2006 review

Well, it's that time again. Although we celebrated the turning of the year at Samhain (Oct 31st), from the garden's point of view it makes more sense to mark the end of a year just here, while nothing is growing. For a start, I have the time for once - and I'm not even exhausted because the weather's been too wet for digging.

Right - so where was I a year ago? Well, living in rented accommodation for a start. Thanks to Rose Irvine by the way - she was my English teacher at O-level and I never write the word "accommodation" without thinking of her, as she finally banged the spelling into my thick head. Ta, Rose, wherever you are. Edna Krabappel could have been based on Rose, I swear. Oh. Anyway, we had to move out while they did this to our house. Hmm. I you weren't reading the blog earlier this year, I was... vexed. But basically, the garden was like this;



This year we prepared beds and raised a polytunnel;


We put together the henhouse I'd made in the winter;


I dug eight raised beds;


We planted about a dozen trees;


We grew a pretty good variety of vegetables;


We learned how to preserve and store quite a bit;


I saw a UFO and took up metal detecting, and this month I has been mainly digging out strawberry and raspberry beds;


Gosh, it's like one of those episodes of sci-fi series where the budget's running out and they do a retrospective using old footage cobbled together, isn't it? Never mind. What's in store for 2007, then?

The soft fruit has to be planted and a fruit cage of some sort built to keep them pesky birds away, and a frighteningly large number of extra veg beds need to be added (this time using a conventional row system unless someone talks me out of it, so no shortcuts in sight). The irrigation system I designed on paper wants to get put down and connected, since I spent around half an hour every day watering during the summer. Therapeutic it may be, but time I spend whistling with a watering can is time I don't spend actually looking after the plants and generally making sure they're tucked up in their little beds.

Half a dozen fruit trees are still needed, the edible hedge needs to go in, there's a further section of stepping-stone path to go down, and I want to make a start on the perennial area, envisaged as a sort of forest garden around the fruit trees, to be shaded out as they grow. No doubt I've missed lots, and I'm feeling a bit panicked just with that lot. There's something else I need to say though...

...I'm really looking forward to it. Happy New Year to you all.

RATS!

Well well, here we are again. Despite my attempts to head this problem off, once again we have rats. Regular readers may remember that I built a worm bin a couple of months ago, which is basically a vertical tube made of a stack of old tyres with the rims stuffed with damp straw. The worms seemed quite happy with it, but their numbers didn't really get time to increase fully before the cold arrived, and sadly the bin wasn't as rat-proof as I'd hoped. Or, indeed, at all. The bottom tyre was filled with sand, you see, with a layer of plastic sheeting over the top. My hope was that the rats wouldn't smell the edibles within (wrong) and even if they did they'd be unable to tunnel into the unstable sand underneath (even more wrong). In fact last week when I lifted the lid I was greeted with the sadly familiar sight of fat brown bodies dashing for cover. Damn their rapidly-multiplying hides.

So. A little design modification was necessary, so today a slightly viral Hedgewizard swapped his Poorly Pants* for his shitty** gardening trousers, and tottered outside to perform surgery. The bin was stripped down (three frights as, one after another, three rats exited from hidden pockets in said bin), the sand smoothed out as a base, and the whole thing reassembled on top of a large concrete paving stone which I happily had left over from... actually, hang on; where in the hell did I get that slab? No matter. The bin's on a non-tunnellable base, and I won't be putting any more food in there until the rats move on because I have no desire to find out if they can eat through a tyre if they're determined. I managed to salvage a couple of handfuls of worms - or part-worms, since the rats have been eating them - and the stuff in there is probably full of cocoons so given time the population will recover.

The rats, mind you, are now hiding in their nest under the shed. I know they've been eating scraps from the compost bin nearby (no matter how careful we are about meat, bread etc it still seems to attract them) so we will have to stop composting for the time being. Hopefully by next year we'll have a fully-active worm bin, or even two, but I'd still be very interested to know what strategies other people use to prevent this particular problem.

*Poorly Pants n. - comfortable black flannel joggers worn only inside the house in order to convey to one's spouse that one is ill. A designation of sick status.

**Literally.

Ho ho ho

All rightie, then! Merry Yule, Christmas, Saturnalia, or whatever you'd like to call it. I hope you're all having a good one.

Our own celebrations of what Birmingham City Council this year chose, in a characteristic fit of PC-pique, to call "Winterval" have just changed down to a more sedate gear, as today is my birthday. Yes, the Hedgewizard turns 40 today. Have I got time for a mid-life crisis? Well, I can't find one of my gardening gloves, so maybe that counts...

Like many pagan families, our celebrations are more spread out than the traditional, starting on the 21st/22nd (Yule) and running right through until January 6th. The reason for this is that although the solstice (shortest day) is on 21st/22nd December, an astronomical quirk known as precession means that the mornings don't start to get lighter until January 6th, the end of the Christian "twelve days of Christmas". Co-incidence? Actually... no. What little historians have been able to gather about the birth of Joshua ben Miriam (the closest we can come in English to the name of the man now known as Jesus Christ) suggests that he was actually born in February or March somewhere 10-2BC. There are historical and religious arguments to the contrary, but it seems likely that the early Church decided to celebrate during Saturnalia to avoid detection at a time when persecution was a very real threat, and so Christmas came to be held on December 25th, the date of the solstice in the Julian Calendar. Oh dear, where was I?

Ah yes, Yule. Stripping away all the modern symbolism, what does it actually mean to the self-sufficientish householder? I've been thinking about this since the open circle we attended at Maumbury Ring in Dorchester, when the sky was so clear and the temperature so low that when Sarah spoke of elder cultures' real fear that the sun might not return one day, I could quite see why. But there was another reason to be fearful, and that was simply Winter itself.

The modern self-sufficientish householder is, in the main, a bit of a flabby beast. I'm speaking for myself here, of course; I grow my own food as much as possible and try to cut down on my use of commodities including water, power, fuel and so forth, yet here I am taking power off a national electricity grid and living in a house kept warm mainly by oil from deep under the earth, and by a hefty dose of technology. All this is not lost on me. I realised at the circle at Maumbury, that if all these inputs were to fail we'd very likely be dead in a month. We wouldn't die of cold (not with our wood stores) and I guess we could draw water from the river about a mile away, but our food stores are decidedly low on staples so we'd go through what we have quite quickly. Perhaps the pressures on our pre-technological forebears aren't so difficult to understand, after all, so forgive me if I use the present tense for a moment.

Yule is the last of the sun festivals before the real cold arrives. The stockmen are casting a critical eye over the livestock, working out which of them are most suitable to cull to make sure there is enough food for the remainder. Likewise, some of the old folks will not make it through the cold (true even today), and so it makes sense to gather the family together. The sun will return, and yet we fear that some of us will not see it. Exactly for that reason, we will have a feast of the best that we have and we will eat and drink far too much. We will use the best charms that we have against the dark and cold, and we will bring fire into our homes, and we will give gifts to each other and to the spirits of winter.

Which, friends, is exactly why this Hedgewizard is planning on having a headache tomorrow. Over the Yule feast I have spent time with all of my family and as many friends as I could muster. I have given time to preparing the best food that I can, and drunk altogether too much wine. I have danced in the old sacred places, and given gifts and lit fires and made toasts. I have brought a tree into my home and decorated it, and slept and kissed and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Outside the garden needs attention, but apart from some emergency repairs all I've done is kept things ticking over. All that can wait - until Yule is gone.

Good cheer and best wishes, people, whatever you are celebrating - I wish you courage when you are cold.

This year's marchpane

Mincing towards Yule

Right. It's time to make this year's mincemeat. I've decided to try Hughie F-W's recipe this year, which is a complete departure since it actually contains minced beef. In the text he assures me that it's fine, the meat's invisible... so we'll see. It smells fine, but there's no nuts in... because of the meat component I shouldn't think they store at room temperature (we'll be making ordinary ones too) so it's probably best if they're made in small batches and any leftover ones chilled. Taste comments when I make the first batch tomorrow night! Really it's supposed to stand for at least a week, but I want to take some in to work with me and I've wangled next week off. Hooray!

Historically speaking mince pies always used to contain minced beef or mutton, hence the name. I've used historical recipes in the past with varying degrees of success, but I always need someone who knows the old cooks' language to translate the recipes for me - "dress'd in flowr" is easy enough, but phrases like "lat hem ben hardyd" (leave until firm) need a bit of explaination. This year I'll be using an old favourite, roasted goose stuffed with pears and galangal root. The fruit from the body cavity gets sieved into the gravy at the end and you cook forcemeat balls separately, and it's really something special. Also I'm going to cook some marshpane, a semi-sweet baked marzipan, again this year, although I think I'll look for a slightly different recipe this time.

The last of the frozen corn bit the dust last night, and it was excellent. Corn is probably the only vegetable that should be defrosted before it's cooked, something the commercial producers don't push as they're scared people would find this too much work. I think we've all had our share of scalding-on-the-outside-still-cold-in-the-middle corn. Opinions vary about how long to cook frozen corn for though, and whether the water should be brought to the boil before or after the corn goes in; my preference is to drop the cobs into plenty of unsalted boiling water into which a tablespoon of sugar has been added, and give them no more than two or three minutes. Apparently the sugar in the water stops the corn from absorbing too much of the boiling water by osmosis, preventing "watery" flavours.

Finally, the mange-tout peas. These have obviously grown very slowly in the cool weather, and although they're still sweet and good they're chewier than the summer-grown sort and the harvest, though welcome, is pretty microscopic really. On balance it's not worth occupying space that could be used for something happier in the cold weather, such as rocket or mizuna, but it's fine in fallow beds as a green manure with an edible bonus!

The end of self-sufficiency?

No, I'm not giving up on the whole project. It's just that this week, for the first time since cropping started in June, we've had to buy some vegetables in. OK so it's only a cauliflower, some onions and a bagful of baking potatoes, but I can't help sigh to myself. This has been our first year post-groundworks, and you can't get the whole thing up and running in one go. All right, I can't get the whole thing up and running in one go. All right? Happy now?

Properly speaking, this is the end of our third year in the coach house. The first year was spent simply observing - where frost formed, where shadows were, and so forth. We did grow some things in keyhole beds that year, but it was an experiment and was never intended to be permanent (which is just as well, as it wasn't an unqualified success). On the second year we threw up a ramshackle raised bed to try that, but it had to be dismantled to make way for the groundworks on digger day. Digger day was, broadly speaking, the year dot for the garden since pretty much everything started from scratch after that.

This year, then, I've had the raised beds in production but not the row beds, and hence not the full rotation. Likewise, the late start meant that the polytunnel hasn't been as productive as it should be in future years. So it was never anticipated that we'd get through this winter entirely on our own produce; sad, but true. Next year we should be 95% self-sufficient for vegetables (as good as we're ever likely to get really), but will still have very little fruit. Soft fruit should come in the year after that, with top fruit (apples, pears, peaches etc) following another year or two later. It's a long-term business, is growing your own.

We still have lots of vegetables of course, but we're now short on some important crops. Firstly there's potatoes, which did poorly this year because of poor watering and the layering of soil and compost (both remedied for next year). They also suffered from being harvested by Number One Son without my supervision, so around half of them were speared and had to be used quickly. We ate a lot of potatoes in September! Secondly, there's the autumn brassicas which perished due to inexperience on my part; they weren't protected from slugs and caterpillars, and I didn't really give them the time and love they needed. My bad, and at least the winter harvest brassicas will be ready in a month or so. Finally, there's the onions which are entirely my fault. The ones we planted did phenomenally well and have stored beautifully, but I simply didn't grow anywhere near enough of them. Next year I'll have to grow about three times as many!



The tunnel, however, is still producing well despite the less-than-ideal planting times that have dogged me ever since the late start. Today (after exhausting myself digging and refilling another of the raspberry trenches) I was able to gather a respectable winter salad of rocket, flat-leaved parsely, land cress, corn salad and the tail end of the summer lettuce, and in a minute I'll be going down to put the chooks to bed and fetch the mangy-dog peas for tea. The chickens, on the other hand, are off lay in a true Union stylee; one out, all out. We haven't seen an egg in nearly a fortnight, and have been reduced to buying free-range from a neighbouring farm*. In April I'm going to take Stoney's advice and eat two of the hens, and get some fertilised eggs from Kingston Maurward agricultural college, where a friendly groundsman has offered them to us. Provided I can get one of the chooks to go broody, she can hatch them herself and the only thing I have to do is provide suitable accommodation (I can't see chicks managing the chicken ladder)!

*Now, I really want to know. If their birds are free-range, why are my eggs so much more yellow and full of flavour than hers?

Ah, good. The rain's come on.

Not something you'd normally hear me say, but we've just now planted the maple tree (Acer pseudoplatanus "Brilliantissimum") and put down four inches of mulch on next year's corn bed (I know, I know, wrong time of year but I'm mainly putting it down to improve soil fertility), and a bit of heavy rain is just what the doctor ordered.



Can I just point out that I'm not mutating into a clone of a certain crofter from the Antipodes? I'm wearing the hat because the wind gives me earache. Mind you, having said that about the rain we've only just lifted all this year's leaves from the paths and grass, and I can honestly say that they haven't been dry since the minute they landed. A couple of years ago I succumbed to gadgetdom and bought myself a leaf blower (to get them off the gravel path without taking a load of stones with them) but there just hasn't been the opportunity to use it this year - everything's been sodden for weeks. Hmm. East Anglia has drought, Dorset has floods. No wonder the Department of Asshole Ideas thinks that a pipeline is the answer.

Also today I lifted the three leaf bins that we filled when the council was kind enough to give them to us free a couple of years ago. As promised, the leaves have broken down into a lovely woodlandish light soil, with the help of some ants which still managed to be angry despite the season. I've read that the "leaf mould" is nutritionally quite poor and best suited for mixing with other stuff to make a seed compost, but this year's is going in a heap to improve the soil where the russet apple tree will be planted, mainly because I'm moving the bins to the other end of the garden nearer the path and grass that the leaves come off.

Also in this brief break from the rain I managed to take some snaps, so here you are; now you're up to date.

The squash bed, under carpet mulch and green manure

The soft fruit beds take shape

Winter in the Polytunnel I:
lettuce, pak choi, mooli, corn salad, rocket and chard

Winter in the Polytunnel II:

mange tout, overwintering peas, dodgy overwintering broadies

Anyone who actually looks at the list of what we're picking right now might have noticed "mange tout peas" making an unseasonal appearance. These were one of my highly experimental plantings in the tunnel and did very well despite the unseasonably dull weather. I wish the same could be said of the land cress, which hardly struggled above ground! I'll let you know how the peas taste when I actually get to eat some; Witchypoo fondled them thoughtfully this morning, but we went for roasted shallots in the end.

And finally for anyone interested, the crop bars that
have to support the hose and suspended shelf