Self Suff-ish-ent

The ducks are pretty much fully grown now at 12 weeks or so. They start laying any time after 20 weeks. We’re still not entirely sure what breed they are although they are definitely heavy birds and would be considered ‘table’ or ‘meat’ breeds. The white one is probably an Aylesbury and I think the black and white one is an Aylesbury bred with something black - maybe a Rouen or a Muscovy. I’m fairly certain the black and white is a duck and the yellow is a drake which had been my initial thoughts. Ducks tend to be the noisy, quacking ones and drakes tend to hiss or croak. That is definitely the case with our two - the black one - Sploosh - is *very* noisy with a real deep, throaty quack and the yellow one - Lucky - is more of a squeak. We did have them in with the chickens for a while but two chickens got quite badly hurt and we think it must have been when the ducks tried to snatch food off them. The ducks are perpetually hungry and really grab at food and I think they might have grabbed at the hens with food in their mouths. After some consideration about what to do we seperated the ducks again with a low fence. As they are not yet flying they are contained and the chickens, who can flap up and over are able to go in the ducks area if they want and can get away again.

The incubator has been in use again, this time with quails eggs. We started with a dozen, discarded five after candling them and finding them empty and three actually hatched. They incubate in just 16 days and our son was in charge of the hatch this time. The quails are *tiny*, they must be around the smallest bird that can hatch and not need feeding by a parent bird from the very start. They mature really quickly though and can flap and fly by one week old and start laying eggs by six weeks old! I don’t know enough to be sexing them yet but on first peek I would say we have one male and two females or one female and two males. We’re not sure yet what we’ll do with them but I’d quite like to see them to maturity.

 

Meanwhile out in the hen house with five of the 12 hens gone broody we gave up and let them sit on some eggs. They started with four, but kicked one out after a few days. Two hatched, the third died in it’s egg having partially hatched. We opened it to look and it seemed as though whilst it was fully formed it had not managed to pull the egg yolk into itself properly as it’s stomach was very distended and full of air. The two chicks are doing really well though. I’m fairly sure there is one cockerel and one hen there. Both seem very healthy so we’ll see how they do out there. I remember hatching our first bantams after chickens and being amazed at how tiny the chicks seemed. We brought a bantam chick in to put next to a quail chick (they hatched on the same day) which had the bantam looking like a giant in comparison to the tiny quail.

 

It’s been a great year for hatchings so far, if a rather noisy one - sorry neighbours!

Growing wise we are still reaping the rewards of what we’ve sown with potatoes, strawberries and peas ready now, apples, sweetcorn, carrots and parsnips to come later. We definitely have not made as much of the allotment as we could this year but have done really well here at home in containers - no weeding, easier to water (using grey bathwater) and no need to drag ourselves away from home to get there.

 

Produce wise we have been doing well - I’ve made pots and pots of jam using strawberries picked at the local PYO - along with lavendar from our garden or chillis from our plants last year stored in the freezer. We’ve made a HUGE bottle of elderflower cordial using foraged elderflowers near the allotment.  I have had a first go at winemaking using a kit although I have yet to sample to results as I am letting it mature a little. I now have the kit ready to make some fruit or berry based wine. The kids and I have been working our way through the River Cottage Family Cookbook first section on flour. This has seen us making all sorts of bread - soda bread, sourdough (from our own caught wild yeast starter), flat breads, basic white loaves and pizzas, as well as home made pasta (using our own bantams eggs) and a delicious lemon tart using our own eggs for pastry and lemon curd.

We have some exciting plans afoot for an even more self-suffish future which I will share on here once we are a bit further along the line with them.

Lifestock update first . The ducklings are doing *really* well, growing enormous and have just started to quack rather than cheep in the last two days . We’ve moved them outside and they have their own little pen alongside the chickens run so they are getting used to each other through the fence. They are not putting themselves away yet so are being herded into their little hutch each night before we close it up but hopefully they’ll catch on quick and put themselves away soon. They have a grassy area, a shallow tray for a pond and a food dish. Eventually we’ll install a bigger, deeper pool for them within the chickens area but I suspect they will spend time free ranging the garden when we’re about as they still firmly believe our daughter is their Mummy and love nothing more than following her about, sitting on her lap (yes, really ) or swimming in a toy paddling pool where they practise their diving.

The chickens are laying well, a good six eggs most days. Two of the younger hens have gone broody but as they are only sitting on eggs which will contain chicks who mother’s have been mating with a cockerel who is both their father and grandfather I suspect it wouldn’t be a success. If we were to breed more from our chickens we’d really need to dilute that blood line to get healthy results. As it is we do have a second cockerel but bless him he still hasn’t managed to persuade a hen to stay still so he can mate with her yet!

If I went back and started again I would definitely have stuck with chickens rather than the bantams we have got. They are pretty, smaller so we can have more comfortably in the garden but the eggs are little and the birds just don’t grow big enough to be worth killing for meat. I would now go with chickens, breed chicks and kill the cocks for meat and sell the hens to people wanting chickens and the eggs to whoever wanted to buy them. But you live and learn and we’ev certainly learnt ever such a lot .

Crops update then: The allotment is doing okay although I have a bit of guilt about us not being as productive there as I’d aimed to be this year. We have onions, garlic, peas, broad beans, sweetcorn, potatoes, spring onions, strawberries and asparagus growing and I noticed today the apple tree has lots of apples growing on it so I’m probably being rather hard on myself but the weather prevented sowing early in the season with late frosts and heavy rain and now the sunshine has kicked in the weeds have overtaken the areas we’d not sown in yet. A full day up there of weeding, cutting down and licking into shape would fix it really though, so maybe next week I’ll try and achieve that. Watering pretty much daily has started now the sunshine has finally arrived so a few evening sessions of watering and weeding should put us back on track.

Here at home we’re going great guns, we have potatoes, peas (lots of peas ), carrots,tomatoes and strawberries all looking good. I want to sow some more peas, some sweetcorn and some more carrots aswell as getting some parsnips in either at the allotment, home here or both. Some cucumber seeds didn’t germinate so they would be worth a try as they are our daughters new favourite food and I think some more salad leaves would be good in both places too.

This year I want to learn more about preserving and storing as last year we let garlic go rotten through bad storage and despite making plenty of jam (strawberry and chilli and summer berries and lavender were favourites) we ran out a while back so it would be good to be self sufficient in that sort of thing, maybe freezer some veg or make soups for the winter and look into bottling, chutneys and possibly even investigate home brewing wine.

Our daughter (seven) wanted to hatch ducklings this year. Keeping ducks alongside our bantams is something I’ve wanted to do for a while and whilst hatching eggs is of course frought with potential problems that buying in already fully grown ducks doesn’t have it isn’t nearly so much fun .

Last year we did some research on what would be the best ducks to have. We’d initially thought call ducks would be good as they are quite small and are good layers but we spent some time at a rare breeds show stood next to some call ducks and discovered they live up to their name and call constantly. The odd quack is quite nice to hear, an ongoing cacophony of quacking is less charming. A friend has some Aylesbury ducks which are nice and I was quite taken with runner ducks so we planned on one or other of those breeds.

But of course we never seem to quite act on our carefully laid out plans and having realised the timings for having ducks ready to go out this summer involved working backwards, finding a full 3 and a half week period when we’d be home to turn the eggs daily in the incubator and be around for the hatch and very early days suddenly left us with a tiny window in which to get eggs. So we visited The Old Gardens Animal Rescue Centre and had a chat with one of the staff there about their free range ducks eggs for sale. They are meant for eating but as they have drakes there was every chance they would be fertilised so we bought a half dozen. They have a variety of ducks there so we won’t really know what we’ve got until they have grown up enough to be identified.

We began incubating all six eggs. The incubator is a basic one with a tray in the bottom to add water to keep humidity up and a light and fan with built in thermometer. It requires you to turn the eggs by hand. Duck eggs are incubated for longer than chickens eggs - chickens are 21 days, bantams around 19 days but ducks are 28. You need to turn the eggs to ensure that the chicks don’t stick to the inside of the egg - birds push the eggs around the nest regularly and of course most birds leave the nest once or twice a day to eat and drink so they get moved about when they are gathered back under the birds breast again. It’s important to turn them an odd number of times per day too so that they don’t spend all night in the same position each night but are alternated.

Although I did remind her to check the water tray and temperature and turn the eggs this was all our daughter’s job. She also spent some time talking to the unhatched eggs so they would get to know her voice. I’ve no idea whether this actually worked but it makes sense given how human babies are said to recognise voices from inside the womb. You stop turning the eggs about 3 days before they are due to hatch as by then the chicks are likely to be starting work on breaking out of the shell from the inside out and you don’t want to turn their carefully started hole up the wrong way.

We candled the eggs after about 10 days. This involves putting a very bright light (a torch with the light made narrower and therefore brighter using an old toilet roll inner) at one end of the egg in a dark room. The light shines through the egg showing what is inside. We have done this pretty successfully with chicken and bantam eggs over the years but the ducks eggs really candled clearly. Three were empty - meaning they had been unfertilised so we discarded them. The other three all had pulsing little lives inside. Candling eggs is quite amazing, just like an ultra sound scan.

On day 29 the eggs pipped - this means there are little cracks on the outside of the shells and there was audible cheeping from two. The third egg we discarded as although there was an obvious duckling inside it had died and the egg had started to go bad. However despite having got that far and still cheeping away a full 24 hours later no progress had been made. I read a little more about ducks hatching and discovered they often need some assistance. Most baby birds have sharp little beaks, perfect for breaking out of shells and many have an egg tooth too (a tiny tooth on the top of their beak that falls off at a day or two old) but ducklings have their big flat bills - perfect for drinking and scooping up food, not so good for breaking out of shells. I also discovered that keeping the eggs moist throughout the incubation is a good idea as the mother duck would take to the water often and return to the nest with a wet breast, keeping the eggs in far damper conditions than they’d been in our incubator.

I have helped chickens to hatch before, with varying degrees of success and tend to prefer not helping really but we were going away for the weekend and had hoped to leave a ducksitter with two hatched ducklings already set up in a brooder just needing a food and water check rather than two eggs and the cheeping was getting a bit fainter causing me to fret they were not going to manage to hatch alone. So I broke out the tweezers and did a little duck midwifery by making their holes in the eggs a bit bigger. 

Birds remain attached to the inside of their egg and the yolk right up until they leave the eggshell behind and the yolk is sort of sucked back into their body and becomes they first meal. Breaking them out of the egg yourself means this doesn’t happen and you can literally rip their insides out or cause harm to them. I stopped when I saw a trickle of blood from both shells (there is often blood stains in egg shells even when they hatch naturally) and left them to do the rest on their own. 

 

And indeed they did - the folllowing morning there were two fully hatched little ducklings in the incubator which my Dad (our ducksitter) moved into the brooder. Here they are at 2 days old when our daughter first met them

We ‘re keeping them in a large plastic container with food, water, wood shavings and a brooder lamp above to give them warmth. They had their first paddle aged 3 days in a metal roasting dish (the irony wasn’t lost on me )

And the following day we put them into a room temperature bath, out of their depth so they could begin swimming lessons. They took to it like ducks to water

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At ten days old they have already *really* grown. We’re giving them plenty of running around time (on an old towel in our front room) each day, swimming in the bath daily and they have already spent some time outside in an enclosure next to the chickens. They should start to get feathers in the next week or so and be fully fledged by about 6 or 7 weeks old at which point they can move outside permanently with the chickens. Our daughter is doing plenty of talking to them, hand feeding and handling to ensure they remain fairly tame. We have back up plans of releasing them onto a friends’ lake if they turn out to be drakes or plain old mallards or other unsuitable breeds for keeping at home in which case we’ll do the whole hatching exercise again. For now though Lucky (yellow duckling) and Sploosh (black duckling) live in our daughter’s room and still think she’s their mummy!

 

C and I spent a good few hours up at the allotment again today. We did a lot of chatting so it wasn’t terribly intensive but it was lovely just the same .

 

I took up the next lot of peas to add to the ones already under mesh with twiggy sticks. The asparagus is doing well with several spears poking through. We weeded those raised beds and spread some seaweed we gathered from the beach on the beds. Seaweed is C’s idea and apparently is great for giving nutrients to the soil. The onions we put in are doing well although the garlic has yet to poke through (which has me wondering if it had already and has been eaten). The carrots C sowed have not put in an appearance yet, the potatoes are not yet poking through and the chilli seeds have not done anything. I am wondering if the unseasonably hot and sunny April we’ve had has meant we should have been watering really…

 

At home all is doing well, we have some very chitted seed potatoes which we have finally put in (under mesh as the area we’d earmarked for them has become Chicken Territory and they eat anything in sight so we’ve meshed the beds to see if we can protect the potatoes. The regular sowing of seeds into the mini greenhouse is going well and the seedlings tranplanted into containers are loving the sunshine and watering and doing well. I predict early crops this year if we carry on with this weather.

 

The chickens are all doing well, a couple have gone broody but we’ve managed to cajole them out of it and we are getting a regular 6 eggs a day which has us being very creative with eggs and handing out egg gifts to friends . The duck eggs have been candled at day 14 and 3 of the 6 discarded. Two were simply empty and the third had gone rotten. The three remaining have been candled again tonight and are looking good. We are at day 23 of 28 so stop turning the eggs 3 times a day from tomorrow and can expect to see them start to pip from day 26 onwards. Expect potential duckling pictures from next week .

 

A couple of good stints up at the allotment has made some good inroads into things up there and we have several rows of potatoes in, the asparagus beds have been weeded and we’ve checked asparagus is indeed still in there. I shook off the dead chillis and pulled out the plants and turned over the soil with the seeds still in it, in a fairly experimental manner to see what will happen.

We had several trays of plug plants so have got those in now, some broccoli, some spring onions and some peas. The peas have twiggy sticks to grow up and are covered with mesh. C put some carrots in and taught me about succession sowing. I have more onion and garlic sets ready to go in on our next visit there to add to the stuff already in which is now poking through the earth.

Here at home we’ve been sowing seeds every week or so and have our first lots of healthy looking peas planted out along the fence next to our drive. We had sweet peas climbing up the fence last year which were beautiful but this year we’re going for the edible variety. I’ve sown some more peas straight out into a container and done another two sowings (2 weeks apart) which are in the mini greenhouse. I’ve planted out some carrot seedlings into containers and sowed some more seeds today into pots in the greenhouse along with more peas and some cucumber.

Also in containers we have some more potatoes and some more broccoli - we’re doing a real mix of container / allotment / garden, trying to ensure we have stuff cropping every week or so throughout with lots of regular sowings and plenty of experimental techniques. 

Meanwhile in news of a livestock nature we have our first batch of duck eggs in the incubator. S is totally in charge of this and as an experimental first shot we are not necessarily expecting success but tentatively excited nonetheless. They are 10 days in now, out of an incubation period of 28 days so coming up to half way. She is turning the eggs 3 times a day and checking temperature and humidity levels in the ‘bator. We might try candling the eggs in the next day or two to see if anything is happening inside.

The bantams are all doing well and enjoying the longer days and sunshine. We have managed to prevent any of the potential broody hens from anything longer than a day or two of sitting and have had some very interesting shaped eggs. We are getting a good 5-6 eggs a day which is making us more than self -sufficient in the egg department - more baking or some bartering for something else type arrangement is in order I think.

 

We’re starting slow this year but so is Spring. The daffodils were nowhere near ready for St David’s day and it’s been a very slow sprung spring! But yesterday was the first official day of spring, when there were the same amount of hours of daylight as darkness and it finally feels like everything is ready to wake up after the longest, coldest winter I remember for many years.

The chickens have fully woken up and I’m fairly sure all 12 hens are laying as we’re getting a good 5-6 eggs a day, more than enough to keep us in pancakes . We need to get some duck eggs sourced ready to get incubating - that’s my task for the coming week.

This year we are planning to grow some stuff at home in our garden as well as at the alllotment. The children are getting older and only too happy to give over some of their playspace to growing space. Our patio which is quite a sun trap and has two earth borders will be perfect for our mini greenhouse and plenty of potatoes. We have a front patio too which also catches lots of sunshine and will be good for salad leaves that are nice to have on hand at home to pick as needed, along with some other crops grown in containers. We have a few rather gimicky planters for crops like peas and I want to try some carrots in containers having not managed a decent crop straight in the ground at the allotment yet despite a couple of attempts.

This weekend we have cleared lots of general clutter than had congregated in the garden, allowed the chickens the run of the beds to dig out the weeds and spread their droppings around for us and got the first seed potatoes of the season put in containers (they’d been chitting in the house for a couple of weeks), errected the mini greenhouse and put several trays of plug plants we’d already got in it along with some peas and carrots sown into small pots for planting on. I also put some peas straight into a container which has built in canes for peas to grow up. Next weekend we’ll get some more seeds sown but it’s good to feel we have made a proper start in our garden growing this year.

Up at the allotment we have been very lucky to be offered help from our good friends C&B. We have already had a first go up there on a sunny afternoon earlier this month where C & I cleared some raised beds of dead crops, dug up some parsnips (which are delicious, definitely a good crop that one considering I just broadcast seeds all over a bed and was laughed at by one of the old hands up at the plots ), had a poke at the compost and planned to come armed with gloves and turn it over properly and got some onions and garlic in.

B dug over some ground ready for potatoes to go in soon. C&B have plenty of growing experience and are happy to join in with the work for a share of the harvest. It’s lovely working alongside friends, chatting and digging and I forsee plenty of lovely times ahead in the sunshine up at the plot in the coming months . Infact I have a plan to lure them up there next weekend to help get more onions and garlic in along with some peas and potatoes, some compost rootling in return for some more harvested parsnips and a bottle of beer and some sausages cooked on the plot when the work is done.

Despite the fact we’re still getting heavy ground frosts and that crazy period of snow and ice is still a very recent memory there are enough sunny blue skies days to have us thinking ahead to the coming spring and growing year ahead. The bantams can feel it too, so much so they have started laying again in the last 2 weeks . We’re only at one or maybe two eggs a day at the moment but I can tell from the reddening combs on all 12 of our hens that they are all getting ready to start laying if they’ve not started so far so I’m hoping for half a dozen a day when we really get going.

One of our hens is determined to escape the run and lay her eggs very inaccessibly behind a large pile of logs we have for firewood. Fortunately the cockerel alerts us to her escapades and hopefully we can encourage her back into laying in the run somewhere. We’re thinking about constructing a mini logpile or perhaps putting a couple of small haybales in for her to hide in to lay. The dynamic in the chicken house is pretty good just now, we have two cockerels who get on well and it is very clear who is boss. There are 12 hens and there is a clear pecking order there, predominantly based on age although the two oldest hens have been rather sidelined.

We’re also planning on getting ducks this year and have been reseaching which would best suit us. I think we have decided on runner ducks so will be sourcing some fertlized eggs soon to have a go at incubating them. As and when we start that I’ll document it here.

Growing wise we have very little still happening - there are some carrots at the allotment but they are teeny tiny and I can’t see them growing much more. They were planted from seed and didn’t really work. I have plans for carrots in containers this year. The parsnips are doing well although my broadcast sowing had rather patchy results so I will be a little more precise this year. My leeks still haven’t worked but I will not be beaten and will have another try this year!

We visited the allotment yesterday and took some pictures from left and right for our starting position for this second season:

 

 We have planned this years crop rotation and I’ll try and post up a diagram of our plan soon. We have also decided to put three or four raised beds in our garden at home as we have a largely unused area which gets the late afternoon sun and is nicely sheltered by the house, will be easy to water and can benefit from our home composting and feed the chickens with any waste or gluts / failed crops. We will also make use of the sacks and containers on the patio for more potatoes, herbs and salad leaves.

It is our plan to spend some time at the allotment next weekend and put in the garlic and onion sets, dig over and weed the raised beds that are over and cover the rest of the plot with some heavy matting we have which will warm the soil ready for sowing aswell as smothering any weed growth until we’re ready for the ground.

 

 

I’ve been reading back over the first few posts on this blog from a year ago when we first took on the allotment. I’ve just paid for the second years rent on the plot and have been reflecting on how we’ve done, what we’ve learnt and what we want to do in our second year.

First of all I want to remember the reasons for getting the allotment in the first place:

• We wanted to be more self-sufficient. We’re having a really low key foray into self sufficiency really. Our chickens are bantams so are not great layers. We do now have 12 hens (although some are this years so haven’t started laying at all yet) which means we should be self sufficient in eggs for most of the summer next year. We are definitely self sufficient in not needing to buy any more fertlized eggs as we have two cockerels, the older one has sired several chicks including some of our newest batch. The allotment has done similar for us. We are self sufficient in garlic for the coming year thanks to a bumper crop and we didn’t buy potatoes for several weeks during the summer. None of our other crops were sufficient to not need topping up and I suspect a plot the size of ours will never yield enough vegetables to sustain a family of four (even if some of that family aren’t big on eating vegetables ) but I like the idea that I can nick Tesco’s tagline whilst needing to use their shop slightly less…. every little helps!
• To get healthier. This was an exercise / outdoorsyness wish and I can hand on heart say this happened. I cycled to the allotment twice most weeks during the ‘watering every night’ summer months, I’ve done loads of digging and weeding and other such bending, stretching and lifting. I’ve been standing making rainbows with the hose in the evening sunshine, cleaning out mud from under my nails, cycled home bedecked with a string of garlic round my neck and known the satisfying ache of muscles weary from working on the land.
• Educating ourselves about where our food comes from. Raising and breeding chickens has given all our family a new respect for meat, concern for the conditions our animals are kept in. We understand the life cycle, how animals are killed and prepared for food, the biology and anatomy of a chicken and about breeding, hatching, birth deformities, cross-breeding and inbreeding, the mating process, growth and development and so on. The same has happened during this year at the allotment. We know about seeds and pips and bulbs, how plants grow, above ground and below ground, what time of year to sow and harvest, when crops are ready, storage, dealing with pests, failed crops, knowing what conditions different crops require. We’ve seen onions that bolted, leeks that didn’t grow, carrots that didn’t germinate, beans that got blackfly, beans that were eaten by rabbits, sweetcorn that suffered a lack of sunlight, spinach that just wouldn’t die even when I hacked it off at ground level, the tenacity of weeds, the delicacy of parsnips, plants that die back after one season, plants that will come back again next year. I realised earlier this year while walking round an open air musuem with the children that not only could I identify various crops just by their plants (broad beans, potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, strawberries) even before there was fruit or veg on them, but the children could too. Gone are the days of thinking vegetables come cleaned, trimmed and in polystyrene trays from the supermarket.
• Eating more vegetables! This was for me as much as the children as I tend to be vegetable-phobic! We did grow mostly stuff I already liked so I didn’t necessarily try new things but did eat more freshly picked vegetables than I would have done previously. I would hope to increase this next year to trying more new things.

We have put several raised beds in on the plot and plan to put more in. Our neighbours who did have a compost heap taking up space at the end of our plot have now moved it. We have a big compost heap and a compost bin on the patch and save kitchen waste at home to add to them.

I’ve talked already about what has and hasn’t worked on the plot so there’s no real need for a round-up of that again. Aswell as clearing the weeds and debating the idea of green compost for the cleared areas over the winter we also need to plan what’s going where next year to maximise the space we have. I have a lot of reading to do and would really like to draw up a proper crop rotation plan and schedule of what needs to be done when.

It’s been a great first year!

This was where we started:

but during the summer we had it looking like this:

 

We’ve had a couple of camping trips during July which has taken us away from home and therefore the allotment. We spent a whole week away in early July during which time my Mum took over watering duties but the rest of July has been so wet that watering was the least of our worries at the plot. Infact it was finding dry spells to get up there and do some weeding that posed a problem.

Today we had a good few hours up there and have cleared over half the allotment. The onlons and garlic were either harvested already or the rain had ruined the last chance they had of coming to anything and they had started to rot instead. I’m very happy with the crop we’ve had though and they are currently hanging in our garage drying off

I’d already cut down the broad beans a few weeks ago and today decided the peas had had their day so we dismantled the canes and netting and put it aside ready for next year. We picked off the last few peas, which happened to be a perfect amount for our dinner this evening and congratulated ourselves on a good first crop which we’ll double the volume of next year, learn about what to plant alongside it and also find some better early protection against pests for them.

Our sweetcorn was also being eaten so despite it not quite being as big as I’d like we decided to pick it to eat it ourselves rather than leave it for the mice or rabbits who are currently decimating it. We had enough for the kids to have a cob each straight off the plant, another each to bring home and a large portion each for dinner to go with our fresh peas. There are a couple of small cobs still up there which we’ll leave to see if they grow any larger. Another success that we’ll be planning on improving more for next year. Several of our neighbours had great success with sweetcorn in cages or nets so I think we’ll be following their example next year.

 

We dug up two large sections and pulled all the weeds up. There’s a lot of weeds thriving at the moment but we just dug them up and piled them up ready to collect in sacks and take to the dump. We’ve previously made the mistake of putting weeds on the compost heap which is now rife with them re-growing. We’ve now dug over and cleared the area which had onions and garlic and the area which had potatoes. We’re debating green manure, just covering the areas over with something weeds can’t get through and what over crops we could put in now. We’re also considering more raised beds and trying to think what would make good pathways around them. Wood chip is looking like a favourite idea judging by what others have used there.

 

We have more weeding to do and some more digging up so that all that will be left is crops which remain each year - asparagus, fruit trees, strawberries and herbs. The pond could do with some clearing and the compost heap needs some attention. We also have a plastic composter coming (free from the local council) which will take over while the stuff on the heap composts down.

We put some chitted sweet potatoes into an empty raised bed to see how they go and have leeks ready to go in too. I want to put some more carrots in and some of the later summer sowings like pumpkins and squash. We’re aiming to get up there again for a few hours one evening this week to get the second half licked into shape so we can get cracking with the next seasons’ stuff.

We’re coming to the end of our first half of the season of our first year.We still have autumn harvesting things to come but a lot of our first and early crops have now finished.

Garlic The October sowing of onions and garlic did really well. We have aboutg 50 bulbs of garlic hanging up in our garage drying, which will mean we are more or less self sufficient in garlic this year. I think we spent about a fiver on the sets to plant so that’s very good. The spring sowing really hasn’t done so well. I think the weather has been opposite to what they needed really - Spring was very hot and dry and summer has been very wet so we’ve been working against the seasons really. The wet summer has meant we didn’t get the extra crop of the garlic leaves too as they rusted. The idea is as the first few leaves start to yellow you cut the leaves off and can use them, chive-like in cooking. They have a lovely garlicky flavour and are perfect for chopping up as herbs. This means the last couple of weeks growing energy goes into fattening the bulb rather than growing the leaves and you stop watering them too. Sadly the rain has continued to water them for us so the bulbs are really quite little. Overall it’s been a good crop and I guess the chance of a spring sowing is a good back up plan if the autumn one isn’t doing so well. There is one row still left of sad looking stalks which I will dig up in a week or two, but I suspect they are miniature bulbs which won’t be much good for anything.

Onions are much the same as the garlic. The autumn sowing did pretty well and we have some red onions hanging up drying out including a couple of beautiful big glossy ones. The white onions seem to have disappeared and I think lots of the early shoots were eaten by pests so we may find evidence of the bulbs when we dig the area over. The spring sowing all bolted and flowered with one single tall strong shoot meaning all the energy went into making a flower rather than big onions. I’ve dug them all up now and again will concentrate on an autumn sowing with a spring one as security only if needed.

Potatoes We did mostly second earlies which was possibly not great planning. We did harvest some early to use as salad potatoes and our daughter and I today dug up all of the shallow potatoes. I suspect there are more deeper down which we’ll leave in the ground for now and dig up as we need them. We’ve had pretty good crops of potatoes both from the allotment and the patio planter bags. Next year we’ll do some first earlies to have as new / salad potatoes and some main crop too for later harvesting. A very healthy crop though with no blight and the only unusuable ones being a few that weren’t deep enough in the ground and were green.

Peas  We’ve had a good crop of peas although we’ve had to share them with pests which next year I’m rather selfishly hoping won’t be happening. We’ll also be planting a second row next year as we could easily have consumed double what we had this year.

Broad Beans Only A eats these so we had more than we needed really despite the black fly issues. I’ve chopped them all to ground level today and next year we’ll only plant 3-4 plants rather than a whole row and a half of these.

Carrots We’re on our third go at carrots so far.The first try was some plug plants of a dwarf / globe variety which were really not worth bothering with. The second try was from seed in a raised bed. I broadcast sowed them with the intention of thinning them out once they were seedlings but only two ever came to anything. We slightly prematurely picked them today out of curiosity and very tasty they were too but hardly a crop! We’ve today broadcast sown another raised bed with the rest of the packet and have a plan to sow some more into sacks or plasic containers here at home to see how they go.

Lettuce and other salad leaves These all did very well and were very nice. The chickens enjoyed rather more than their fair share as they were plugs rather than seeds so were all ready together and at a full raised bed were rather more than we could manage. I’d sow from seeds next year and stagger them more to crop throughout the season instead of all at once.

Still to come: We have some things that remain a ‘work in progress’. There are still sweetcorns, tomatoes, parnsips, runner beans and peppers which are looking good so far. We also have the things such as strawberries, raspberries, apple tree, asparagus which are in situ but in their first year so not due to give us much if anything this year. We seem to have missed the boat as far as the jostaberry tree went as it was full of fruit but the birds got to it before we did - ah well, maybe next year!

And to be getting on with… I want to get some more carrots in as mentioned above, also some more parsnips and some leeks too. I’d like to get squash and pumpkin in and I have some sweet potatoes chitted ready to plant up aswell.

I have several books about companion planting ready to look through borrowed from the library and a burning desire to get my hands dirty pulling up all the weeds that are now get-able at as we’ve pulled up potatoes, garlic and onions.