Tag Archives: gardening

Progress, phythalis and pizza

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The weather is returning to spring after a short diversion back into winter and things are looking up.

Teachers seem to be springing into life too and we have quite a few bookings in the pipeline, though it’s never quite as simple as it should be, as they all think that we have unlimited days available at their convenience. Having already had to wave goodbye to one booking I don’t want to see any more disappear, particularly as they are all schools who haven’t visited before. We have a 95% rebooking rate so it’s important to get people down here, both for the experience and for the repeat business. I may be in a touchy-feely profession at the moment but it doesn’t mean I can ignore business reality.

Just checked my figures – it’s actually 94.4%. Better be accurate when there’s teachers about.

Even the Cape Gooseberry (which has so many other names) seeds have finally started to break through after a worryingly long germination. The three year old plants are coming back to life too, with a few flowers already showing.

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The kiwi berries are looking full of fruit after a three year wait so this year could be a really good year for odd fruit.

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I’m starting a proper cuttings diary after last year’s debacle. It was my own fault for not paying attention so simply keeping a diary should help by making me focus properly.

Finally, a picture of pizza. It’s like cats, people always seem to like pictures of cats and pizza. I’m working on getting the two together but in the meantime here’s a picture of pizza – lovingly crafted by a group of 6-year-olds.

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Lessons all round

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We had twenty kids out today to discuss plant growth, plant seeds for cressheads and make butter.

Due to the regulations and fears around taking photos of kids I can’t actually show you a photograph of 29 smiling faces as I didn’t get the right form signed, but believe me – it happened. This was achieved despite the fact that they had been expecting a day out playing on the farm, not the plants growth/sandwich making brief we had been sent.

It’s a shame I was only expecting 20. It meant that we didn’t have enough compressed paper pots for cress heads, so I had to cut some egg boxes up. At that point I was told that Pupil X has an allergy to chickens, which includes eggs and anything that once contained eggs.

Now, allergies are dangerous, and I’ve been taking some training lately so that we don’t kill anyone in the kitchen, but there is a time and place to be told about allergies. The place is not “here” and the time is not “now”.

Time, I think, to reassess our booking procedures, and to look closely at our communication skills!

 

Behind every successful man…

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You wouldn’t think one small woman could contain so many orders but by the time she’d finished I had a list big enough to see out my Saturday, which is why I’m sitting down at just after four to finish the day. It’s not been the longest of working days, but it is Saturday and a chap expects a bit of slack.

I’ve bought compost, potted, repotted, sown seeds, weeded and swept up. I’ve tidied, moved things, made compost, picked rhubarb and watered. I did find time for a cup of tea and to show off my new “tea plantation”, talk to a keen new volunteer (I’ll soon turn her into a cynic) and er…

That reminds me, I seem to have missed lunch. I knew there was something I’d forgotten.

If I call it a diet I can feel virtuous. And hungry.

My nettle crop is looking good – enough tops for a good soup and enough mature leaves to start drying for tea. Unfortunately The Farmer and his farmer’s brain have noticed them and told me to eradicate them. This calls for either blackmail or distraction tactics. I will apply my thoughts to the problem.

This was the weather this afternoon just before the rain. Not quite as good as it has been and there’s a definite bite in the 25 kph wind – good job I decided not to jump the gun with the planting out. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The postman calls

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Big news of the day is that the tea bushes arrived. For the moment “bushes” might be an expression of hope rather than fact (as you can see from the picture) but I have confidence. As usual I have the plants well in advance of knowing how to look after them. I vaguely remember they need ericaceous compost but can’t remember much else. I should have learned from the Great Gimger Debacle but I didn’t. One day my polytunnel will pulsate with exotic life.

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For the moment, in the exotic line, it has nine tea twigs and some sorry looking bits of ginger in it.

We had a birthday party today, launched a massive attack on the garden weeds and planted more seeds. Now that my French beans and multi-coloured carrots are coming up I feel more inspired to plant more. The rhubarb seds are coming up too, but the comfrey has still to appear. We also had three more bookings for school trips – 180 kids, some as young as five, spread over four days. Let’s just say that everyone has their own personal hell. Mine features five year olds. They squeak. They fill each others’ pockets with stones. They don’t listen. And you feel guilty when you threaten them.

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That’s all for now – I have to set up for tonight’s visit from the Young Farmers’ Club and then we’re going out for a meal with the kids to celebrate having time to go out for a meal when all four of us are available.

Ours is a life of simple pleasures.

 

The calm before the storm

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It’s not been a bad day. The spring weather continues, though it’s a bit crisp at the start of the day. The birds are singing, the chickens are laying and things are growing.Somebody paid me £40 they owed me and I had an email from an organisation telling me that they owed us £60 from last September. We were even spared the weekly staff meeting when it was cancelled with 23 minutes notice.

I did draft an email saying Julia and I had gone ahead with the meeting and voted to stop wasting time by holding meetings but I decided it wasn’t worth sending. Not everyone shares my sense of humour.

On top of that we have just had the result of the latest Environmental Health inspection and have been awarded five stars again. It takes a bit of doing when you are running a kitchen by committee but we managed it.

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We have made major inroads into preparing beds and planting seeds, though there is still a lot more to do. That however, is not the calm before the storm.

The calm before the storm refers to the fact that at 1pm tomorrow people will be arriving to get ready for the High Sheriff’s visit. It’s going to be a nightmare of women cleaning and tidying, like a wedding but worse. At least with a wedding you know there will be cake but this is a meeting about health and wellbeing: the liklihood of cake is, to be frank, small.

It seems like progress

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Now that it’s settled we’ve edged the keyhole bed (well almost…), planted it and watered it.

As you will see from the photograph and the “well almost…” my calculation of the circumference based on 2 pi r is slightly at fault. I think it’s the radius that’s at fault rather than the calculation but it’s a bit annoying and calls for another trip to the Poundshop tomorrow morning. Once that’s in place we can start adding more soil. All we need to do is find the soil – it seems a bit of a cheat to buy more when we’re trying to be sustainable but you can’t grow veg in poor soil and principles. We’ll be talking about that tonight I suspect.

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As for the watering, we’ve transplanted some veg from other places so it looks like it’s established and they needed quite a lot of water to help them get over the shock. If only I’d known it was going to rain this evening I wouldn’t have carried quite as many cans. 

We’ve even started to refill the compost heap.

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The trench left from fitting the biomass heating system to the farm cottages (which has been the subject of some discontent over the last two months) is now filled and the equipment has also been used to put tarmac down at the back of the centre so we don’t look like a building site any more.

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All in all it’s looking like progress, and when you add the weeding and tidying we’ve also done today, and the fact that I’ve been able to tick eleven jobs off my office list I’m going home tired but happy. I’ve also taken a booking for a cookery group and agreed the catering for a meeting this weekend – eight people, one requiring gluten free sandwiches, and all keen to try nettle soup!

Finally, I saw my first swallow of the year this morning and as we left the allotment tonight a female kestrel circled round us at head height. Where else can you get that sort of job satisfaction?

 

Keyhole Garden (2)

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We added the last barrow loads of soil to the bed today and although the central compost basket isn’t quite finished as it should be we’re pretty happy with it.

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Working on the basis of striking while the iron is hot we have started a second bed using recycled materials to form the boundary. This time it’s old tyres, because we have plenty of them (somebody just dumped another four in one of the fields recently.I’m hoping that the black tyres will heat up in spring and give us a slightly earlier start to the year, though we will have to wait until next spring to test the theory out.

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We’ve also started a trial in one of the raised beds. They were made from conifers felled during the building of the centre and half filled with a mix of rubble and rubbish from a demolished barn. We used general purpose compost from the local garden supplier (bought by the ton so it wasn’t too expensive) but there isn’t a lot of body in the soil in the beds as you may imagine.

Digging holes today it was clear that the top foot of the bed we were working was very dry and though it had roots in it there wasn’t a lot of organic material in it. I spotted three worms, but that isn’t a lot for the soil we shifted.

Hopefully we’ve addressed this lack by sticking in a layer of wood chippings, a layer of paper towels, fruit peel, teabags, toast and eggshells. Mainly paper towels to be honest, but we generate a lot of waste on a school visit and we need to reuse them if at all possible. We followed this up with a layer of pig muck and then replaced the soil.

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We harvested the leeks this afternoon so next week we’ll repeat the process with the second half of the bed and use the whole bed as a raised bean trench. It’s going to look decorative and hopefully be very productive. If it works we’ll start a proper rotation and do the same to another bed next year.

 

Keyhole Garden

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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.

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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.

Focus! First week report.

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A week in and little has changed – seems like I’m going toi have to do some fine-tuning.

The intention was to narrow down my workload and achieve more by focussing relentlessly on getting results. The reality was that I’ve been given more to do and I’m still sprinkling my effort lightly over too many projects. Sprinkiling lightly seems to work with fairy dust, but in real life it doesn’t bring many results.

On the other hand, we did make nettle soup today, something I’d been meaning to do for two years. I’m hoping to move on to other nettle products as the year progresses. With luck, they will appear on my new nettles page, but considering my track record the result may well be that one of the other pages disappears.

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It’s been a productive week with two days delivering the college course, a day of Woodland Trust training and a school so far. I’ve even had chance to try out my new soup and soda bread lesson, which went a lot quicker than I thought it was going to do. I’m going to be running it twice more next week so I’ll have to add a few bits.

Meanwhile Julia has landed me with running a party for twenty five-year-olds tomorrow – looking at lambs, making butter and being generally nice. It’s not really my forte.

Latest news on the guinea fowl is that several have gone in the pot and were delicious. The survivors are currently engaged in escspe-related activities and the outside group has risen to eight. They are so successful at escaping that we have been accused of helping them. If you remember when I first pased an opinion on the captivity I said that in a battle of wits my money was on the birds – seems I’m right.

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This a picture of guinea fowl at liberty during a solar eclipse. Not much different to a normal picture of guinea fowl but I was bored after borrowing a welding mask and staring at the sun with a bit missing so just took some random photos.

Bay Leaves

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Before I go any further, this is the European Bay tree I’m talking about- Laurus nobilis. I’m sure all bay leaves can all be dried in the same way but it’s best to be clear.

I ran out of bay leaves last week and as I hate having to buy things that are growing in the garden I thought I’d have a go at drying some. During the summer I used some for pickling but never got round to drying any. At the time I wasn’t using many and thought I had enough.

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Anyway, it’s a simple technique – pick good, sound leaves (preferably in summer when the flavours will be at their peak), wash, dry and microwave.

We have just bought a new microwave for the farm kitchen so I could only find two choices for heat (I’m a man, we don’t read manuals). Thirty seconds on defrost produced an aromatic blast of eucalyptus when the door was open. That’s why dry and fresh bay leaves produce different flavours: fresh leaves produce a much harsher flavour due to the eucalyptus taste while dried produce a subtler effect.

Another six sessions at 30 seconds each didn’t quite do the job so I decided on full power for the next thirty.

That’s what the browning is on the tips of the leaves – I managed to overcook them in just half a minute. There’s a moral about patience in that story. Despite this they still helped make a great stock (more of that later).

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