May round-up

Blossom, blossom, everywhere

It has been a very warm and dry month of May here. Three weeks without rain and lots of days with temperatures around 20°C! Our rainwater-collecting system (six barrels, each 200 L capacity, that are filled by run-off from our roof) which we use for watering the vegetable garden was nearly empty at the end of the dry spell. With all the new seedlings coming up (direct sowings of carrot, beetroot, kale, chard, New Zealand spinach, calabrese, red, winter and Savoy cabbage, purple-sprouting broccoli, kohlrabi, lettuce, turnips, radishes, scorzonera, edible flowers and herbs) and being planted out (dwarf and climbing French beans, summer and winter squashes, courgettes, celeriac, amaranth, sunflowers), there was a lot of watering to be done: my least favourite job in the garden.

Squash seedlings

Empty beds

Path from the top paddock to the middle paddock

Salad with beetroot and celeriac stalks

So hot we had to shade the greenhouse

The first job of the month was to get the squashes going. Sowing them on 1 May means that they are perfect for planting out four weeks later, after the last frost date and when it's reliably warm enough for them. Because I'm seed swapping with a squash aficionado, I ended up with 22 different varieties this time. Of course, I had to pop in two or three seeds of each, to be sure to get at least one plant each. The germination rate was excellent and suddenly we had 51 squash plants needing a home. Luckily, the Huegelkultur bed was nearing completion. It made a very handy depository for the mountain of used-up brassica plants left over from our winter crops.

Once all the purple-sprouting broccoli, kale and most of the chard had been removed from the veg garden, the beds were looking rather empty. The emptiest it's been all year. After a quick tilling and cultivating session with the new Mantis, the beds were ready for direct sowing and to receive the latest seedlings from the conservatory. The asparagus seeds germinated very well this time, after soaking them for two days, and it looks like we've got ourselves just over a full bed of asparagus plants. I already had a half dozen three-year-old Martha Washington plants and added the newcomers (Argenteuil and Jersey Knight) to the same bed. Now wait four years.

The grass has been growing like crazy and for the past week we've been playing catch-up to get things under control again. All the hedges need weeding and mulched around as do the fruit bushes, fruit trees and potatoes. So far we've completed the top and middle paddocks, with only the large bottom paddock left to do. However, since we've removed the fence between the middle paddock and the top paddock, maybe they classify as a single paddock now! The fence was very well made, but Jim managed to extract the six-foot posts (half underground) with the aid of a 2-tonne hydraulic jack. The space has now a much more open feel and view, and we've put down a more secure pathway instead of the old chicken ladder.

We've been eating very well, with the polytunnel virtually eliminating the 'hungry gap'. Already this month, we've had beetroot, broad beans, pak choi and courgettes from the polytunnel, colourful salads most days and heaps of globe artichokes. And wild rocket is a new weed in our garden - the kind of weed we like!

The chicks at one month

The chicks are growing fast. At the age of three weeks, they got a slight shock - it rained for the first time in their lives! Can't be many Scottish chickens that lucky. Out of the five, three are hens and two cockerels. Luckily three more hens was exactly what we wanted. We'll keep our flock black-and-white with two more black hens and one white one. The cockerels will be for the pot, unless one of them is needed to replace Feathers who's been spending a lot of time on the therapist's couch recently...

Digging a Hügel

Couldn't have known what a big job it would be.

The single largest task we had planned for this spring was creating a large (about 12 x 4 metres, or 40 x 15 feet) new vegetable bed down in the bottom paddock.

We're nearing the end of our rolling programme of covering large areas with black plastic each year, for digging new beds the following year. The ground down there is quite heavy with clay, borderline boggy. The original intention was that it should be this year's potato bed, but when I started digging it, back in February or March, I soon concluded that it was far too wet and stony to be ready in time for planting potatoes! We found a better spot for the tatties and put this one on the back-burner for a little longer.

Happily, at just this time, we heard about Hügelkultur (literally mound- or hill-culture). This is a land management technique long practised in parts of Germany and Eastern Europe, in which marginal land is made cultivable by creating mounds of wood, woody waste from around the garden, plant and grass cuttings: basically whatever organic material is handy, with compost and soil over all. The result is a bed with a decaying core of organic matter that acts as a moisture store, while gradually breaking down, enriching and contributing to the soil.

Typically, the material is simply piled up on the surface of the ground, over an area of about one by two metres, to a maximum height of approximately one metre. In our case, the area we wanted to cultivate is considerably larger (of course, we could have just created a series of small mounds), and is also very windswept. Although we have planted hedges to break the wind, it'll be a few years yet before the shelter is really good and in the meantime we can't get into vertical gardening.

By this stage I was starting to realise the scale of it.

We decided to modify the method to suit our needs, inverting our Hügel and embedding it in the ground, so I started by digging a large trench. The first six to eight inches weren't too bad, coming up with the spade as hefty soil blocks, with some stones scattered throughout.

Couldn't have done it without the fishbox soil sifter.

Then came the 'stone zone'. A layer of another six to eight inches so packed with stones as to be impenetrable to spade or fork. I suppose at one time, 9000 or so years ago, this was the bed of a glacial meltwater runoff.

We had just invested in a Mantis tiller, which proved to be the very tool for the job. With that, I was able to gouge out the stone zone layer, into piles of earth and stone the we could shake through our homemade fishbox soil sifter. The soil was thus kept to go back on top and the stone added to our ever-increasing mound of rubble in the bottom corner of the garden.

Probably couldn't have done it without beer either.

Once underneath the stone zone, the ground was again penetrable to the spade, allowing me to dig out the deepest, central portion of the trench, down another 12 inches or so.

That's where the trench met the level of the ground water, and soon there was water pooling in the bottom of the trench, even though we were weeks into an unusually dry spell of weather. This hopefully means that the new bed won't ever need watering.

Now it was time to start filling it all back up again. We started out by sacrificing a couple of large sitka spruce firewood logs to the cause, providing the substantial, slowest-decaying core.

Step 1. Logs

Next came a layer of scorched gorse bush remains, which our neighbour had burnt off a nearby hillside the year before. Still woody matter, but much smaller pieces than the core logs.

Step 2. Brush

On top of that, we happened to have a very large pile of winter brassica ready to be cleared from the rest of the veg garden.

Spent winter brassicas

So, in it went. This will break down much more rapidly.

Step 3. Garden waste

We also chucked in some rotted manure at this point, for good measure.

Step 4. Manure

As the final, swiftest decaying layer, we spread in a load of grass cuttings.

Step 5. Grass

And then it was time to Mantis (yes, that is now a verb here) the soil back over top of all.

Step 6. Tilling and covering

The soil is, of course, still heavy clay. Very sticky when wet and easily compacted. So we added a bale of wood shavings (animal bedding type), to lighten things up a bit.

Step 7. Wood shavings to be mixed in

Soon it will be time to add squash seedlings. Hope they're going to like the new bed created especially for them!

Just add seedlings

January round-up

Still busy in January

Unlike most of the rest of the continent, our mild winter has continued and Jim is still mowing the bottom paddock. When that's done, hopefully he'll get at least six weeks off mowing! Some days we've had 11C so signs of spring are appearing everywhere: rhubarb stalks, rocket leaves, daffodil coming up and even some leaves (elder, rosa rugosa) unfurling.

Celtuce

Because it's been so mild and relatively dry we've decided to forego the DIY projects on the inside and concentrate on the garden while the going is good. We've been moving roses and wildflowers into new locations - this sounds like a pleasant, easy job but involved a surprising amount of stone removal. All the raised beds have had fresh compost added and Jim's already dug over quite a lot of the veg garden. Soon it will be time to lift the first of the large black plastic covers off the three new growing areas for this year. Fingers crossed they won't be as stony as last year's!

Dredging the pond

The big outdoor job this month has been the dredging of the wildlife pond. This has to happen to some extent every year so that there is somewhere for the frogs and toads to deposit their spawn and provide us with lots of slug-chomping offspring. Otherwise the yellow iris and grasses would choke it completely. The more trees we plant the lower the water table in the paddock seems to go. We reckon it is a good six inches lower than when we started. This is good, as it was excessively wet in places.

Celeriacs: funny-looking and tasty

Another large outdoor job we've started is the clearance of the last remaining bramble thicket in the south-east corner of the garden, behind the pond. It's maybe only a third of the size of the bramble patch we cleared last year, but some of them are big, old and tough enough to break a garden fork! This is the corner from which we have occasional mooligan ingress so we want to plant a prickly rosa rugosa double hedge to keep those pesky cattle out. And then we'll have to think about what to do with the remaining space.

Winter veg selection

We've still got lots of winter veggies - oca, Jerusalem artichokes, celeriacs, leeks, swedes, cabbage, kale, Daubenton's kale, chard, perennial onions, rocket, celtuce. Only the parsnips have run out and the squashes are down to two. We have about 16 purple-sprouting broccolis sprouting away so hopefully from next month broccoli will be back on the menu. In fact, we have so many nice green broccoli leaves that we decided to kimchi them (along with Jerusalem artichokes and kale, the two other veg we have most of at the moment).

Preparing kimchi

The kimchi has been a great addition to our diet. We have some almost everyday - just like in Korea! It's very energising stuff and wonderful for the digestion. The other new addition to our diet is homemade ice cream. We acquired a Chilly ice cream maker (non-electrical, basically a double-skinned stainless steel pot with cooling element all around) and it makes wonderful ice cream and frozen yoghurt. We got it in preparation for our berry harvest and now it looks like we'll need to get an additional freezer, too!

Wood chopping under the rainbow

In between the additional garden jobs, work on processing the remainder of our 25-tonne log pile continues. It's going down, but looks like there will be ample for this winter and spring. Another goal for this year is to build a proper wood shed.

November round-up

Final squash harvest

The frogs and bees have gone into hibernation, almost all the leaves are down. There is more darkness, even if the supermoon provided some extra night light. A good time for a garden clean-up before a bit of winter rest. Just to be able to put all the squash plants on the compost bin, Jim had to dig over the whole row of bins twice! And he's even started digging some of the cleared vegetable beds.

Pile of squash plants

Frosted kale, should be sweeter now

The last of the squashes and beans have been harvested. This time I shelled the large runner beans, which were pretty in pink and purple. They weren't quite dry yet, but good enough to freeze. The naked beans turned out to be so delicious that I'm going to grow runner beans just for them next year. Eat the French beans fresh and shell the mature runner beans for winter stews.

We've now started into the kale, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, leeks and Brussels sprouts. Some of the swedes are monstrous. I now throw a handful of neep cubes into every casserole I make. And we're still eating a large or medium-sized squash per week. The small ones are gone, but some of the remaining Marina di Chioggias are huge. The amaranth didn't quite make it to maturity. One plant was ripe and after threshing we got a medium-sized jar of amaranth. It might work in a hot summer.

First pears

More rewarding was our pear harvest: seven pears from our three-year-old tree and no threshing required. However, I learnt that pears don't really ripen on the tree and that it's best to pick them when they come off easily with a sideways bend and let them finish ripening off the tree.

Frosted purple-sprouting broccoli

The weather was very mild for the first half of the month, but now we've had several nights of frost, which is a little unusual around here, and it's been the coldest since we moved here ('feels like -6C'). Early in the month we covered the tea plants with garden fleece for the winter.

We've also completed hedging around the perimeter of our land. Hurray! It took another 115 hedge plants: 25 dog roses, 25 white rosa rugosa, 25 guelder roses, 15 forsythia, 15 purple beeches and 10 amelanchiers. We had hoped that planting them as early as possible in the dormant season would mean better weather for hedge planting, but alas it was not so. The first day it was blowing a gale and we had to retreat early. There followed a torrential downpour that night (one inch/25 mm of rainfall in one night) to water everything in nicely, followed by a decent day to finish the planting. We also moved some rogue raspberry plants and replaced them with rogue rugosas and stuck about 30 willow sticks in the ground to bulk up the hedges.

Greencurrant cuttings

The other exciting bit of planting came in a package from Finland: greencurrant cuttings. This is a Finnish specialty, a blackcurrant variety with translucent yellow-green berries. The flavour is said to be similar to blackcurrant but milder and sweeter. And the berries are hopefully less attractive to birds! Fingers crossed now that they will take (at least a few of the ten cuttings). I also took cuttings of our buddleia and stuck them in a seed bed.

Overwintering pea

So far the winter sowing programme has not been too successful. The aphids got one tray of lettuce seedlings and the slugs (unfortunately not in hibernation) got a second one. After that I set all four beer traps in the polytunnel and resowed. The pea seedlings are doing the best so far. I also sowed twenty broad beans outside and three inside the tunnel. The first of the Early Wonder beetroot seedlings are coming up and the rocket obligingly reseeds itself, both inside the polytunnel and outside in a raised bed.

As an experiment, I sowed some organic chickpeas - the fresh young pods are supposed to be the closest to edamame soybeans you can grow in the UK. I wanted to see how easy it was to get the shop-bought chickpeas to sprout. The answer is very easy. So that is another new vegetable on the growing menu next year.

Chickpea seedlings

Egg production is way down. We have six hens and only get an egg every other day at the moment! How can this be? One hen has just finished moulting, another one has just started and the three young point-of-lay hens have not quite reached the actual point of laying. So good old Mags is the only hard-working chicken at the moment - apart from Feathers who's taking his cock role very seriously. The young hens will be six months old on 1 December and hopefully our egg skelter will be filling up nicely thereafter.

September round-up

First lot of the winter squashes

Fallen apples after the first gale

September is a time of major harvesting. First the maincrop potatoes (now stored in the summer house), then the quinoa. August's glut of tomatoes has been replaced by one of beans and the squash harvest has begun. And, finally, we're getting good amounts of fruit. Both apples and raspberries are in full swing and we've also picked some brambles for jelly. I'm very excited about the first ten pears hanging on our best pear tree.

Unfortunately, September is also often a month of gales around the time of the autumn equinox. This year we had two pretty wild ones, one of them 36 hours long. The hedges have helped and we haven't had any damage other than half of our apple crop falling down, the poor sunflowers suffering badly and the top of the bean poles getting scorched. Dwarf beans next year! Nothing must show above the parapet.

The herb corner in the top paddock

Because we took a couple of weeks off from mowing to refurbish and paint the garage we've had a hard time getting back on top of the grass cutting. It's a bumper year for grass and it's been like painting the Forth Bridge (before the new paint). But we've finally caught up and the paddocks are looking their best ever. All the mulch has found a useful home. Now we're going to take another couple of weeks off mowing to get the wood chopped and stacked for the winter and then there'll be the final mow of the season.

Freshly mown middle paddock

Not much sowing this month. I've only sown our overwintering lettuces (Valdor, Winter Density and Merveille des Quatre Saisons), tatsoi and cauliflower and have taken cuttings of the Vietnamese coriander to have small plants overwintering in the house. Last year one plant survived outside covered in fleece, but it was a very mild winter.

Feathers (left) and Wingco (RIP)

In the world of chickens, all is well, apart from for the young cockerels. We've already started the job of decimating them since two of them targeted the oldest hen until she had hardly any neck feathers left and was hiding in the hen house. So they were obvious early candidates for the pot. First to go was Omega (nomen est omen) and next up was Wingco, a very sizeable bird for his 3.5 months. Now just one more to go until we have the optimum cockerel number of one (though some might argue that the optimum number is zero). It looks like Feathers will be the lucky cockerel. He's the only one actually protecting the hens and breaking up fights.

Rainbow chard, parsnips and nasturtiums

The summer crops are coming to an end: broccoli, romanesco, courgettes, tomatoes, beetroot. Cabbages, kale, chard, beans and carrots are still amply available. The sweetcorn is looking good for the first time ever. And some winter crops are starting up: swedes, parsnips, pumpkins and lots and lots of squash. Other winter veg (Jerusalem artichokes, celeriacs, leeks, Brussels sprouts, purple-sprouting broccoli and oca) are nowhere near ready yet. Something to look forward to it in the new year.

Hedges: planting and aftercare

Hedge after two years

There was very little by way of hedging here when we moved in. The donkey and pony had eaten anything the previous owners planted. In the past three years we've been putting in around 250 hedge plants each winter, to hedge the entire perimeter and the veg garden and to partition paddocks into useful sheltered spaces for growing.

The most economical way to buy hedge plants is bareroot when they're dormant (November to March here). They are easy to send that way - they are basically sticks with a bit of root on them. The one disadvantage with bareroot plants is that you have to plant them as soon as possible, at the outermost within the week. This can be a challenge in February! Usually we end up with at least one day of awful weather while we're planting.

It doesn't really matter when you plant the hedge in the dormant season as long as the ground is workable. We prefer to leave it to February or early March after the worst of the winter storms have passed, but if you don't have wind issues you could just as well do it in November.

Prepped strips for the new hedge

When the bareroot plants arrive by courier, we unpack them straightaway, water their roots (you don't want them drying out at all) and then pop them into one of the compost bins and cover the roots over with compost while we get ready to plant them over the following days.

Prepped windbreak

Usually we have covered the strip where the new hedge is to go with black plastic for six months or so, to kill off weeds and prepare the ground. Sometimes we have to dig a trench for a little unplanned extra hedge. Usually we've also already prepared the windbreak fabric fence.

Planting spade

A planting spade makes the job a lot easier. This is a small spade with a lip that you can stand on. It makes a nice hole big enough for the bareroot sticks without too much effort. To fill the holes we prepare a planting mixture of soil, compost and a handful of bonemeal.

Unfortunately you can't just plant a hedge and leave it. Nascent hedges do need some nurturing:

• Regular weeding, maybe three times a year, particularly in the beginning. Don't be tempted to take a shortcut and use weed killer - you'll risk killing the hedge as well. There is really no substitute for doing this by hand.
• Regular mulching, at least once in spring before the leaves come back and once in autumn. This will keep the weeds down, moisture in and provide slow-release fertiliser to the new hedge. 

This year's new hedge needs weeding

Mulched hedge, first year

 
And then, of course, it will soon be time to trim the hedges annually...

Scything: Part II. How-to

These are the basics of how to wield the scythe in the field. If you get to the stage of buying your own equipment, the conscientious retailer (such as Simon Fairlie) should help you along with set-up and fitting the tool to your height and general dimensions. Simon's site has an incredible wealth of information ranging all the way around the topic.

The main things to remember, once you've got the scythe set up ready and you're standing in front of lawn, meadow or field are:

• Keep the blade resting on the ground all the way through the arc of swing and return.
• Your swing should be comfortable from a fairly upright position, not stretching forward or leaning back.
• Don't take too much with each stroke. You should be stepping forward only an inch or two each time and taking the same amount forward with your swinging arc.
• Don't hack at it! This is a refined and elegant tool. The grass shouldn't even realise it's been cut until it falls over.

Particularly if you're using an Austrian scythe blade, which is lighter and finer than its traditional UK or US counterparts, frequent honing in the field is absolutely essential to keep the sort edge on the blade needed for optimal performance. You'll soon notice when it loses its keenest edge: the effort required for each stroke increases and the quality of the cut decreases.

You should acquire a set of three whetstones.

• Coarse: Relatively seldom used, for when you have a nasty ding from hitting a stone, bit of fence wire, whatever.
• Medium fine: Most used, primary edge honer when in the field.
• Fine: For putting the premium shiny razor edge on.

In the third part of this scything series, I'll get into a bit of advanced maintenance, namely: peening.

Scything: Part I. Introduction

The Austrian scythe

An important part of the RGL philosophy is using the simplest tool practical for any given job. I've always had an interest in traditional tools and methods as well as a strong suspicion that a fair few of their fancier modern equivalents are more about making money for their manufacturer than improving the process or outcome of the work.

The scale of the job is, of course, a key factor in determining whether a traditional hand tool or modern power tool is going to be the best way to go. I'm no Luddite, but I do believe that in general simpler is better, the easiest way isn't necessarily the best and that developing and using the skills required to use the traditional tools lead to an unparalleled satisfaction in the work.

The scythe is a prime example. Dustbin of history, right? Not quite.
Unless you have acres and acres of smooth uninterrupted lawn to keep trim, the scythe holds a number of advantages over powered alternatives.

The advantages as I see them are:

Re-skilling an otherwise dull job

1. Cost. A good mower, push or ride-on, is expensive to buy. Also, you'll likely need a strimmer and possibly a brush cutter as well. The scythe does it all.
2. Simplicity of maintenance. You've got one blade to keep sharp. No engine to maintain, no fuel or other consumables to buy.
3. Enjoyability of use. Mowers, strimmers, whatever - they make a hideous din. With the scythe, all you get is the gentle swishing sound of the blade gliding through the grass. Listen to the birdsong instead. The satisfaction of learning the skill and doing it well is immense.
4. Safety for wildlife. We have a lot of amphibians in our garden. The carnage attendant on ploughing through them with a power mower would be unspeakable. They have a lot more time to get out of the way and you have a much better chance of spotting them in time as you approach with the scythe.
5. Versatility. Terrain, obstacles, moisture levels (scything is actually best with wet grass), vegetation type, vegetation height - you can deal with it all using this one elegant tool.

Disadvantages? The ones people usually expect don't necessarily stand up to scrutiny.

1. Speed. "Doesn't it take forever?" Not really. Especially not when you include setup and maintenance time in the total. Scale counts here and if you have much more than an acre to mow regularly, you might want some power assistance.
2. Safety. "I'd probably lose a foot." You'd have to do some pretty bizarre acrobatic maneuvers to bring the blade into contact with any part of your anatomy while mowing. Particular care, however, is required when sharpening the blade.