Green manure

Green manure, cut and ready to dig in

The potatoes currently chitting on the windowsill are going to go into beds two and four, where I was experimenting with green manure. The forage rye I grew there got to about 6" high, growing quite thickly over the area. It needs to be dug in about 4-6 weeks before the following crop, so today I cut it down with shears. I'll let it wilt for a few days, then dig the beds over.

I don't think it was worth it in terms of time and money - the soil appears to be in good condition and green manure is really a treatment for heavy clay soils or nutrient-poor soils, so I think I just made a couple of extra tasks for myself. Next year I doubt I'll bother with green manure.

Murdah, Holmes!?

Just before I left on Thursday, a parcel containing ten strawberry plants arrived in the post. I followed the instructions and soaked the roots, then placed them in shallow holes loosely covered in soil, to keep them damp until I got back.

Sadly, there wasn't anything left when I went to plant them out - a few shreds of leaf was all that remained. Something had dug them all up and eaten them.

Cauli and turnip seedlings, garlic growth

Cauliflower seedlings, 12 days old

After a few days  away, the first of the seeds have started putting forth shoots in the paper pots. As I feared, they were quite dried out by the time I got back, but not fatally I hope. So far most of the cauliflowers have appeared, and a few of the turnips are also visible.

14-week old garlic plants

The most successful of the 2011 sowing has been the garlic - pictured here after 14 weeks in the soil. The onions are less vigorous, but still growing. The kale and cabbages are mostly holding on, but not growing very strongly, and a few have been eaten, probably by pigeons. The autumn planting of broad beans and peas appears to have perished entirely.

More early planting

Pots with germinating seeds

A few days ago I watched 'Fort Apache', and while doing so I rolled another 70-odd paper pots.

Today I sowed more seeds, again varieties which should be started in March, but I'm taking a chance that the weather will continue mild. I've only done small batches of each, so I have plenty more seeds if these ones are killed by a hard frost.

The varieties are:

• 6x Spinach Samich F1
• 6x Beetroot Chioggia Pink
• 6x Basil Lettuce Leaf
• 12x Turnip Rubin
• 12x Cabbage Greyhound

To replace the original planting of broad beans, which I don't think will recover from the frost, I've planted six more of the Aguadulce variety in peat pots, also in the greenhouse, and six directly into bed five, since the lamb's lettuce there seems not to have germinated.

Tuber Mirum

Watching... waiting...

No sooner had I finished the paper pots and had a cup of tea, there was a knock on the door and my seed potatoes had arrived. (They were brought by a courier man in a van, obviously, they didn't make their own way here.)

 Checking on the excellent Grow Your Own forum, it seems that many gardeners have already started chitting their potatoes. Apparently, at the very least this prevents mould and weak, white, spindly shoots, and may also increase yield and shorten the time until the spuds are ready to lift. So I put them out in egg-boxes on a cool, well-lit, airy window sill. The sheet of advice that came with the potatoes said to place them 'blunt end' up, but I'd read somewhere that you place them with the majority of eyes uppermost. This was easier than trying to decide which was the blunt end. I think the potatoes have already decided which way they want to grow - one end usually has many spiky little eyes, and the other end usually has one, which looks different. I expect that one is the bud of the tap-root.

There are two varieties of potatoes here, Epicure, which is a first early (ready as soon as June, possibly), and King Edward, which is a maincrop, cropping from August. I got a 1.5 Kg bag of each variety, and that came to 23 Epicure and 24 King Edward.

Busy morning

Making paper pots

First batch - leeks, cauliflowers, and two varieties of peas

Since the weather is very mild at the moment, and the long-term forecast says it will probably continue mild, I decided to try getting some veg off to an early start. I chose things that are supposed to be planted in March, and will keep them in the greenhouse for the first month or two. The veg chosen for this early experiment are leeks (Carlton F1), cauliflowers (All the Year Round), and two varieties of peas (Early Onward and Greenshaft).

For Christmas I got a wooden tool for making biodegradable pots out of newspaper, pictured right. A strip of newspaper about 4" wide is wrapped round the top part with about 1.5" sticking out, which is folded under and crushed against the bottom part of the tool.

They seem to stay together quite well. Obviously they won't be very strong when wet, but I will be able to leave them in their trays until it's time to plant them out, when the pots will be transferred whole to the beds - no need to unwrap them, the newspaper will just decompose in the ground.

Since the volume of earth in each is quite small, and the paper will wick water away, there may be problems with them drying out. Time will tell.

Raspberry plant

I also planted out the raspberry I got from the neighbours. I put plenty of slow-release fertilizer pellets in the hole, to help it along.

Some raspberry varieties produce fruit on the new year's growth, and some on year-old wood - if mine is the latter I wont see any raspberries until 2013. Hope it's the former!

Lettuce bed

New bed, intended for lettuce

I finished digging a new bed today, which I'd started a while ago. Frost delayed more work for some time, but the last few days have been mild and the ground has now thawed out. This bed is intended for lettuce, rocket, and other salad leaves - it is more shaded than the other beds, and lettuce doesn't need full summer sun.

Leaf blowers = evil

Spring-tine rake. Low-tech and effective.

This is a miscellaneous rant, because there's not much to do in the garden at the moment. It's been too frosty recently, and there's now a couple of inches of snow over everything.

So, compare two instruments for sweeping up fallen leaves. The old-fashioned spring-tine rake, and the electric or petrol-driven leaf blower. I believe that the differences in these two tools illustrate many of the serious errors in our society's attitudes towards the environment, sustainability and human labour which are quite likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation.

The technology for making a rake has been around for about 3000 years, when wire was invented. Rows of wires are supported by a simple frame - pieces of metal with holes in them, also very low-tech, and attached to a stick - possibly the lowest technology tool there is. Rakes are simple, easy to produce and use, robust, and effective. Leaf blowers are constructed from dozens of plastic and metal parts, all of which are precision engineered, which has a high environmental cost. They cannot be made using simple metal- and wood-working skills, and all but the simplest repairs will require new parts sourced from the original manufacturer.

The first point of comparison is clearly in the rake's favour in terms of the environmental impact of construction, use, and maintainance.

The second point of comparison is in use - they do similar, but not identical tasks. The aim of each is to move leaves off lawns, but the action of the rake draws leaves towards the user, resulting in a pile which can be easily taken up and put in a wheelbarrow to take to the compost heap, or into sacks for rotting down as leafmold. The leaf blower blows leaves away from the user, and it is less easy, if not impossible, to make a tidy heap of leaves using one. Leaves are transformed into litter, to be whooshed away onto someone else's property, or the public street. By using a conceptually poor tool, a valuable resource is turned into a problem.

Bosch leaf blower. Worse in every respect.

Thirdly, the leaf-blower panders to the dangerous delusion of convenience - the idea that anything that reduces the expenditure of human muscular energy is a good thing, almost irrespective of the cost. In this case, the cost is in far higher environmental impact, and the transformation of a resource into a disposal problem. This is not worth paying for the highly questionable benefit of reducing the gentle exercise involved in raking to mere ambling about holding a gizmo.

Developing leaf blowers was thus a totally misguided project, giving a higher environmental cost, to do a worse job, of less benefit to the user and the land so managed.

Legumes suffering

Frost damaged legumes

The peas and broad beans have suffered from the weather despite it being generally mild, and despite the fact that both were described as extremely hardy varieties. (The peas are Meteor, the beans Aguadulce.)

We had a spell of frost about two weeks ago, then some strong winds, and now another frosty spell is starting. Several of the beans look totally dead, as do about a third of the peas. I will fill in the rows to replace casualties in March or so. Still, I was hoping for better from hardy varieties - the temperature never went below about -2°C, and it was only that cold for a few nights. Hrumph.

Crocuses flowering already

Crocuses starting to flower

The mild winter we've been having here has prompted some crocuses to start flowering - I noticed the shoots about ten days ago. This is early - apparently March is normal, and according to the BBC they can flower in February in mild conditions.
I didn't plant these, they're relics from a previous owner. I wonder what else is under the ground waiting?

Firewood

Chopping logs

Log pile (on fence section to allow air circulation)

A friend delivered about half a ton of logs yesterday, and I spent a fair amount of this morning chopping them and stacking them for seasoning. Seasoning means allowing the logs to dry out - freshly cut wood may contain up to 45% water by weight, and it is unsuitable for burning. Partly this is for the obvious reason that a lot of the energy content of the wood goes to turning the water into steam rather than giving out heat, but also because the fire burns cooler, and the smoke contains heavier molecules of partially burned fuel. These can condense in the chimney, corroding the lining and forming a tarry coating which is much more prone to chimney fires than the dry soot produced at higher temperatures.

Apparently wood can be seasoned in the open, but I intend to cover this pile (somehow) when I've finished splitting the logs. In the meantime, I've stacked the log quarters with the bark side upwards, which should allow the rain to run off without soaking in.

The pile of split logs in the second photo is about half the amount I was given. The rest is made up of smaller diameter pieces, which I won't split at all, and much larger ones. The wider ones I may not be able to split, and some longer ones need to be sawn in two first. Chopping and piling the first half took a couple of hours, and I left the remainder for another day because my arms were tired and the axe wound in my leg was starting to hurt.

New compost bin

New compost bin

Tony, the neighbour whose bow saw I broke (full story), gave me some old sections of fence for firewood. Since the wood was still quite sound, I used some of it to make a new compost bin. This is in an area right at the bottom of the garden (not shown on the layout) which is shaded by large trees, overgrown with ivy, and where the soil is full of half-bricks, old tiles, metal junk and bottles. Because of this I've just been using it for general garden waste - there's a big pile of the turfs I removed to make the beds, and another of woody prunings.

Having more than one compost heap means that I can leave the first to rot down without adding more fresh material, and it will be ready to use sooner.

Give peas a chance

Mesh for pea plants

The peas have been bashed about by the very strong winds last week, and were looking a bit forlorn, so I've given them something to climb up. Next time I will put in the supporting mesh as soon as the peas are in the ground. The canes and mesh are re-used from my  last garden, and since those peas came down with powdery mildew I left the equipment to soak in a fungicide solution before setting it up, in the hope that any spores are killed and I don't introduce a harmful species to this garden.

One of the broad bean plants had its stem broken, so I cut that off to a few inches above ground level. Possibly the root system will have enough stored energy to grow new stems and leaves.

Pruning apple tree

Before pruning

After pruning

January is a good time to prune apple trees, and the one in my garden definitely needed it. When I moved in there were hundreds of very small apples on the ground around the tree, and I hope by giving it a vigorous pruning I will get fewer but larger apples this year.

I found some useful information on pruning on the Royal Horticultural Society's website here, so I had a go. I've probably taken off more than they suggest, but the tree has been neglected for some time and there was a lot of dead wood. There was also a lot of growth which was too high to be able to pick the apples easily, and many branches were too close to each other, rubbing together or tangled together.

Now the structure is much more open, the highest branches have been removed, the lowest ones which were below head-height have also been trimmed back, and there are still plenty of fruit buds on the remaining branches. I left some long branches growing across the garden so that the open area is divided up visually, which should be more appealing to look at.

Cabbages pulled out

Half a dozen of the cabbages - which are still barely more than seedlings - were pulled out overnight. I replanted them as best I could, but they may have been too damaged to survive. The culprits are almost certainly pigeons - they like brassicas, and there are now very few berries for them to eat. I will have to protect the cabbages with netting or they'll be eaten.

Wood pile

Shelter for firewood

I found that some of the logs stored in the tool shed were going mouldy rather than drying out, so I built this open-sided shelter for them out of scraps lying around the garden. The floor is made of tiles laid on some thin branches (for air circulation), and the roof is an old door with a bin bag tacked onto it.

First frost

The temperature was down to 1 °C last night, and in sheltered parts of the garden there was a light frost, the first I've seen this year. The average first frost date in these parts is mid-October, that's six weeks ago.

The frost had melted away by 10:30, before I thought of taking a photo.

According to wikipedia, "In the United Kingdom, the growing season is defined as starting when the temperature on five consecutive days exceeds 5 °C, and ends after five consecutive days of temperatures below 5 °C." I don't think we've had temperatures that consistently low yet - most days in the last few weeks the maximum daily temperature has been between 6 °C and 9 °C.

Mulch

Leaf mulch on allium bed

After the last lot of damage to the allium bed I mulched around the plants with cherry leaves, and this seems to have prevented further digging.

The plate of green goo is a harmless preparation with a strong citrus smell, which is supposed to keep cats and dogs away. I'm not convinced that it works, though.

Kale planted out, onion damage

Uprooted onion

Seems that the squirrels have been busy - there were quite a few holes in the beds, mostly in unplanted areas, but some in the allium bed, despite the wires I strung over them. One of the onions had been completely dug out (but not nibbled). A couple more onions had been knocked or trampled. Grr.

I put the onion back as best I could and firmed up the soil round it - it should continue to grow, but it will have to spend energy repairing root damage that could have gone towards further growth.

I also planted out some kale seedlings in bed three. They've been growing from seed since the 5th October, starting indoors, then spending the afternoon in the greenhouse, then moved to the greenhouse full-time. I'm not sure if they're advanced enough to survive the winter and grow to full size, but I might get some winter greens from them.

Wood blewitt

Wood blewitt. The cap is about 5cm across.

This post isn't about gardening, but about another interest sharing the same motivation - cheap, healthy, tasty food.

Out walking today, I found a wood blewitt - a very distinctive lilac and brown mushroom. I picked it, and when I got home made sure that I'd identified it correctly. I sliced it thinly, fried it briefly in a very hot pan with a little butter, and ate it on dry toast. Delicious.