As a result of the lame efforts of the postman (who didn’t wait after ringing the doorbell) and despite the recent wintry weather, I took a trip to the local Royal Mail sorting office to collect my parcel of rhubarb crowns from Marshalls Seeds. I had ordered a pack with two different rhubarb varieties so I can compare the difference as they grow (aka spreading the risks in case one dies!).
One variety is called Stockbridge Arrow (allegedly) one of the best varieties available with long, thick stems that are topped with arrow shaped leaves.
The other one is Champagne, an old variety is reliable and easy to grow. The young plants quickly mature with crowns big enough to harvest around 2 years after planting.
My plan is to grow them together in a large (approx. 3ft diameter) pot for the moment so that they can be easily transported when we finally sell our house and move to a new place. The conditions were admittedly not ideal when I got the parcel back home but the instructions included in the box were very clear – plant the crowns out as soon as possible after receiving them. Luckily I have had the pot ready for some time and it has been covered with bubble wrap as a token gesture to “warm” the soil. I doubt that it has made much difference but it should hopefully have prevented the worst effects of the cold weather recently.
The pot has now been moved into the garage as we don’t have a greenhouse or similar that could be used and the crowns were planted according to the instructions included. The only change I made was to cover them with a clear propagation tray lid in the hope that keeps off the worst of the temperature drop. There might not be quite enough organic matter in there but I’m hoping that this is only a temporary home for a year or so and no more than that.
Obviously there isn’t much to show at the moment but pictures will follow as soon as there is some action!
Once the current snow, sleet and ice has cleared I can move the pot back outside again and hopefully by that time my order from Greenfingers.com will have arrived. I don’t urgently need the new spring tine rake that I’ve ordered but the protective garden fleece will come in very handy!
This will be my first attempt at growing rhubarb so I have read up on information around the web and I thought it was worth including a selection of links here for reference purposes as I’m always misplacing useful web links:
Something that has been on my list of things to get around to one day has been the re-glazing of the cold frame. This is an existing cold frame which had problems right from the start when I got it a few years ago – I broke a couple of the panes just putting it together!
At the time I decided to use perspex so that my clumsy repair attempts would end in the loss of more glass or may be worse a couple of fingers!
This approach worked fairly well until it became clear that it wasn’t the best way to do it when the perspex sagged a bit on the top. However by that point I’d lost the will to live and didn’t need it so much anyway because the weather had warmed up.
Now that I have properly re-glazed and reassembled the whole structure it looks as good as new to my untrained eye. I’m sure that this year’s harvest will be noticeably improved as a result – failing that at least some of the earlier plantings will stand a bit more chance of success.
A thing of beauty as I’m sure you’ll all agree and I’m just ignoring the fact that this replacement glass probably cost more than a new one!!
I have spent the last few weeks pondering which vegetables to plant this year whilst not wasting any time, effort or money on crops that we won’t see through to harvest if we manage to sell our house in the coming months.
Rather than spend the next few weeks repeatedly changing my mind, I decided to just go ahead and order a small selection of vegetable seeds for this year but I tried to focus on those which are ideally early planting and thus early harvesting. I will just have to accept that in the event we are lucky enough to sell fairly quickly that means some crops may be left for the new owners.
However all is not lost as I have a cunning plan to use various containers for some of the slower growing or longer term crops so that we can (in theory at least) take those with us.
Most of these will be started off under cover anyway – assuming I ever buy the replacement glass needed for the cold frame – but some may be planted out directly under cloches in the raised veg beds.
Potatoes
This year I have again gone for first early potatoes (Swift this time) which if the website is to be believed could be ready for harvest “in as little as 7 weeks from planting” – I have my doubts about this but I’ll be interested to see how it turns out.
The Thompson and Morgan potato growing guide has some great information, particularly the planting and spacing guide but also about the various problems when growing potatoes.
Peas
A variety called “Early Onward” which is (allegedly) a “heavy cropper, maturing some 10 days earlier than Onward“. I think that these are destined for one of the veg beds that are now covered with cloches but there’s still no guarantee that the weather will warm up quickly enough to suit my impatience!
The guide to pea growing on the Thompson and Morgan website is a handy reference but doesn’t specifically mention this variety so I’ll just make it up as I go along!
Beetroot
This will be my first attempt at beetroot but it was a special request so it’s worth a try. This is a variety called Boltardy which “is the perfect variety for early sowing“. This will most likely be planted up in a number of medium sized pots/troughs so that I can handle succession sowing to get a decent crop over a longer period while still keeping it slightly portable.
Carrots
A rather interesting looking variety called Purple Haze which can apparently be sown “under frames or cloches in February as soil starts to warm” and unsurprisingly this is a nice shade of purple! Apparently the taste is excellent but I may need to eat them with my eyes closed – after all I’ve always known carrots to be an orange colour!
Rhubarb
Finally I decided to take the plunge and try some rhubarb so I ordered a double pack with 1 crown of Stockbridge Arrow and 1 crown of Champagne. This is definitely one for a large (3ft?) tub which has nothing growing in it right now and I’m hoping that my calculations are good enough so I can fit both crowns in there with no adverse effects
There is a handy rhubarb growing guide on the Thompson and Morgan website which I found very useful and I’ll be going back over that when the delivery arrives
Left overs
There are also still some seeds left from last year – particularly the Nantes carrots and Apollo leeks – so assuming I can find any spare space they may get planted at some point. Unfortunately they aren’t as exciting as the new stuff I’ve just ordered so they’ll probably get forgotten but I’d hate to waste the space!
I can now spend the next week or two watching for the delivery man with my parcels… and waiting for warmer weather of course!
The weather has been kind around the end of December and so we managed a good couple of days work in the garden to end the year – to my untrained eyes at least it makes quite a noticeable difference. After all the wet weather and the lack of any decent chance recently for things to dry out I wasn’t sure when we started that anything constructive could be done though.
Luckily a little bit of weed control fabric and some strategically placed cloches seem to help bring things together on the veg beds at least. We are already starting to see some shoots coming through which I guess must be the snowdrops so I need to keep the chickens off those flower beds if I want to see them grow!
Raised veg bed with plastic cloche
Now that the leeks are all harvested and eaten all 3 veg beds are now tucked up for a couple of months while I try to decide what to do next year.
Raised veg bed with weed control fabric
And chickens really enjoy it when you dig over the compost heap, in this case I was redistributing the contents of the current compost heap and adding a little of the contents from an older heap to liven things up. I can’t help thinking that the chickens will have cleaned out any worms that I managed to transfer though so maybe the effort was wasted.
Chickens love a good compost heap
What to try in 2013?
We are still hoping to sell the house in the early part of this year so there aren’t any major plans for the veg beds but I can’t just leave them empty. Maybe a quick peek in the seed catalogues and some fancy planning with a calendar will throw up some ideas for vegetables that are happy with early planting and give a quick harvest? Of course there are always a few pots of various sizes dotted around which I could plant up and then if necessary take with us when we move so maybe all is not lost!
I’d better get off to study the catalogues and vegetable books but any suggestions or past experiences would be most appreciated…
There has been a certain mystique in my mind around making quiche and I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps because it seemed a little complicated or possibly because I believed my mother who always said it was easier to buy one than make it from scratch.
The finished quiche
Now that I’ve successfully completed my first attempt I think it’s safe to say that buying one is definitely easier, possibly cheaper and certainly less messy! Despite all that it was great fun and fairly quick to make, especially when using ready-made pastry from that nice Mr Sainsbury.
This was loosely based on a recipe for Quiche Lorraine from the Hairy Bikers pie book but the only changes were to increase some quantities as I thought I needed more than they suggested. As usual I was wrong and the recipe was right so I have some mixture left in the fridge will have to be the basis of a new experiment tomorrow.
The results for my quiche can be seen in the photographs – although the spare pastry was used to make some extra mini quiches and they didn’t last long enough to get their picture taken!
Very impressive looking and extremely tasty. I had planned to keep this for lunch tomorrow but I had to be sure it was properly cooked and tasted okay first…
After finally giving up on the forlorn hope that there might be some further growth, I started to dig up the remaining leeks from the last raised veg bed at the weekend. As can be seen below, I brought in about 6 leeks of varying sizes but they were hardly the most impressive haul especially after cleaning them up a bit!
However, despite the fact they were not particularly impressive to look at, they were extremely tasty for the evening meal when added to the home-made pasta sauce along with some ham and mushrooms. Perhaps the flavour was enhanced by the amount of time taken to grow them?
Overall I think the leeks were worthwhile but given that I grew them seed first planted around the end of February it’s taken quite some time to get anything from them. As I have read elsewhere, in future there needs to be careful planning when allocating space for these because they are in the ground for some time. As I noted in an earlier blog post, even by August they weren’t particularly impressive and some were starting to flower but maybe I was expecting too much especially given the weather this year!
My approach this year involved interspersing the leeks with carrots in a single raised bed and this made good use of the space. However I will need to plan the timing for planting out a little better in future to get more out of the space and more organised succession sowing may give better results with the carrots in particular.
There are only about 8 small leeks left now and if I’m totally honest most of those bear a closer resemblance to spring onions than leeks but I’ll still make sure I enjoy them once I think of a recipe to use them in!
I’m not sure how it has happened but after a quick check of the calendar I found that it’s been around 6 weeks since the last blog update. I know that in general not much is growing at this time of year and so there wouldn’t be much progress to report but even by my (generally low) standards this is a bit poor!
I think it must be time to address that deficiency with a general update…
Garden
It’s nice to note that almost everything that has died down in the garden has not done so as a result of my amateur efforts!
After a promising start the runner beans faded out but I like to think that was mostly a consequence of the very wet weather we had about that time. The leeks which had looked so promising have just not lived up to my optimistic expectations. There is no danger of them winning any competitions but they are still perfectly edible of course (except where the chickens have had a go at them)
On the whole the potatoes, carrots and garlic were fairly successful but the broccoli seedlings I was given ended up mostly being chicken food – at least they seemed to enjoy it!
Perhaps the main disappointment has been the onions which were grown using sets I ordered from Marshalls. Although they did grow a little the final results don’t look anything like I had expected. I’ve not grown onions before so perhaps I was being unrealistic and maybe next time I’ll try growing them from seed but use another supplier like Thompson & Morgan instead.
Chickens
Chickens still happy after 6 months
The 3 chickens have scarified the furthest section of lawn to within an inch of it’s life but that was only to be expected. One benefit of the recent heavy rain has been that we needed to move the chicken run to the other end of the lawn which has had the effect of limiting any further damage in the original location.
We don’t know what to expect through the winter months but so far we are still getting fairly regular egg laying from them. An occasional 2 egg day is slightly more frequent now perhaps but we careful not to apportion any blame so I won’t name and shame the offender.
The most noticeable difference for me is that I only see the chickens at weekends now – from Monday to Thursday I head off to work in the dark and get back home in the dark. It’s only briefly on a Friday when I can leave work a little earlier and obviously over the weekend that I get to see them in daylight.
Smallholding property hunt
There have been a couple of occasions when we have experienced the minor disappointment of finding what looked to be a suitable property but because we haven’t sold yet we have been unable to take things further. On the bright side though, there have also been a couple of properties which had offers accepted but which have now come back on the market so there’s always hope.
There is a general feeling that the Tyne Valley or North Pennines will probably be the eventual destination but nothing can be finalised until we get a buyer for our property (and have an offer accepted for somewhere too!). We’d like to think that we’re not too bothered at this stage but I’m sure that when the time comes we’ll be just as picky as anyone else would be.
Future plans
Any planning for life on the smallholding will necessarily be guided by the property we finally manage to buy but we are managing to devote some time to general ideas so that at least we feel like we’re making progress.
Having had back garden chickens for some time we will certainly increase the numbers over time and maybe even go for meat birds as well as layers. We got our existing 3 hybrids from Durham Hens and we’re very happy with them but there are many other places like Heydon Bridge Hens, Teviotdale Farm etc if we fancy trying something different.
As far as the other likely livestock we will try, I think that one of early contenders would have to be pigs – probably Tamworths to start with as I’ve already been for a very entertaining day at Yearle Tamworths near Wooler. There are generally some weaners available at most times of the year so we can hopefully plan things to suit our other workload.
I’m still not quite so certain about having cows or goats but in time it would be interesting to work with something for dairy produce. Personally I would favour goats but that’s mainly because I’ve always thought of cows as big scary beasts but also because I have occasionally had some goat meat from The Goat Company and its fantastic when done in a slow cooker.
Perhaps we may chose a few Shetland cattle then they wouldn’t seem so threatening as they are smaller and they are still very hardy so I might feel a little differently.
There are also loose plans about providing some sort of holiday accommodation but this would depend on the options available on the property we eventually buy. Many places we have seen have a barn or outbuildings which could be converted but I wouldn’t rule out the idea of a couple of Tents, Yurts or Tipis if there were no other options. I’m very impressed by the set up at Wild Northumbrian but haven’t yet had a chance to try them out – I think I’ll wait until spring now though!
Patience is a virtue
In the meantime we have to recognise that this is not the best financial climate (or time of year) to be selling property. We can only be patient, keep watching the property websites and handle an occasional viewing of our own property.
With so much to take on board and so many mistakes we are likely to make along the way, I’m more than happy to make the most of this time for planning and learning.
Do you have any top tips for novice smallholders that you can share?
It’s amazing the little snippets you come across when you least expect it. I was reading through an on-line article about composting from the Telegraph and was surprised by one particular part of this section:
This is a pretty standard list of items for composting that you might find on any number of websites. However, when I read the part about citrus fruit, my first reaction was one of mild disbelief mostly because I thought I would have heard of this before now if it was true. How can it be possible that citrus fruit peelings are any good as fire lighters?
However, this seems to be confirmed by many other pages I found on the web, this is just one example:
Orange Peel Firelighters
The citrus oils in dried orange and tangerine peel make it an effective firelighter. If you have a Rayburn or Aga you can leave the peel in one of the ovens over night to dry. Alternatively you can put the peel in the oven after cooking. The peel will dry as your oven cools.
It seems that for the last few months I have had a consistent list of “things to get done” which somehow never seemed to get any shorter. Every time I reached the point where an item could be crossed off there were another couple of things to add to the bottom of the list!
Finally I think I can see the end of the current list but I know what will happen when I get there, I’ll just add more things to it again. With luck those new items will related to moving house and starting the smallholding but the housing market doesn’t work on luck so I’ll have to wait and see.
Hopefully I’ll remember to take some time before starting the next list and I must also remember not to add so much on the next list as well!
Chickens
The chickens are still merrily trashing the far end of the lawn plus (when they feel like flapping over the fence) the veg beds and flower borders.
Chickens still happy after 6 months
Compost
The compost heap looks to be an excellent “brew” which I will try to take plenty of credit for but of course the success is probably more down to loads of chicken poop, straw and wood shavings.
It might be considered by some to be slightly “chunky” perhaps but I am disproportionately proud of my limited contributions to the process!
My finest compost yet
Attempting to move house
Some of that lovely compost has already been spread over one of the raised beds although my heart isn’t really in it. I’m not sure of the etiquette when selling a house but perhaps we should have specified that we’re taking our compost with us when we move?
Every so often I come across posts on other blogs that I follow which resonate strongly with my current personal situation. One such recent example is Back to the land which is on a blog from Devon – a place which has assumed mythical proportions in my head because I’ve been told we can’t buy a smallholding there as it’s too far away from the kids!
That particular blog post dates from August so it’s not exactly recent but it echos many of my own thoughts and even more so after watching the episode of The Audience last night about a guy deciding whether to give up farming.
For me it seems obvious that working on (and with) the land must be more fulfilling than sitting in an office but of course the grass is always greener – at least I hope it will be when we eventually get around to buying somewhere! I just don’t quite understand why you wouldn’t want to be working outside…
I know it’s important to carefully consider this kind of decision and occasionally it’s sensible to stop and think about other things than just the day to day grind. However I’m also very conscious of the well-known John Lennon quote:
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans
(After a quick check on the web I find that this quote was originally attributed to Allen Saunders and it actually appears in a 1957 edition of the Readers Digest!)
