply tomorrow and then we just have to let it settle for a while.

The theory is that you put compost in the central cage and water it, thus getting best value out of the water and the nutrients. Some beds are much more like raised beds but the bricks we had earmarked for the job ended up in a path so we’re having to make do with a lower wall. Despite this we will be getting an increase in surface area because of the slope. There are all sorts of keyhole beds, as you can see if you follow this link.

More food

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It’s a shoot day on Saturday, though from the casual attitude of the pheasants we saw this morning they haven’t it’s clear they haven’t been told.

I’ve no strong feelings either way – I like birds but I also used to enjoy shooting. The lack of feeling is further intensified by the fact that I don’t find pheasants particularly enthralling. though I am quite fond of partridges in both their varieties. We have a number of red legs about. They potter down to the barns like middle-aged married couples in thee summer evenings to browse through the poultry food. There were as many as three pairs at one time this summer,

We’ve also raised grey partridges this year. Also known as English partridges they have been going through a rough time over the last few years with a 91% decline in numbers between 1967 and 2010. Hopefully we will be able to do something to stop the decline.The farm has spent a lot of effort on hedges and headlands and the gamekeepers have been working hard so there is a good chance of improving the population.

As we wait and see at least people won’t go hungry on Saturday as I’ve been cooking Honey and Treacle tarts for lunch. I don’t always get on with celebrity recipes, though I won’t go into it here, but this one worked well. I didn’t have any black treacle and I upped the ginger after my practice run, though that could be down to my powdered ginger being a bit old. I might tone down the orange and have a go with root ginger next time. And I cheated by using ready-made pastry cases. Life is too short to make pastry.

Nearly forgot to say – the recipe makes a bit too much filling for a bought in pastry case – I’m going to cut it back by around 15% next time and see how it goes.

Awards time

Caterpillars aren’t birds…

Compost and Mondays

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It’s always nice when a plan comes together, and for that reason alone this Monday was a good day. I’m not really sure why I’m prejudiced against the day – we tend to work through the weekend anyway so it isn’t as if it’s actually the start of our week. It’s probably a hangover from my school days, when Sunday evening was such a poignant time. It seems like I spent all my Sunday evenings thinking back to our Sunday seaside trip and dreading a return to the village school where the spirit of Wackford Squeers lived on well into the 1960s.

In truth I actually liked some of the schools I went to and didn’t go to the coast too often so I’m really only thinking of an eighteen month period when I was eight-years old, but it seems to have ruined Mondays for me for life. Fortunately it’s just a mild dislike – if I had an irrational fear of Mondays I would have to learn to spell lunaediesophobia just to describe how I felt.

Anyway, back to the real subject. Having access to a large amount of greenery and several cardboard boxes it seemed a good time to dig the bean trench we’d been threatening for two years. There are various sorts of bean trench, ranging from ones filled with good compost to those filled with cardboard and newspaper. The benefit of the first sort are obvious, the benefit of the second sort is that it keeps moisture under the beans. We’ve gone for the third type, also known as a composting trench, where you fill it with waste and let it rot down over winter. The idea is that it will not only rot down to produce compost, but will heat the soil (according to one blog I read). I’m not convinced about the soil heating bit – I think you will need a lot more in the trench to produce heat, but let’s see.

That’s cardboard, cape gooseberry and various garden clippings in the trench. We ended up with a lot more by the time we’d finished and had to stamp it down. Now we just wait and see.

As for the rest of the compost – the three bay pallet bin is nearly full (as you can see from the picture above), the plastic and wooden bins and rotating drums are full and the pigs are producing plenty of raw materials. Despite this I just know that when we come to spreading time we will be disappointed when we see how little it actually covers. There are several rules of composting:

(1) It always contains plastic, no matter how careful you are

(2) It never looks as good as it does on Gardeners’ World

(3) It never goes far enough

A plateful of weeds

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When you think of salad you probably think of lettuce, or possibly rocket. If you think of chickweed or fat hen you’re in a minority, and you probably don’t need to read this. Fat hen, incidentally, contains twice as much iron as spinach, so eating weeds does have something to offer nutritionally.

In an hour or two I’m going to be taking a party of Rainbows round the garden to see what we can find to eat. We have a good crop of chickweed growing in a newly-composted raised bed and plenty of mallow. There is definitely some fat hen round by the edge and we have plenty of marigold and nasturtium flowers. We also have dead nettle , borage and dandelion so without resorting to anything from the herb garden we can provide a plate of colourful salad, though I will add some chive flowers for the onion flavour.

We have some nice tender nettles coming through, but although they are edible they are not recommended in salads. I will pause for a moment while you think about it…

(Later…

It seems we need a permission form signing if we want to feed garden weeds to children, though we didn’t need special permission last week. It’s something to look into, and worth remembering that educating overly-cautious adults is also part of our job.

Strangely, when the foraged food is made into jam and spread on warm scones you don’t need special permission. I suppose it’s a case of familiarity seeming safer than the unknown. And sugar being more palatable than salad.)

I’ve been thinking of what to write as a first post about Green Care for several months now, Finally I’ve come to the conclusion that no matter what I do it isn’t going to be as good as I want it to be, but at least I managed a key word in the first sentence, which is what I’m supposed to do.

That may be the last time I do anything because I’m supposed to do it. In a life characterised by drifting it might be asking too much of a blog if I expect it to correct my character flaws as well as publicise Quercus Community.

It’s also slightly misleading because I probably won’t be writing much about Green Care, just about a series of events that occur as I drift through life supposedly assisting my wife. She’s the one who set the Quercus project up with a friend and she’s the one with the sense of purpose and the crusading spirit. Today, for instance, I have been baking quiche (using ready-made pastry cases), looking at the World Porridge Day website, thinking about writing press releases and sorting out paperwork. Pleasant as they may be, I can’t see porridge or quiche changing the world. Nor can I see much paperwork being done.

Meanwhile my wife and her co-director have been outside in the cold and rain with our usual Wednesday group engaging in horticultural therapy and using the Green Gym. In everyday English that’s “gardening”.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with a picture. It’s our guinea fowl doing what guinea fowl do best – loafing about in a big group, Just like teenagers with feathers. They’ve had a busy day so far, looking for bugs, taunting the sick turkeys in the hospital pen and dodging showers. In this picture they are sheltering under a table. Every other bird in the county is in a hedge, but ours are sheltering under a picnic table.

However, they do eat a lot of pests and according to most websites they don’t damage plants. My experience is that they did shred a courgette by roosting on it as it grew at the top of a tyre stack. And they probably did pull a neighbour’s onion sets up. They were certainly in the area, though it could have been anyone. But as I say, they do eat a lot of pests, and they do deposit a fair amount of manure so I can live with that.

Or as Bill Mollison the permaculture man put it:

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm