Ladybirds - the Garden Cavalry

Yayy! Just when I was beginning to despair.

This year's been a bit odd, since when he was putting Spring away last year, the God of Gardening* accidentally put it back in the box arse-about-face, causing us to have a glorious April and a miserable March. This was extremely good news for aphids, and bad news for the ramanas roses in my edible hedge - and the apple trees, the carrots in the tunnel, and... oh, I didn't dare look at anything else. To prevent everything growing up as twisted as Clive Barker's imagination, I had to intervene a couple of times (once with a soapy water squirty bottle and once with the dreaded derris powder), and I was distinctly unhappy about it. I don't like to intervene** if I can help it, but I needed to knock the aphids back a bit until the cavalry arrived.


Which, at last, they have. The cool weather in May delayed them for a couple of weeks, but suddenly you can't move in the garden without being in danger of treading on a ladybird or one of their larvae. This is bloody brilliant, because the cold weather has stopped the aphids in their tracks and the ladybirds are chowing through them like nobody's business. Balance is restored. Of course, the lacewings and wasps will be out soon, but ladybirds are the first on the scene and oh, so welcome; a wandering ladybird can be transferred gently to a finger or a stick and moved to a badly infested plant if urgent action is needed, and will by and large stay there until the aphids are gone. Incidentally, ladybird larvae are more useful in this regard, as they are hungrier and less likely to leave the scene; if you don't know what they look like, there are a few common ones at the bottom of this page.

While I'm on the subject, Britain has a new invader in the form of the asiatic harlequin ladybird, which preys on the pupae of many of our native ladybirds and lacewings. Nasty little things, and if you're not convinced of that they eat pears too. Unfortunately they as quite variable in colour scheme but you can easily see how they get their name. If you think you've found one you should contact these chaps, who seem to have no idea what to do but are worried as hell.


One last thing to mention before I go is that ants farm aphids, placing them on plants and generally helping them along. This is because aphids secrete a sugary substance which the ants collect - and they will chase ladybirds off any plants that they're farming at the time. This means that if you're getting aphid problems and seeing ants running up and down the plant stem, you're going to have to deal with the ants first. I've heard that if you put a blob of jam at the stem base to keep the ants busy for a while, you can get enough breathing space to seed the plant with a few ladybirds; I've not tried it, but I can see the logic. Hmm. Theoretically I could use the same principle to keep Witchypoo off the PC by leaving a stack of Johnny Depp DVDs near it. I must consider this further...


*Titchmarsh. It has to be Titchmarsh. I mean, the guy's just so perky.

**Or indeed get out of this chair.

Growing Audit, part the fourth

"Growing our own will mean we don't have to put up with second-rate produce any more."

Oh dear. I'd really hoped not to talk about this, but on the increasingly infrequent occasions where I end up buying veg from a supermarket I'm horrified at the quality of some of the produce. Take a punnet of peaches on special offer, for example. They may be cheap, but the retailers rely on the fact that they won't be on the shelf for more than a few hours. The reality is that they were picked before they were ripe, and then packed in refrigerated containers flooded with nitrogen gas. All this is done so that they can be transported and stored without any of the fuss needed to bring you a properly ripe, fresh peach; once back up to room temperature, they will deteriorate very quickly and will never be properly ripe. One day shortly before we took the decision to "kick the habit" I had half a punnet liquefy on the way home from the supermarket in the car on a hot day, while the other half stayed resolutely rock hard until they grew mould.

Another Google images classic under "supermarket fruit". A bing is a type of cherry, btw.

Okay, okay, so peaches are an extreme example - but look at other hardier produce as well. When you buy a big polythene bag of potatoes, do you turn it over to see if there's any milky, slimy stuff sloshing about in the bag? You bet you do. And potatoes keep for months!

To compare home-grown to commercial vegetables, it's useful to split it up into several categories; fresh produce, frozen produce, and stored produce. Fresh stuff is where our home-grown produce wins hands down. I'd say that if you have never enjoyed sweetcorn straight from the garden, or eaten an asparagus shoot raw just standing there with a garden knife in your hand; if you have never scrubbed up some baby carrots and popped them straight into the steamer for two minutes*; if you have never picked, podded and consumed peas all within an hour, then you have no idea how these things are supposed to taste. I'm not saying that my own produce hasn't had some slimy moments, as even the freshest lettuce goes limp in the fridge eventually, but when that happens the chickens get an unexpected snack and I fetch another superbly fresh lettuce from the salad bed. No need to eat the sad stuff, you see?

Frozen produce is not such a success story, as there appears to be something of the dark arts about freezing. Commercial setups have an advantage in being able to tumble produce in very cold air (or whatever it is that they do), whereas home freezing relies on blanching it and open-freezing before packing it away in sealed containers. So far our results have been mixed; flavour has been good, but texture has been patchy. No doubt we'll get better at doing it, and choose varieties that freeze better than the ones we started with, but I'm afraid for the moment commercial frozen vegetables win this round. Before I move on, though, most of the freezing that we have done has not been an intentional storage method - it's been a way of dealing with storage crops that were bruised, or coping with an unexpected glut of fresh stuff. With a few exceptions, it's not our preferred storage method.

Finally, produce that's grown in bulk for long-term storage. This is a difficult comparison to make, because you're looking at two different ball games. With the home produce, you aim grow a little more of the crop than you will sensibly use over the winter, and then use it through until it begins to deteriorate.** With commercial storage vegetables, the retailers have done the storage for you so all the produce has to do is survive the period between when you buy it and when you use it. On the face of it that shouldn't be hard, but we found that once brought up to room temperature we couldn't trust supermarket stuff for more than a week; this is because it has been stored too cold for too long, and given that we only shopped once a fortnight, this means that home-grown storage vegetables win our vote.

So with the exception of some frozen vegetables, our expectations were met. Of course you can improve the performance of supermarket produce by eating only seasonal produce, but not by as much as you might hope. This is because supermarket produce is rarely truly local, and thus rarely truly fresh.



*I had a couple of comments about this over on my blog on The Ecologist Online (which shares some of the material here, albeit usually in abridged form). One lady posted the fruitarian argument;

• "It's great that you are managing to produce so much of your food yourselves – and even better that you re reducing your meat consumption. What a pity, though, that, having put all that energy into growing fresh peas, you then boil them! They, like so much home-grown produce, are far tastier and far more nutritious eaten raw." which was then rebutted by someone else;
• "I disagree! Peas are delicious raw when young, but blanching them for a moment or two in boiling water with a touch of mint and a couple of the pea pods really brings the flavour out. I'm afraid the "more nutritious" arguement doesn't stack up. It takes a strong stomach to digest many of them raw, since only around 65% of the protein is digestible before cooking. Also, the only vitamin to be lost in cooking is vitamin C - check out www.nutritiondata.com and you'll see that the increased digestibility means that most other vitamin and mineral availability rises with cooking. Vitamin A, for example, rises by 18% and potassium by 20%."

**Once the rot sets in - hopefully not literally - you have to use up or otherwise process the remainder. This can mean anything from cooking yourself some "ready meals" to freeze at one end, down to feeding the stuff to a worm bin at the other. Somewhere in the middle lies using it as livestock feed, but my point is that nothing has really been lost. Even if you end up with a heap of mouldy veg that you have to trench compost under next year's bean crop, all you've ended up doing is growing a rather labour-intensive green manure (the squashes in particular went very manky indeed, because I haven't yet cracked making a root cellaring environment) but these are failures, and hopefully rare. There's a world of difference between that and paying someone else for produce that is already manky when you get it.

Of drunk children, and zombies

I've had a closer look at that last photo and have decided that she's not a real policewoman at all. She's one of those ultra-real Japanese sex dolls, in uniform. I'm mean, look at her skin. And that posture? Hah! Actually, it's sort of appealing...

Right. Ha-hem. Beans - planted. Sweetcorn - planted.* Peas - planted. Celery - planted out. Squash bed - you're always on my case, aren't you? It didn't get done, all right? I got sidetracked weeding out the raised beds and my, look at the time. Tomorrow. I'll get on the case tomorrow. I'm still hoping to get the elderflower champagne done (because I've seen the weather report for Sunday) but I'm not actually sure if we have enough pressure-type bottles - but I'm sure we'll manage something.

Also on tomorrow's list - plant more fennel! Weed the raspberry trenches and asparagus beds! Excited? I am - but you can't see what I'm doing. Before I go, let me share a song I stumbled across on Youtube. Jon doesn't mind this being shared, so enjoy. You're all going to die, screaming...

Jonathan Coulton "re: Your Brains"

* This turned out to be a bit of a traumatic experience, since I decided to involve Number Two Son(aged 4) in the process. I made all the holes beforehand, and gave him the seed to pop into them. I mean, nothing can go wrong, right?

...er, right. Unfortunately, as soon as the seeds were in his hand N2S was concentrating so hard on not dropping them that all the fine motor control for his legs went, and he staggered about the bed like a drunkard. Then he got a bit confused about which holes he'd already put seeds in, which ones he'd closed over on purpose and which ones he'd just stood on by accident - but we got there in the end. Sure, some of the holes may have two or even three seeds in, and some may (do) have none at all, but hey. He'll get a big kick out of it when they sprout, and an even bigger one when he gets to eat the corn that he planted.

You'd think I'd know better than to type "weed tea" into Google images

Woe, woe, and thrice woe, for the digital camera lead appears to have been left in Wales when I was putting up Digiveg's polytunnel. I am forced to continue to enfringe the copyright of others for the noo.

All in the garden is peaceful, and the mole is quietly working down in the as yet empty perennial beds, where the soil is good. I'm hoping that the soil will soon be better to the tune of one mole carcass though, having invested in a few lightning-fast mole-snipper traps. He laughs at my efforts, though, in his whiffly way. Rhubarb is coming in, and a few strawberries, and the two experimental caulis I grew in the tunnel came up trumps - and how! Which is just as well, really, given that this is supposed to be the hungry gap. Well, we ran out of peas a week ago, although there are still some limp frozen ones. More seriously, we're down to our last couple of heads of garlic. Next year there'll be wild garlic to fill the gap, but I'm really going to miss it this year. Might have to buy some.

Put the kettle on, Sarge?

Light garden duties have been resumed, so today I took it upon myself to set up a bin for weed tea, as mentioned by Beansprouts. This is one of those ideas that I read about some time ago, thought "oh, what a good idea" and promptly shelved, but it just so happenens that when I read Mel's post I was the proud owner of three large sacks of seedy weeds and perennial runners, so I decided to bite the bullet. Basically you fill a bin with weeds, top it up with water, and leave it until it stinks the place out by which time all the plants - and seeds - should be dead. Then the liquid goes on the plants as a foliar feed and general fertilizer, and the sludge goes on the regular compost heap. Basically it's a poor man's comfrey bin, but it's also a canny way of dealing with plant material that you can't compost, and will do nicely for this year. Next year the comfrey plants I put in a few weeks ago will be ready for harvest, and I can go the whole hog. Not that I'm ever likely to run out of weeds!

That done, I finished clearing the first half of the sweetcorn patch so that I can sow it out tomorrow. I also planted out cauli seedlings - those most fussy, move-hating things - in the wrong bed, and danced a merry little dance of rage when I realised I'd have to move them again. So tomorrow - tomorrow is for sweetcorn and peas and bean planting, for celery transplanting, and for squash patch clearing. If I can get through that lot, I'll be doing ever so well and I'll have time to make elderflower champagne at the weekend. Huzzah!

Book Review - No Nettles Required

Let's start with a quick book review. Books are good, oh yes they are. Books don't chew their way into a worm bin from the bottom and eat exactly half of every single worm, nor do they uproot an entire bed full of onion sets just to see if any of them have sprouted yet. No, books sit quietly on the shelf in my little office and wait to be summoned to tell me how lovely everything could be. Good books. Nice books.

The nice book that I want to comment on is No Nettles Required by Ken Thompson (Transworld 2006). The author is a clever chap from the University of Sheffield, where they have just finished a study called Biodiversity in Urban Gardens in Sheffield (BUGS), so the book is based on actual observations rather than on theory, which gets my vote every time.

The style is relaxed and personable, not too heavy on facts and figures, and yet avoids sliding into the anecdotal mush which is too often the death of works like this. Thompson gets his message across admirably, and gives enough background material from the project for readers to see where his advice comes from. Much of it comes as no surprise, and yet there are a few bombshells in there - such as the revelation that the notion of "native" species is illusory and confers no measurable advantage to wildlife. That may raise a few eyebrows, but the information is there to back it up; I read the book cover-to-cover in a few sessions, and although I'm not organised enough to make notes I certainly thought about doing so, which coming from me is high praise indeed.

So here are some of the most important points that Thompson makes. You might think there's no point in reading the book after this, but you'd be wrong - the book as a whole helps your understanding of the dynamic equilibrium that is your garden; these points are just what you can do to help things along.

• First off, understand that your single garden can make a difference to the biodiversity in your area, even if you live in an urban environment. That might strike you as unlikely, but the effect is there. Ken's measured it.
• Stop buying stuff. A whole industry has grown up around nest boxes and bee boxes and all that kind of malarky, but you don't need any of it. Oh no, you don't. Finding useful links for people to follow for ponds etc proved quite difficult, as I had to wade through snowdrifts of commercial sites! But there are far more important things you could be doing in your garden, and you can fart about with "Venezualan moss-lined insect multiplexes" later if you really want to.
• Most important thing? More trees and shrubs. Get rid of some of your monoculture lawn to make room for them - they're less work anyway. Stick to northern hemisphere plants, but beyond that the sky's the limit. Oh, and try to have something in the garden in flower throughout the year. Ivy flowers in winter, by the way, although you wouldn't want to sniff it.
• Have a compost heap, preferably in a shady corner. If you haven't got one - what the hell are you doing? The nicest thing about compost heaps is they're free - you don't need a fancy frame or anything, just a heap of decomposing plant material. It doesn't even have to smell bad.
• Have a pond. Every garden can have a pond, since it's mostly minibeasts we're thinking about here and thus size doesn't matter much. An old plastic windowbox will do, or even an old washing up bowl. It doesn't even matter if you sink it into the ground or not, although you'll need to make a ramp from the ground to the edge if you don't, so that stuff can get in. You'll also need a ramp from the water to the lip, so that stuff can get out. And that's it. Resist the urge to throw the water out when it gets manky; just top it up with rainwater, and from time to time fish out most of the crap from the bottom.
• To make your soil life as vital as possible, build soil carbon. This means growing lots of plants, making as much compost as possible, and going easy on the digging. Sounds good, doesn't it?
• Make a heap of logs in a shady spot, and leave them to rot. If you don't fancy that, make one of these.
• For solitary bees and aphid-munching wasps (which don't sting, f.y.i.), use some blocks of untreated wood (they don't have to be big - anything from 5x5x10cm up) and get busy with a drill. Bung in some blind holes (i.e. not all the way through) with your 4mm, 6mm, 8mm and 10mm bits. Then fix the block to a wall, fence or tree somewhere sunny, so that the tunnels are horizonal(ish) and forget about it.

Now, I have to admit that when I originally spoke about attracting more wildlife into the garden, in the quiet partt of the year*, I had in mind small buzzy things, small crawly things, and perhaps the occasional slightly larger fluttery thing. However, a couple of weeks ago I came in for rather too much attention from small buzzy things that bite, small furry things that dig, and other small furry things that climb, chew, rip and nibble. It's enough to make me come over all suburban.

The trouble with moles is that they go where the worms are, and by and large that means going where the compost and manure are - in other words right to my raised beds, with speed and accuracy that the American military can only dream about. And under the edible hedge. And the raspberries, and the new fruit trees, and the pumpkin patch. The damage was considerable, so I asked Mr Mole very sweetly to go away with windmills and repellant. He declined. Since the asparagus bed was next, it was Time to Act. Our local conservation officer opined some time ago that "humane" mole traps are anything but (trapped moles usually die of shock in any case, and traps are often not checked for days at a time), and so a bumper pack of the wonderfully-named scissor traps are on their way.

But it isn't the mole that my blood pressure up - oh no; it was the clueless schmuck I was put through to when I phoned the council office for advice. His opening gambit (after asking for my postcode) was to assume he was talking to someone like my Posh Neighbours. "We don't have a mole man. You people and your lawns," he said, in scornful tones. Actually, I pointed out, this problem was effectively in an allotment. His tone changed in an instant to that of a pub permaculturist. "In permaculture," he said sagely, "you have to look at every feature of your garden as a series of inputs and outputs." Oh yes, I asked him, and what exactly is Moley's output? "Rather than an excess of moles, you have to see it as a helping hand with the drainage." Well, having seen an entire row of parsnips perish as a result of excellent drainage that very morning, I'd had just about enough. If he couldn't put me in touch with someone who could help, what advice could he offer me? "Well," he said eventually, "You could watch that video of Jasper Carrott."




*22.45 to 23.06 December 10th in our house, although that includes the time it takes to make the pot of tea.

Sidelined

One of the things I've noticed is that the character of the blog has changed a bit. It seems to be less about the actual garden now than it used to be, and I'm unsure if it's a good thing, so I thought I'd throw in a few more remarks about what's acually happening out there.

This morning was... odd. The garden was cool, and a gentle drizzle had been falling all night onto the grass seed that I'd used yesterday to fill in a few baldy bits and the bloody great hole in the lawn that my pile of chippings had made (note to self - in future don't leave things in a heap for 6 months). Ideal.

Further down the garden I began to get suspicious. No new mole activity. No mouse visits to the tunnel. Tunnel looked perfect and didn't even need watering (beyond the timer-operated soaker hose). No slugs, and everything growing nicely. The chooks filed out peacefully with no bum-pecking or nastiness, and waited patiently for me to hang the feeder up and throw them their morning grain ration. There was even a warm egg for my breakfast.

This isn't right, I thought to myself as I wandered back up the garden warming my hands on the egg (and trying not to look at the roses in the edible hedge, which are suffering badly from greenfly). Where is today's calamity? Whither the pest attack, the flooding, the sunscorch? But no - for once, everything in the garden was rosy.

The Scottish blood in me is deeply suspicious; it predicts I will pay for this lovely morning later...

Growing Audit, part the third

"Growing our own will make our diet healthier."

Absolutely. No question. But of course, this being a sort of pseudo-audit I have to explain the hows and whys of that, so let me break it down for you a bit. When we started on the project I anticipated that we'd eat more fruit and veg, and so we have: since the vegetables coming from the garden were grown organically we decided to use the money saved to shift over to an organic green box scheme for fruit. Limitations on the size of the delivery meant that fruit would arrive slightly faster than we were previously eating it, ergo we picked up our consumption to fit the box. So that's more fruit, and all organic. And that's just for openers.

Living on our own vegetable also dictated a move towards seasonal produce, and that's something I really hadn't thought about. To keep variation in the diet, this meant beginning to eat some vegetables that we previously hadn't bothered much with - things like kale and winter squash. Trying them once and rejecting them out of hand was not an option (as experiments in the supermarket so often are), and we learned - are learning - how to cook with them. Mealtimes shifted gradually towards a vegetable focus, and meat became less important.

Where's my digital camera lead gone then? Lost, you say?

Keeping our own chickens was a given for me, especially as my Dad told me I was dreaming and would never do it (Ooh! Unresolved issues alert!). This is easily the softest bit of self-sufficiency anyone can ever do. Get hold of a chicken house, bung some birds in it, give them food now and again. Presto, eggs almost every day. And such eggs! We'd been eating free-range eggs from local farms for quite a while, but the first really fresh, raised-in-the-yard, mixed-diet egg was quite a shock I can tell you. The taste plunged me back to eating a fresh egg at Great Uncle Sam's table on his farm in Ballymena when I was five years old. It was that powerful.

Keeping chickens, though, raised a few ethical issues as it was now impossible to look at the lumps of stuff in the supermarket the same way. How has a supermarket chicken lived, and died? HFW's programme put the tin lid on it, and since then only organic chicken (or free-range if we can't get organic) has been on the table. Curiously enough this was a powerful drive away from the supermarkets, simply because they charge an unrealistic premium for organic meat. We found that it was possible to buy "boxes" of organically-reared produce from local farms much more cheaply - say again, much more cheaply, than buying at Quik-E-Mart. And of course, eating organic flesh put a stop to pretty much all processed foods and ready meals in particular.

It's an on-going change, and different family members have adopted it to differing degrees; but with even teenagers agreeing to eschew crisps in favour of a tub of dried fruit in their packed lunch, it has to be going well!

The Missing Post

Looking for an old bit of information this morning, I found a draft post from last March that for some reason I never pushed the button to publish. It being as redundant as Britney Spears' hairstylist, there's no point me polishing it up so here it is, as I found it - a snapshot of the past. It contains references to the labour of love of winter 2004-2005, the chicken penthouse, which didn't go entirely to plan. N2S had played a toddler sing-along CD at me until the tune was etched into my frontal lobe with battery acid, and when I was working on the penthouse I ended up composing variant lyrics to one of the songs. So here it is, tto the tune of "I'm going to build a little house".

I'm going to build
A chicken house
With a hole in the roof that the rain comes through
And a badly cut-out pophole that won't close to
And the dropping board too small to catch the poo

I'm going to use
A proper plan
That I've thought about and bought online
And modified a little to my grand design
The measures are Imperial, but I'm sure they're fine

I'm going to build
A nest box big enough for eight
And a perch too thin to take the weight
And a roof too low for a bantam to stand straight
And the whole thing ready six months too late

I'm going to blame
That beardy bloke
From the cover of the plan with his drill and his tan
In a stripy old shirt bought from Oxfam
And I'll bet that he sleeps in a manky old van

I'm going to build
A chicken house
It'll be a cosy shelter for those feathery little bums
And it doesn't really matter if I'm all thumbs...
'Cos they're only bloody chickens, they can take what comes

But I will build
That chicken house!

The chicken house was made from a plan that I did, in fact, find online and sent for by mail order. I was horrified by the cost of ready-made houses, and yet I found that there weren't all that many detailed plans available. There were plenty of vague plans that assumed you could look at a cutaway diagram and instantly see what you needed to do, but for a woodworking virgin like me there was precious little. I was a bit surprised when it arrived to find that it was a design for "growers" (poultryspeak for meat birds as opposed to "layers") and so I had to design my own nest box, which I made an internal one because it was easier.

I made a couple of changes too. One of these was to put in a second pop-hole on the other side of the house, so that we can control which side of the henhouse the hens come out. This means that on one side of the house we can have the permanent run, and on the other a "forage area" which is the fruit orchard, under which we can eventually place various chicken forage plants. This is partly a solution to the problem of internal parasites (which spend part of their life cycle in the soil), and partly a response to the fact that chickens slowly destroy the area that they are in if it is not big enough. For six large hens the area in the literature is half an acre, or our entire garden, and that's just not happening! So dual runs it is, combined with a number of pick-em-up-and-pop-em-in temporary runs and a chicken tractor. More of that later, when I get round to making one!

The hen house was constucted in sections over the winter, but because of the weight of the finished product it needed to be constructed in situ. My insistence that the house would be on stilts meant that actually putting it together was going to have to wait until we were a little further on with the garden plan, so the chickens had to make do with a promise of better days. On balance, we saved a couple of hundred pounds and I made a good job of the house (with the possible exception of accidentally making one of the popholes large enough to drive a small sportscar through) but the time investment was enormous!

In the spring we started removing some overgrown conifers that were restricting light and were well past their best, and having got the measure of conditions on the site we called in a landscaper to discuss it. While we waited we got on with trying out a single raised bed using a bunch of old shelves for sides, and filled with topsoil taken from elsewhere in the garden. It was fairly easy to do apart from the double-digging, and soon we had a 1.5mx4m bed and were planting red and white onion, kohl rabi, radish, garlic, carrot, parsnip, mangetout, sugarsnap peas and chard. The old veg bed was once more pressed into service, this time just for courgettes and sweetcorn, and a 10m stretch of lawn at the bottom of the garden was set aside for potatoes. We planted these using a variation of the sheet mulch (10cm alpaca beans with weed-proofing fabric laid over). We escaped the badger that year, but conditions were perfect for creating our first "slug hotel", and when we eventually lifted the potatoes we found that yields were quite poor. I was summoned to the potato patch by a howl of outrage from Witchypoo, who had lifted a mammoth specimen of her beloved Desirees only to find that it had been completely hollowed out from underneath!

At last the landscaper arrived. This was a bit of a non-starter because having told us what he could do and what it was likely to cost, he simply disappeared off the face of the earth in a way that Dorset tradespeople have a habit of doing. Worse still, he had hugely underestimated the difficulties of providing a flat, level site for the polytunnel and this mistake was something that we carried through into our planning, causing much trouble and expense later. Regardless, he started us considering the contours of the garden, and we could see a few things that needed to be sorted out.

First among these was the patio. Although it was in the right place (more or less, anyway), it was mysteriously offensive in some way that we couldn't qualify, to the point that the entire family had avoided it for the whole of the preceding year. Everyone had a different theory as to why no-one liked the patio, ranging from its odd shape to the fact that it was built on a slope and so one end jutted out half a metre above ground level. I hated it because it felt like I was sitting on a soap box. There were also various diseased or poorly placed trees and shrubs in the garden, but more important than these was the lie of the land itself which was a very uneven slope. We made the decision to get a digger and operator to sort it out, and to use the digger to remove the various tree stumps and patio.

Polytunnels are never the most popular thing with neighbours, and since we were talking about cutting a flat section into the slope it was time to float the idea with our own next-doors. This was done using the most rapid means of communication known to man, which is by telling our Roger. Every neighbourhood has a Roger. Roger is recently retired and terrified of having nothing to do, so he tackles huge projects and does all those little neighbourhood tasks that are no-one's job, like repainting signs and clearing out blocked drains, which makes him very useful to have around. He also watches everything and talks (actually "talk" is too small a word for it) to everyone about everything without hesitation, so anything you tell him travels fast.

Using the political principle that if you're going to break unpopular news you break it hard and are prepared to back off later, I leaked news of the polytunnel project undiluted even though we weren't all that far along our thinking in that regard; there was going to be a tunnel, twenty-five feet wide and forty feet long, and it was going to be right in the middle of our garden. As we had suspected, a day later we were in crisis talks with both sets of neighbours, and they weren't happy. We hadn't expected them to be, but we listened politely and fed them biscuits while they laid out their concerns. Some of them were sensible (visual impact), but some were not. Water use was one of these. Were we going to be using a lot of water, as pressure was already poor? A good question you might think, but not when the person asking it maintains a swimming pool! There were worries about light pollution in our gorgeously dark neighbourhood (I have no plans to use growing lights) and noise pollution (I mean, what? And this from the noisiest party-throwers in the area), which I still haven't quite figured out. How much noise can a polytunnel make?

After the confab was finished, Witchypoo and I got to thinking about how much of a tunnel we actually needed and decided that perhaps a monster like the one at Ourganics was a little over the top. Did we need a hammock in there? Probably not. But did we need the height of an 8' tunnel? Yes, we did. In the end we decided to downsize to 14'x24', and to move the tunnel closer to the laurel hedge where it would be less visible. We would have liked to go for a less visually-obtrusive solar tunnel, but it was beyond our budget. We also decided that instead of just levelling-up the site we would cut a rebate into the slope as low as possible so that we could have the head room of the 8' tunnel. Had we but known... but anyway. It was time to gather our courage, and call the diggers in.

Growing Audit, part the second

Hedgewizard: "In a plot of this size (a quarter of an acre) we can grow most of the fresh fruit and vegetables that our family needs."

The key word here is "most", and an auditor would wield a red pen maniacally at such as imprecisely-worded claim. Still, in the first proper year of growing we managed to stop buying in vegetables all together with the exception of potatoes, onions and a few caulis - not bad for a first attempt, and that's without any perennial beds. Thank heavens for the polytunnel which has been a real boon, and not just for hiding in whenever a horde of WP's friends arrives to chatter like garrulous crows. We're coming into the Hungry Gap, but as you'll see from the "Now Eating" columns on the right hand side of the blog we're far from hungry.


The word "fresh" hides a couple of sins as well, as WP has a weakness for frozen peas and corn as an omigod-I-forgot-the-veg crop. We did freeze quite a lot of mange-tout peas, but these ran out in January and weren't particularly good frozen. Brassicas, now - brassicas are my gardening blind-spot; I just haven't cracked them yet, and last years were decimated by caterpillars and nasty little worms. I haven't given up though, and this year I'll be giving them lots more attention, netting them, and perhaps watering with rhubarb-leaf tea (which apparently keeps butterflies at bay - you heard it here first). Onions were a straightforward cock-up - just a botched guess at how many we would need and I'm growing three times as many this year. And potatoes...

Potatoes are a staple part of our diet, and difficult to grow in sufficient quantities for our growing family. Especially for N1S, a.k.a. Gannet Boy. This year the problem was supposed to be solved because I was going to use them as a clearance crop for some future perennial beds, but my operation being brought forward a month put paid to that. I have to say though that I'm not too worried about it, since maincrop spuds (the bulk of what you need) have very few advantages for the home grower. They store so well even the supermarkets can't cock it up (unless they accidentally freeze them, as sometimes happens), and generally taste unremarkable. The only significant advantage is price, with the supers charging stupid rates for organic spuds out of sheer greed. Early potatoes are a different kettle of... er... potatoes though, tasting immeasurably better than the charlatans the supermarkets try to sell as "new". A couple of years ago we planted some of the tiddlers out again in September to harvest at Yule, and we'll definitely be doing that this year if the bed plan allows.

Fruit has been a different story as we've had to buy everything that couldn't be traded for, stolen*, or picked from the wild. For top fruit that's not about to change, since both the new trees and the "extremely pruned" existing ones are still a couple of years away from fruiting. We'll get a little soft fruit this year - the strawberries I planted in winter are in already producing well (two weeks before the Riverford ones come on-stream), and there may be a light yield from the raspberries and perhaps the blackcurrants too. To be truthful I doubt we'll ever stop buying in oranges, lemons and occasional bananas**, but once our own fruit begins to come into its own next year we'll certainly buy less frequently.

In summary:
Last year's score on veg - around 80% (largely due to the onions).
This year's score on veg - expected 95% (frozen peas remaining a problem)
Fruit - watch this space.



*And they think I'm joking. Heh.

**I have to wonder - if they're only occasionally bananas, what are they the rest of the time? It's like saying "part-time traffic lights". I know for a fact they work in a disco when they're off duty. But occasional bananas? Perhaps it's better not to know.

Post-op!

If I've seemed distracted these last few posts, sorry. It's just that I was going into hospital for a nasty operation called a fundoplication, which means - horrors - no gardening for a week, and no heavy work for several weeks. With very little notice, as you can imagine there was a lot to try to get done before I went in! Anyway, all went well and although I'm in a bit of discomfort I'm feeling better than I have any right to be. No photograph today, but I have five little holes in my abdomen which makes me look like I've been machine-gunned. How cool is that?

Anyhow, while I was coming out of the anaesthetic my mind wandered something chronic, and I made a few notes...

The sound of the wind blowing at the window is balm to me. I have images of wind-tossed sycamores, the leaves moving like a green ocean.

(later) The weather's bloody filthy, though. If I'd planted the squash out (as I'd intended) I would have been a repeat of last year's massacre! Will have to cloche them, and think about a useful windbreak plant to replace the buddleia for next year. Perhaps I should think about Nev's lilly pilli.

(much later) Yicken soup being smuggled in for an illicit tea since I seem to be doing well*. Yum. Nurse Tracey is my friend. Yicken soup was always the food of choice in the Öpik (childhood friends) household whenever feeling poorly - I don't remember but it was probably a traditional Estonion thing. Not so traditional that it couldn't come out of a tin, though. It's curious to think about now, but I was a very picky eater as a child - one of those boys who has to be cajoled and threatened into every mouthful. Looking back though, it was hardly surprising since in 1970s Belfast "traditional cooking" involved boiling vegetables until they were too weak to beg for death. I can remember my old Mum chopping white cabbage up with a plate - a plate! - and that kind of cooking was absolutely normal. Caught between the kitchen and the school canteen (where grated carrot inexplicably suspended in orange jelly was considered a dessert) it's no wonder that I formed the opinion that vegetables were Not Nice.

All the pickiness stopped, however, when I spent three weeks staying with the Öpiks in a relative's house in Leicester, where traditional Estonian fayre was served up for every meal. Truthfully I remember little about the food, but it was a tremendous culture shock for someone who can remember the excitement when pasta first hit the streets of Belfast. One evening it was announced that there was to be rice pudding and I held out for it, toying with my main course until it was taken away. Then out came the rice pudding, and it was something of a shock.

"Simply take quite a lot of ordinary long-grain rice, and boil it in unsweetened milk until all is absorbed. Turn into a bowl and leave to set. Turn out, sprinkle with sugar, and (this is the important bit) leave uncovered overnight in the larder to develop a crispy outer layer. Cut like cake, and serve cold. It's a measure of how picky I was that I couldn't eat the thing - these days I'd go through it like a Labour Administration through Health Secretaries - but in the dead of night I learned my lesson as I snuck down for a feed of unsweetened, unsalted, partially dried-out rice and slivers of cheddar, formerly despised as partially rotted milk. And to my surprise, when hungry they both tasted pretty damned good. Epiphany! Thereafter I learned NOT to take the first bite with my eyes until they had been substantially retrained.

These days the only things I won't eat are marmite and avocado, but one again I - we - are retraining ourselves to eat what we can grow. Or, more often, to cook it properly. WP laboured for years under the mistaken belief that she disliked calabrese; not so, she just dislikes it overcooked and served plain. Over the last year she has rediscovered brussel sprouts, and beetroot is next (gods willing). It doesn't stop there though; we're gradually coming across foods we've never even considered before and finding them good. Broad bean tips tosed in garlic butter, steamed chard flowers with onion gravy, sorrel and nasturtium flower salad...

...wait a minute, here's the hospital menu. Carrot and sultana toasted sandwich... WTF?



*The soup was horrible, and I was pathetically grateful for it.

The Only Polytunnel in the Village

This week, I have been finding out what buddhists are like when they're annoyed.* The occasion to find this out was my first ever visit to Wales, which was made in true destroy-the-environment-to-save-it style as mentioned by Kitchenwitch. Come to think of it, Wales is the furthest I've been from home in quite a long time, being as it usually takes the promise of some rare seeds just to get me out of the garden these days. This time, however, it was a jaunt to help my old friend Digiveg put up his spanking new polytunnel.

Golygfa Hyfryd: "Beautiful View"

Digiveg and his wife Chickenlady recently used the Black Arts in order to fund their escape to Wales. Digi denies this, of course, explaining that keeping his old house on with tenants in it to pay the mortgage is nothing shady - a sort of reverse buy-to-let. I don't know, sounds suspiciously like Accountancy to me. However he did it, the Digis decamped with indecent haste last autumn and are now quietly developing a two-acre smallholding in southwest Wales. Walking the Walk, in other words. So far vast areas of grass have been reclaimed for vegetables, whole flocks of battery chickens have been re-homed and the first of several lines of willow plantings have been, er, planted. Most telling of all a row of leylandii has been sacrificed to the Great God of Self-Sufficiency**, which makes Digiveg an official Good Sort in my book.

A polytunnel goes up with slightly less fuss than an Amish barn-raising, and there's no requirement to have either a beard or a bad attitude (although by the end of it Digiveg had both). There's quite a bit of work and head-scratching involved though, so it was important that we got as much time as possible to put the thing up. Naturally, this meant that the world conspired against us. Unexpected visitors, children with tonsillitis, diary clashes, poorly grandparents; you name it, it was all thrown into the mix. It was with mingled fatigue and relief that we finally rolled onto Digi's driveway, only to find that a horrific nail-clipping accident had forced Digi and ChickenLady to make a mercy dash to the duty vet in Pen Y Bun, and they wouldn't be back for a while. Oh, and the frame wasn't up, which was grounds for saying "Ah."

From the beginning we knew we were up against it, and before long we were doing what Hedgewizards do; working on until it was too dark to see. We finally got the cover on the following day, a mere hour after Witchypoo and I were supposed to have left. There was a modicum of tension, and not just in the polythene film. By that time I'd had my bum in the holly hedge more times than I care to think about, Digiveg (normally the most laid back person on the planet) had been reduced to making Executive Decisions with more than a Whiff of Miff, and Witchypoo was brassed off by the whole thing. Chickenlady was... well... more buddhist than ever, dispensing sweetness and calm as a sort of spiritual counterweight to all the tetch going down in the garden. But the tunnel... was up!

Of polytunnels themselves, more another time. But if you're contemplating a purchase just now, let me offer you a piece of advice; count all the bits when they arrive, read the instructions cover to cover at least twice, and have the frame up before your helpers arrive!


*It turns out they're just as snippy as anyone else, but they apologize more for it afterwards.

**HFW, the new God of Self-Sufficiency. Gods, but you people have short memories.

This article first appeared in my blog in The Ecologist Online. See how green I am? I even recycle my own material.

Growing Audit, part the first

I love my garden - have I mentioned that lately? - with a passion, and am considerably less fond of my day job. So far so standard, you might say, but just lately I've been on a bit of a learning curve at work which has some bearing on Hedgewizard's Hollow. The learning curve in question is audit.

Not my garden, not my kids.

For those who have not been exposed to the full horrors of audit, audit is management-speak for taking a damned good look at something. Moreover, it means measuring it - or at least establishing a good way of estimating measurements. Then it means questioning its value, and perhaps setting targets for developing it.

...

...sorry, nodded off for a minute there. It occurred to me that I could conceivably apply the principles of audit to our initial assumptions about growing our own food - in other words, to find out if the process has been doing what it said on the tin. This promises to be quite a long feature, so rather than present it as a single, boring block I'll split it into a few, shorter boring blocks. You never know though, something might come up that changes the way I do things (the point of audit, after all). So (assumes his best Sebastian Cabot voice)

...come with me on a journey back to when the family Hedge rolled onto the Hollow's hardstanding and took a long, hard look at the garden...

Hedgewizard (Winnie the Pooh voice): "In a plot of this size we can grow most of the fresh fruit and vegetables that our family needs."

Sebastian Cabot (off): "I'm only getting paid as a narrator, so if you think I'm about to do any digging you can forget it. Capiche?"