Tag Archives: kale

Grow, Grow, Grow

I was as excited as any other birdwatcher when I read about the Bearded Vulture that has been spotted in the Peak District and Yorkshire. Also known as a Lammergeier, this is only the second time such a bird has been spotted in Britain this century. Which makes it almost as rare as a Cabinet Minister telling the truth. Or a Special Advisor admitting an error. It is thought that this is a juvenile Lammergeier that has simply got a bit blown off course – admittedly by a few thousand miles. The bird obviously thinks that we still live in a Europe of open borders and no distrust of foreign immigrants. Oh, the naivety of youth.

When I was a naive youth, the Lammergeier was top of my must-see list of birds on the occasions when our family French camping holidays took us to the Pyrenees. We saw lots of other eagles and vultures, but never a Lammergeier. It would be amazing to spot one, but I will not be making the trip to Yorkshire to try and see it. Even without the lockdown restrictions having been lifted (for those of us who abided by them in the first place) I will not be leaving the garden for any of length of time at the moment. Because this is the time of the year when the hard graft finally pays off. It is the time of the year when my parents would say that there was no way they could go on holiday, because the peas will need picking, then the beans, the courgettes and all the other veg that they grew on an industrial scale.

And I now understand their sentiments. The scale of my veg and flower patch is nothing to compare with theirs. Mrs B and I are not interested in the long hours of blanching and bagging veg which my parents engaged in, to enable them to freeze enough greens to see them through the winter. But we currently have more peas, sugar snaps, courgettes, kale, carrots and runner beans and french beans than we could shake a big Tory Lie at. Not to mention salad leaves, cucumbers and, this week, the first tomatoes in the greenhouse.

The sighting of a rare vulture in Britain is a relief from the other depressing news (although it also brought into focus the illegal persecution of birds of prey such as the hen harrier on nearby grouse moors). Being in the garden has also provided solace for me and Mrs B. The flowers are looking particularly fine at the moment and Josh’s Spursy Border is performing far better than I had any right to expect in its first season.

All this has happened not because we made any spurious promises or deadlines, or pretended we had seeds in stock when, in fact we had not. We did not double count plants or make up random straplines like “We will get digging done” or “pick, pick, pick”. No: we just got on with it.

And now, like the Lammergeier in Yorkshire, who must have been a bit tired after its long journey over half of Europe, we will take stock and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

Sowing the Seeds

When I started this post a week ago the immediate concerns surrounded the aftermath of another weekend bringing another storm – Jorge.  It seemed that our post-Brexit freedoms did not extend to naming our own storms with those Europeans coming over here, bringing their continental storms, messing with our rivers and flooding our golf courses.

Now we have the non-specifically named Covid-19 coming over here threatening to mess with everything and everyone we hold dear.  I wonder if we can comprehend the enormity of what we might have to face and the steps we can take to mitigate the the effects of the impending epidemic.  Back in 1976 when my father decided to buy a property with 6 1/2 acres of land it was, in no small part, because he wanted to be able to sustain a degree of self-sufficiency in case of a break down in the supply chain through either economic uncertainty of nuclear disaster.  I am not sure if he saw Opec or Russia as a bigger threat, but he was determined to be ready.

It seems many think we might be facing such a scenario now – which would explain the bizarre headline shortages in toilet rolls and hand sanitizer.  Really?  In his day, my father was concerned about shortages in proper essentials like, um, food.  So he grew vegetables on an industrial scale.  I cannot compete with him in the scale of my veg growing operation, but I have managed to maintain an element of self-sufficiency and am hoping that Mrs B and I will have a decent crop of vegetables for the summer.

This week we cooked the last of the stored squashes:  the recipe required “one large squash, 1 Kg”.  Half of my last Crown Prince squash weighed a whopping 2kg so perhaps it pays to grow your own.  We have almost finished the kale but the purple sprouting is doing as described (sprouting, in purple).  There are still leeks in the garden and the rocket has got its act together in the greenhouse, so we have green leaves.  And our hen – plucky Agatha – continues to lay eggs at regular intervals.  For the new season there are the green shoots of new garlic and shallots.  It might not be enough to ward off the prospect of self-isolation, but it is, if nothing else, pleasing to know that we can provide at least some of our diet for ourselves.

Most of the recent horticultural work has revolved around sowing seeds.  I have ordered all my veg seeds, which I will start sowing in trays this weekend, but in some ways the more emotionally rewarding work has been in planning the flower garden for the summer.  There will be a new border to be planted in Josh’s memory and I plan for the rest of the garden to be vibrant with colour and flowers for cutting.  Ultimately the new beds will be planted with perennials, but as these will take a year or two to mature, I am sowing more annuals than I have ever done to ensure the borders are more packed than the Greco-Turkish equivalent.  For flower seeds my go-to source is always Higgledy Garden and he includes old favourites such as cosmos, nicotiana and sweet peas, as well as newbies like Cleome Spinosa, amongst others, and a free packet of Godetia.

My father used to say that if you could not eat it, he did not want to grow it, but as I see the seedlings poking through and I look forward to sunny summer days and blooming borders in the garden it is a good time of year to remember Jesus being tempted in the desert and remind ourselves that we cannot live on bread alone.

Or toilet rolls for that matter.

Dafs surviving despite their broken home
Tree Peony?
Spring is coming
Frogs been busy
Plants getting ready for planting
Sweet Peas
Cosmos emerging
Droopy Cornflower
Stocks – rising
Echinops – the Great Blue Hope
Aaah – spring bulbs & Christmas Roses

 

 

 

Planting to the Music of Time

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Lonely as a Cloud

The rhythm of the seasons is changing its beat as summer segues into autumn.  In the past, it was a time of year I would associate with final harvests of the summer and then closing down for the winter.  I would clear the veg patch and cover it over to suppress weeds, allowing only space for Brussels, leeks and broccoli to battle the winter.  I would uproot the deceased annuals in the borders and tidy the beds to wait till the warm weather returned.  This year I have even managed to pick some mushrooms from a local field.

But these days I have started the autumnal season with a sense of anticipation for the spring.  Like a tight rope walker looking straight ahead rather than down in order to make it successfully to the other side, I am planting stuff for harvesting and flowering in the spring.  If I keep my eyes on the early summer of next year, perhaps I won’t even notice winter.

So over the past few weeks I have been nurturing and planting out my own self-grown flowers, like Honesty, Foxgloves, Lupins, and Echinacea, as well as Sweet Williams.  I have sown Nigella and Phaecellia in the new bed out front.  Instead of a fallow time, it is a season to plant and nurture.  And to sit back and see everything shoot and take root in the still warm autumn.

In the raised beds I have planted a Curly Kale, garlic, shallots and broad beans.  Broad Beans were something The Old Man never planted in the autumn as he claimed the flavour was not as good as spring planted.  But considering the disastrous crop of spring grown Broadies I had this year, any kind of broad beans in 2019 would be an improvement – whatever the flavour.  But, to improve my chances I have sown two types:  Aquadulce and The Sutton.  The first in the raised bed, the second (dwarf variety) in pots.

So now, with any luck, I will have the benefit of watching stuff growing – even in the dead of winter – which is what this whole gardening lark is about, isn’t it?

 

 

Picked these from the fields nearby
Foxgloves and Honesty in trays
Curly Kale
Broad Beans and Garlic either side of the rows of leeks n Khol Rabi

The Dry

Two weeks ago I started this post.  I don’t know what got in the way of me completing it.  Perhaps it was the end of term which passed in a whir of school trips, successive cover lessons involving repeat showings of Blue Planet or feature films and the year eight boys going mob-handedly feral at lunchtime.  Family matters have also been an issue with Mrs B’s mother slipping from this mortal coil (four days after celebrating her 70th Wedding anniversary).  But the circle of life was shown to be rotating strongly with the graduation of our little girl to the rank of qualified medical practitioner.  That’s a doctor to you or me. (No, not a nurse, nor even a pharmacist.  A proper doctor).

Time is passing so fast these days and yet what I wrote two weeks ago unsurprisingly fits well for now:

*****************

Today I saw the first rumours of hose pipe bans coming into force – though not, thankfully down here in the wet West Country.  Surprisingly, they are talking about the North West being the place they will need to impose the restrictions.  I always thought Manchester and Liverpool got more than their fair share of rain, but then I guess they also have more than their fair share of residents to drink all the water from the tap (like the Tiger Who Came to Tea).

I am not sure how the garden would cope if I were able to water it regularly via a hose pipe.  When I started the garden in the winter, it was chucking down with rain and I was more concerned with drying the clay soil out rather than retaining water.  But regular watering is a fact of life at the moment and the veg have hit their stride.  We now have courgettes, potatoes, green beans, runner beans, mangetout, kale, carrots, onions and shallots.  And we have salad coming out of our ears as well as raspberries and blueberries starting to ripen.

Tomatoes will be in plentiful supply soon, but we’re just waiting for the first sweet million to ripen, then they will all go off like a firework.

Yields have not been as good as I might have expected at the old place, but for a first season on a new plot I feel pretty pleased.

 

French, Runners, carrots, mangetouts, courgettes
Blueberries
Sunflowers – in their element
Greenhouse – peppers, lettuce and toms
Green Millions
Jersey Devil

The First Lift

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Potatoes – Swift and early. But where have all the flowers gone?

These are the days of miracle and wonder, as Paul Simon once sang. The garden is starting to produce, and all the fastidious work sowing seeds, potting on, planting out, weeding, hoeing and slaughtering snails, begins to pay off.

One of the key moment is the lifting of the first root of New Potatoes. It is something that was treated with due pomp and ceremony by The Old Man and required the type of careful prodding and inspection one would normally expect only of a midwife.  The Old Man would have counted the days since planting, checked the growing conditions and attempted to calculate the exact best day to start digging.  But he traditionally only planted one type of potato (probably Wilja or Desiree), meaning that those dug in June were new potatoes, anything after that were main crop.

For my part, I am always seduced by the choice on offer at Pennard Plants Potato days so I buy various types for different end products.  But every year I am unsure about when they are likely to be ready.  The sages of the internet gardening fraternity say you need to start harvesting when the potatoes have stopped flowering, but this May / June has been so dry they seem to have barely blossomed.  And this has been a very different this year for other reasons:

  1. The potato patch (and veg patch) is only a few strides from my back door in the new property
  2. Due to a lack of supply we had to go for Swift first earlies instead of the usually reliable Belle de Fontenay
  3. In an even more radical break with normal procedures, earthing up has been done not with earth, but with grass clippings, thanks to reading an article by Alyce Fowler.

So the timing of when the first spuds would be ready was even more of a guessing game than normal.  However, the three variables noted above were more likely to help rather than hinder.  Point one makes it less time-consuming to check them, point two suggested that the they would be ready earlier (or else why give them a name synonymous with fast) and point three, after some initial misgivings, was the most beneficial of all.  With the dry weather, I was able to simply lift a portion of grass clippings to expose the golden orbs that indicated the potatoes were ready.

And so we enjoyed our first potatoes of the season along with the first kale of the year too.  The kale should have been ready much earlier, but it was a victim of unknown assailants – like the peas and salad.  But, on the whole, there is enough greenery to suggest a good growing season beckons.

Snug under their blanket of grass clippings
The First Root – ready for prepping

 

One Month On

170614 (3)It’s been a month since I put finger to keyboard (or for some I know it would be thumbs to keyboard).   It is an interesting comparison to see how stuff has panned out in the past 30 days.

A month ago it was raining, I was at the end of half term, looking forward to a mad month of end of term activities and report writing. Now the sun is shining and I am on holiday looking forward to weeks of no school and starting to reap the harvest from the springtime planting, potting on and general nurturing.

In June I was worried the garlic was going over and rotting. It was suffering rust (was it the rain?)  and some did – but most are now drying nicely and have been joined by the shallots, spread out in the garage, away from the joists where the swallow fledglings sit and shit.  The Old Man’s reaction to the harvesting of shallots was typical:

“It’s a bit early for shallots”.

“Try telling the shallots” I replied: “they’re falling over”.

It’s been a good year for them (early or not) and many are the size of decent onions. I wish I had planted more now.

Up the top of the garden, a month ago the pig pen was a tangled mess of three foot high weeds.  I put my back into clearing a particularly fertile area of the pen (resulting in a trip to the osteopath) but I reckon it was worth the effort:  the new squash patch is thriving on what I cleared and what the pigs left behind.

Early June the runner beans were just beginning to grasp the canes.  Now they are over-topping them.  The first beans are formed.  The curly kale was being protected by boards – now the kale is big enough to stand by itself and the boards are protecting the cabbages, which suffered some mouse damage.

Mid-June saw the first Cosmos and sweet peas – ahead of the regular 10th July Sweet Pea Day.  And veggies came on stream: courgettes, new potatoes, peas, mangetout and any amount of kale.  And second plantings of lettuce leaves are in full swing when they were non-existent a month ago.

While the over-wintered chillies were originally small and red, they became large and yellow in June and have graduated to orange to proper sized red chillis now.   And this year’s new chillis are starting to bud.

And….much to my relief and Mrs B’s delight…we have the first tomatoes.

(A bit early for tomatoes wouldn’t you say?)

May Now

May is deceptive.  You think there is sunshine and warmth there, but look closer and all you see is grey and coldness. That’s the PM for you.

It’s no different in the garden, where temperatures remain cool and seedlings need to be tough to harden off before planting.  Even before getting to the veg patch they have to combat the “bloody difficult” slugs which continue to chomp on them, but enough are surviving the onslaught to make it to potting on.  Despite the snails rampaging through seedlings like the SNP through the Labour heartlands, I have managed to pot up plenty of Summer PSB, and enough Brussels to pay for ten thousand new policemen.  I think that figure is correct.  Give me a moment….

This weekend it did start to feel warmer and Mrs B helped me plant out the sweet peas in the goalposts.  Last year the first sweet pea blossomed on 27th May – a month and a half earlier than the usual Sweet Pea Day of 10th July.  I cannot see that we will have a sweet pea by that time this year, but perhaps one will bloom on 8th June.  We could do with something uplifting and beautiful to happen on that day.  I am not expecting any other wonderful surprises then.

Sweet Peas – “Back of the Net”
Korean Mint. Another immigrant flavour.
Hardening off
Coriander
Basil!
Brussels. UKIP’s favourite vegetable
“We’ll keep the red kale flying here”
Policemen
Ranunculus in the morning

 

 

 

Feed the Birds

Pied Wagtails in central Bath (poor pic)
Pied Wagtails in central Bath (poor pic)

Mary Poppins the musical is back doing the rounds and so I somehow got an ear worm in my head that is straight out of the show. Ear worm is an apt description as the song is “Feed the Birds”.  It was always something that the parents did and the Old Man has always been diligent in keeping the feeders full of nuts.  in recent winters the main recipients have been rats who have climbed the wisteria to hang on the wire cage and feast.  This year TOM has not been putting food out for the birds (or the rats) yet. Whether this is because the weather has been so mild our feathered friends really do not need any more sustenance I am not sure.

In years gone by we would be asked to delay pruning the Cotoneaster until the birds had been able eat all the berries, but frankly I have never seen any self-respecting fieldfares helping themselves to the red plenty.

But we have found other ways in which to provide for the wild bird population.  A year or two back the starlings would flock around the hen run and clean us out of layers pellets and corn. It cost us a bomb to keep re-filling the feeder – making for some of the more expensive free range eggs around. We now have a feeder that is not accessible to small birds so that is sorted.

Equally, I have put an end to providing fodder to the pigeons, who after I had netted the purple sprouting, turned their attention to the kale and when I covered that, they started to shred the brussels. Can’t fault them for taste, but it amuses me how easily they are put off feeding by a bit of green net.

Birds I am happy to aid in their five-a-day nutritional requirements are obviously the robins who appear as soon as I pick up a fork. Robins act like they are your chums and at Christmas they appear all sweet and festive on cards and the like. But they are fiercely territorial and pretty damned belligerent towards each other. So not all that cute.

The other piece of bird-friendly activity I finally did yesterday was to take the netting off the raspberries – thereby allowing birds to rummage in amongst the canes for any old fruit or other stuff.

And all day long I was humming along “tuppence a bag”…