Sea Buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides)

Sea Buckthorn

I have already decided that I would like to try and grow some Sea Buckthorn in the field within the Chicken area, partly because it appears that chickens like to eat the berries but also because it'll give the Field another species for wildlife and I like the look of the plant.

More general reading about Sea Buckthorn suggests that there are various people pushing it as a super fruit which can have health benefits along with making a good drink, when sweetened and perhaps mixed with Apple juice. Another good reason to plant some as one of the purposes of the field is to have it produce our food.

As a volunteer for the Wildlife Trust I often have to help manage Sea Buckthorn by cutting it back as it can become an invasive plant. Having been regularly in contact with it something has become apparent to me which I needed to explain for myself...

Sea Buckthorn grows in groups of Female and Male plants. You don't get too many male plants next to female ones so when you look at an extensive area you see a big patch of female plants with loads of berries and, perhaps the other side of a path, a big area of male plants. Why is this?

After giving it some thought, driven by the permaculture principle of observe and interact, it would seem that the main way Sea Buckthorn propogates is by runners or rhizomes. Therefore a female plant will spring up next to a female plant. I have read that the genes of a plant only change by seed (something I need to read up on) and that cuttings are clones of the parent. I think the rhizomes must therefore create clones. A male plant's rhizomes will therefore produce more male plants. You therefore get groups or areas of each type just expanding.

The fact that there are male and female plants in relatively close proximity would lead you to think that a seed could drop close to, for example, a female plant, but grow as a male and therefore help to break up these big groups of same sex plants but in reality this doesn't appear to happen. While it may sometimes, in general, it doesn't. To me this would suggest that a seedling doesn't like growing in a shaded position, or at least struggles to grow, and is therefore out competed by the parent plant. New colonies need to be created by the berries dropping some distance away from the parent, probably by birds.

Reading about Sea Buckthorn you are told that it requires, or demands, full sunlight. The observations and my thoughts would therefore appear to be correct.

By observing things in nature it allows you to better understand something as opposed to just reading about it which then allows you to interact better with nature to produce and care for your plants better. 

For me, it is obvious that I need to plant female Sea Buckthorn to make sure I get berries and also not to allow it to become shaded. The location to plant therefore requires space for the plants to propagate via the rhizomes which also needs to be away from my boundary otherwise the rhizomes will simply go under the fence and annoy the neighbours. Knowing, because I have seen for myself, how invasive these plants can be also means that I will need access all around the shrub in order to break rhizomes to stop them spreading beyond the area that I wish them to be.

Sea buckthorn can tolerate a wide range of soil types but in the wild in this country, certainly in my area, they are only to be found on the coast on very well drained and sandy soil. Perhaps they prefer the salt in the air from the sea and as I'm reasonably close to the sea I hope that I can ignore the air and just concentrate on the soil. As I have plenty of sand left over from the greenhouse base I'll use this to prepare the soil which will also aid the drainage in the chicken area which was part of the field that suffers from surface flooding.

Hopefully I can provide a good enough soil and location for Sea Buckthorn so that it will grow well enough to provide plenty of berries for the chickens but also for us to include in drinks and anything else we can think of incorporating the berries.

Sea Buckthorn would appear to be an excellent plant to have for various reasons but must also be very hardy to live on the coast. With  harvesting berries and cutting back it must be remembered that this shrub is not only thorny as it's name suggests but in reality it aggressively attacks you, almost with deliberate targeting of exposed skin. My work in managing Sea Buckthorn has meant that I have become perforated  on many occasions and when working with others every conversation during the work starts with the word "Ouch!" so leather gloves for handling it are a must. 

Soil Preparation and Cultivation

Soil Preparation and Cultivation

Having come to the conclusion that modern life is all about money and that most advice on seed packets and books is based upon you buying seeds each year and all pest control in popular books is about buying chemicals and how you need to buy good seed compost and that many seeds are now F1 hybrids often coated in something blue or green, I decided to go about learning from a bygone era.

An era before commercial gene manipulation, before the main emphasis was purely about money and more about quality and before science of growing really took over. An era when observation and generations of knowledge were still past down. This era seems to be before the first world war.

Luckily many books from that time are now available for free in the form of ebooks and the language used in them is less complicated. These books can teach you simple techniques about growing and storing your food because back then it was more common for people to grow their own and make pickles and preserves but also they used to use so many more plants.

Two such books which I have been reading are:

The Vegetable Garden, What, When and Where to Plant which forms part of a farmers manual from 1912

and

Root Development of Vegetable Crops by John E. Weaver and William E. Bruner 1927

I was surprised to read in the first book that a vegetable garden can produce 10 to 15 times the value of vegetables compared to the same space taken up by a large farm. 

This seemed strange until I realised that even back then things were done with crops purely based upon financial return. They had a lot of knowledge about what would grow best and how to grow more and better but were restricted by market value, shipping costs, labour costs and fertilizer costs. Everything was a compromise between making a profit and getting the most vegetables. It shouldn't have been a surprise and it does highlight why we now use so many pesticides and chemicals and fertilizers. It also goes some way as to explain why all modern books tell you to add fertilizer, to spray pesticides to obtain best crops. Most modern knowledge about vegetables is based around the commercial reasons and takes no account that you, the home gardener, has the free labour and free compost and a small enough plot to make it worth while doing a different way.

Even the modern day seed producers, seed catalogue companies, are restricted in the same way. When they test how best seeds will grow in what environments they are limited to systems which are profitable on a larger scale. Knowledge is being past down and written about based upon systems that simply aren't applicable or of much interest to a home gardener. Instructions on seed packets such as sow in spring at this or that spacing and re-buy the seeds the following year don't take into account that the home gardener can setup a far better environment on a small scale which means seeds can be grown closer together, sown when nature intended and seeds can also be collected and re-used.

Looking a bit deeper it becomes obvious why the farmer ploughs and prepares soil to a depth around 6 inches and spaces rows as they do. They have to have a machine capable of going a certain depth, which need to compact the soil in between with a wheel or horse. To plough and prepare soil deeper requires bigger and heavier machines which meant more horses or more expensive more powerful machines.   

Looking at root systems and how much moisture and nutrients a plant takes up also restricts how close they can be planted. It's a compromise between crop yield and expense. Plant them further away and you have less plants, plant them closer and they need more water and more nutrients to be added, often more often.

You often hear and read that you can't sow seeds too close together because they compete for the same scarce water and nutrients, which is true, but this is surely based upon a commercial view since you can mitigate competition between plants by applying more nutrients and more water. The home gardener can also make use of deeper prepared soil because he or she doesn't have to worry about the cost or machine power needed to plough and till deeper he can simply double dig. Yes it takes longer and is more work but if you have the time this isn't an issue as it is with commercial farmers.

A home gardener can feed the plants as required and prepare the soil as per the root requirements of the individual plant thereby changing the the advice given by the seed companies. This also changes the answer to how much do I need to manure my vegetable patch and how often do I water and how much produce can I grow within a given space. The official commercial answer is not necessarily applicable.

What the home gardener needs to do is learn about root systems and feed the plants with what they need. 

To prepare the soil the farmer doesn't have much choice. He has the soil he has and he has a certain amount of money that it is worth spending on that soil for the specified crop. This also limits what the crop is.

We are told this or that crop won't grow in our climate and that may be true, in a commercial world, because the crop may need better protection from wind, it may need protecting from the sun or it may need shade which often the farmer can't give it simply because it isn't financially viable to drive a machine along each row for a second or third time during the growing season but the home gardener can take a plant and protect it, which may mean growing another plant next to it for shelter. It may mean earthing up on the south side to provide shade in the hottest time of the year or earthing up on the north side to shelter it from wind during the winter.

So many people are growing so many different crops and having success by breaking all the rules that suggests the commonly given rules are not correct or not applicable. 

By throwing away the rules and experimenting many people have found better ways of growing food. They can grow plants much closer together and have fewer problems.

To dig or not to dig, what method is best?

There always seems to be a debate about which method is better but after reading about soil and root systems I've decided that there isn't a better method. They are just different methods. To get a good crop, and there is even a question as to what a good crop is because surely a good crop depends on what you want out of the crop, perhaps just enough is good enough or perhaps as much as possible is a good crop, but with a no dig method you need to know if the soil is of good enough quality to hold moisture while at the same time as draining well enough to not bother about about digging and just apply compost or manure on the top. With this method you hope that nature can take nutrients from the top and provide them as deep as the roots need, and if the soil is too dense so that it can't breath or can't be broken up by worms and micro organisms then it can still work provided you put enough depth on top. That often involves using more compost and manure because you may not have as much usable depth, but less hard work which suits some people but will obviously be just as good as digging provided there is enough room for the roots and enough nutrients and moisture. With digging you can give the plants more room by preparing soil deeper and thereby giving the plant access to more nutrients deeper down. Manure or compost is still needed but perhaps less of it is needed. Neither way if done correctly would appear to be better than the other. 

The answer for myself is that I like the physical exercise part of digging but I also think that I will become lazy in time so I will dig first to break up my clay soil, add enough compost, manure and sand as required to provide as good a soil as I can, then probably only lightly dig over the following year or years and no doubt become lazy and won't bother to dig at all in the future.

If I am digging the question becomes how deep, and the answer to that appears to be in understanding the root system of the crops I will be growing and it appears that many crops have roots that go down 6 or 7 feet but most of the useful roots seem to be within 2 feet, so that will be my aimed for depth. I have plenty of time, manure and compost to be able to prepare soil to that depth and hopefully digging that deep will keep the soil in good condition for years. 

Another reason for me to dig is that the clay soil needs to be turned into a more loamy soil and at present it is very compacted and therefore contains very little oxygen. Watering a compacted heavy clay soil means the water just sits on top without draining away very deep. In fact the water only drains to a depth of a few inches. Clay soil is also a cold soil so digging it and adding humus will allow it to warm up which will also be very beneficial, but once it is loamy, draining and warmer the need to dig will diminish.

With either system the soil will become better quality if you keep applying organic material and nature should be able to help you to a large extent simply by having worms and roots growing. As long as water can drain through the soil without water logging around the roots while at the same time holding moisture and as long as you can replenish the lost minerals and nutrients there should be no difference between digging and not digging.

To Mulch or Not

The old farmers have answered this many years ago. Mulching in general with most crops does help because it helps to retain moisture but some conditions means that mulching can also cause problems. A better answer can only be found by reading what their experiments showed. Some plants benefit from it while others don't. Farmers often don't mulch because it is another cost they incur with time and material which the crop price can't justify but other crops benefit so much that it is a no brainer apart from the fact that modern methods, and different strains of plants are developed to give better crops without it, or at least good crops without doing it. 

Cultivation

I was surprised to learn that cultivation of the soil, breaking up the top surface of the soil, is actually a mulch. A dry soil mulch is almost as effective at retaining moisture as applying a straw or hay mulch. In some tests doing either would keep 17 or 18% moisture at a depth of 6 inches. A mulch of either type stops or slows down evaporation of moisture from the soil by providing a barrier between the air and the moist soil. This is beneficial providing there isn't too much moisture for the particular crop. If there is too much then you would want some to evaporated. Some plants do not want or need a top mulch of straw either because it makes no difference in some cases or because a top mulch may keep the moisture too high and effect the leaves or stems. A top mulch may also harbour insects and slugs or bacteria / disease which obviously wouldn't be good but in general a mulch keeps moisture in so is a good thing but in wet seasons may have a negative effect. 

The problem with cultivating the top few inches for a mulch is that it can damage roots. Traditionally the benefit of mulching in this way with some crops out weighs the damage of roots but only from a commercial point of view since any root damage is normally a bad thing and better crops can be obtained by cultivating at the correct depth as to cause no damage. If cultivation isn't deep enough to be an effective mulch it can still be beneficial but breaking the compacted top surface to allow drainage and also kill weeds.

Whether cultivating the top soil to form a mulch or laying straw as a mulch there are many benefits, stopping a top crust from forming, preventing weeds, and keeping in moisture as well as allowing the soil to breath. 

The home gardener should be mulching with either method or both but should also read up as to what crops benefit the most so as to work out whether the effort and expense is worth while. In some circumstances not mulching or removing a mulch may also be beneficial. As with anything there isn't a hard and fast rule that always applies.

A lot can be learnt by going back in time and seeing how things used to be done and why but also learning why something isn't done. Just because something isn't done by commercial organisations doesn't mean that it isn't worth the home gardener doing it, just that it doesn't always make commercial sense which is a totally different aspect.   

Is Permaculture Something New?

Permaculture

While spending a fair few days ploughing through Google searching for information, especially blogs, recently trying to learn a bit more about vegetable growing, especially using this new-ish thing called Permaculture and coming across terms like Bio-Diverse Intensive Growing, Poly-Culture, No Dig, Forest Gardens, perennial vegetables, sustainability and all the other associated terms that seem to crop up, I began to get some Deja-Vu feelings.

Blog after blog, article after article, the people who seem to be interested in this subject, the people who are either wanting to take Permaculture ideas on board and those who practice it all tend to fit into the same few pigeon holes if I was to label those people. 

In general, Permaculturalists, if that is the correct term, seem to be interested in wildlife, conservation, they are frugal, enjoy a simpler life, like to grow organic food, generally not wealthy - indeed often at the poorer end of society, want to work with nature, looking to plant vegetables and other plants together rather than beds of single crops, often owning chickens or other small groups of animals and a few other generalizations I could mention. All of which sounds a bit familiar.

Cottages and Cottage Gardens

Over the years Cottages have come to mean different things. More recently a cottage is a small dwelling without land, normally in the country, or sometimes nothing more than a holiday home but in times gone by, before the Enclosure Acts, Cottages were actually defined as a dwelling with land. Often the land was between 1 and 4 acres. During Elizabethan times a cottage had to have at least 4 acres. Before that in medieval times it wasn't necessarily a small place but more of a small farm.  All in all, traditionally, Cottages and the romantic idea of the cottage garden has been somewhere to grow food and animals for food. The idea you may have about a cottage garden being mainly of flowers, often untidy, is also a more recent thing when people didn't have to grow their own food because as time has gone on more people could afford to buy it rather than work the land.

Through most of British history, middle ages onwards, up until relatively modern times, Cottage owners, Cotters, dare I use the term Cottagers, had to use their land, the Cottage Garden, to produce their food.

Cottage Gardens had to use all available space to grow food with flowers mainly there to bring in insects and pollinators so the crops could grow otherwise they will have been herbs for flavour or for medicinal purposes. Flowers would have been inter-planted with vegetables or visa-versa. Isn't this Poly-Culture? Fruit trees will have had flowers and vegetables under planted which sounds to me a bit like a forest garden. Cottage garden owners would have had to use the land sustainably, mend and make do, often with ailments which made digging difficult or impossible. They must have recycled their own kitchen waste and used the chicken and animal dung as compost and fertilizer, they must have observed nature in their own environment and put it to good use.

In so many ways the original cotters, cottagers, were the permaculturalists of their day.

I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing new about permaculture apart from sound bites and fancy new terms. It's more of a way for people to reject the modern way and return to a simpler more sustainable lifestyle.

I'm not putting it down, far from it, I've found my own perspective on it that is acceptable to me and therefore I've found another route into learning and adopting it which I find easier. I've also come to realise that everyone who adopts a permaculture way of life does it their own way.  Understanding that Permaculture is more a lifestyle rather than a new way of doing something has been a bit of a eureka moment.

More Seeds Sown and Sea Buckthorn

Today I managed to sow a row of Spring Onions, Pak Choi and Chinese Kale in the main vegetable bed. Another job that needed doing.

Pak Choi (Shanghai)

I'm not too sure whether the Pak Choi will work outside unprotected but like everything it will be an experiment. I've no idea about the flavour but if Tesco's are selling it then it has obviously become more popular and is supposed to be good in salads and stir fries and I think maybe a good addition to the vegetable patch as it'll give us some variety since I have normally stayed away from  growing "foreign" veg but if we are to move into being as self sufficient as possible then we need as many things as possible that can be grown all year round.  I've read different names for Pak Choi and there appears to be various different varieties but often it appears to be called Bok Choy or Chinese Cabbage with some saying it needs to be grown under cloches and others saying it is easy to grow with no other mentions of care.

The seed packet says that it needs to be kept moist otherwise a dry spell will cause it to bolt but it also says that you can and should pick the baby leaves to encourage growth and goes on to mention that it can be cut up to 4 times and will re-grow. I don't know if this means the leaves you pick will re-grow or wether it will re-grow if you pick all the leaves in one go. Time will tell I'm sure.

Spring Onions (White Lisbon)

Spring Onions have always failed when I have tried them. I presume something eats them or maybe I forget they are Spring type and leave them to become big Onions but hopefully by writing what I have planted and where I'll remember this time. It says on the packet that these are quick growing and if you sow them in October they will be ready by March/April - that doesn't sound quick to me. Anyway, another vegetable for a stir fry or salad and sandwiches. I have sown these in between the rows of Durham Early Cabbage simply to cram a bit more out of that bed.

Chinese Kale (Kailaan)

Something else I've never grown before but once again the packet says the flowering stems and buds can be used is salads and stir fries. The larger stems need peeling and cooking. Other thing tried for variety and once again sown within the Durham Early Cabbage and White Sprouting Broccoli to make more use of the bed. Sowing was supposed to be up until early autumn but it is still mild and worth a try.

I think I'll try sowing a few of each in the greenhouse as well later today.

Bedfordshire Champion Onions

I had found an old seed packet, pre opened and 5 years old. It says to sow in Spring but I've sown 3 seed trays worth in the greenhouse just to see what happens. If they grow then I may be able to transplant them outside in the spring. I've bought a new packet of these ready for the Spring so this opened packet wasn't doing any good just sitting in a box so it has to be worth the experiment.

Lambs Lettuce (Corn Salad, Valerianella locusta) 

I have sown 2 medium sized pots of Lamb's Lettuce since when reading loads of other people's blogs I keep coming across it. Apparently it has a nutty flavour and can be grown all year round although it is an annual. It has many nutrients and goes well in a salad.  According to Wikipedia it has been commercially available in the UK since the 1980's but has been eaten, or foraged, for centuries before and is popular with the French. Good enough for me then.

I have read that it can be very invasive and in the Spring when I sow some outside I think it may be a contender for being confined to a small raised bed.

Cauliflower

Cauliflower has to be one of my favourite vegetables and I don't remember growing it before so a couple of seed trays were sown in the greenhouse. The packet said it could be sown in the Spring or indoors during October. I'm hoping I can grow enough of these to freeze a load so we can eat them during the year.

Mizuna Lettuce

Another one I've not tried before but it said can be sown in the Autumn and has a peppery taste. It follows the salad and stir fry theme I seem to have today and will hopefully open my eyes to yet another variety. 

Sea Buckthorn

 I was reading Deano's blog post http://sustainablesmallholding.org/diploma/project-7/ about a Chicken scavenging design  and in there a comment someone made mentioned Sea Buckthorn being something chickens liked to eat and since one of my duties as a Wildlife Trust volunteer is to help manage the Sea Buckthorn I thought I'd pinch a few tiny plants when we had to remove them from an area. Normally the bushes are burnt but I pulled 4 or 5 tiny plants that came off of runners and have stuck them into pots of compost. Hopefully they have enough roots on them to take if they are kept well watered. It must be the wrong time of year to try this but if successful then I was hoping to grow them on a bit before adding them to the chicken run. Hopefully the chickens can supplement their diet, save us money on chicken food and give them a more varied environment. Deano had commented that his soil wasn't right for Sea Buckthorn but I think if they take then I will dig a patch and make the soil right, which is light well drained and sandy.

Sea Buckthorn can be a very invasive bush but if it did grow too well and try and take over then all that is needed is cutting back or digging bits up which isn't the end of the world considering the field would benefit from this pretty bush plus the branches and leaves are very good at fire starting so I could even get a supply of kindling.  The Buckthorn has male and female plants so fingers crossed I have some female plants, if not I'll have to try again in the Spring.

The berries are very popular with birds which will help make the field a wildlife haven plus they can be used for food so they seem like a good plant to me.

Jobs that needed doing

Jobs that needed doing

One of the jobs I've been meaning to do for a while is finish digging the main Autumn vegetable bed and move a Raspberry plant as well as plant an Apple Mint that we picked up in a local community market. One of our biggest problems when buying plants is that they stay in their pots until it is too late. Recently we have taken the decision to be more systematic about planting things out as keeping them in a pot means watering gets forgotten and the plants normally die. At some stage I end up putting the pots outside the greenhouse with the good intention of planting but they get eaten by rabbits or fall over in the wind. Not any more - hopefully. The Apple Mint went into a hole cut in the grass and left to go as rampant and wild as it wants. I did the same with the Raspberry that was in the vegetable bed. 

The bed I wanted to dig also had a tomato plant in that I put outside because the pot it was in was far too small. The plant was about 1ft tall when I moved it in about June and it flourished amazingly well. It was a plum variety and I didn't expect it to do well outdoors but we have been picking ripe tomatoes from it for ages and a fair few but it's vines had gone along the ground, around each other and made a real bushy knot. I knew there were still a few ripe tomatoes on it so I picked them, and ate most of them there and then, but amongst all the foliage there must have been 100 or more green and semi ripe tomatoes. You can see the pile I made with them, plus a load, may be 30 or more that fell off which I left to dig into the bed plus a load more still on the plant which will go into the compost heap. I intend weighing the bag of green tomatoes and will leave them in the greenhouse to ripen. I think there must be around 2KG of ones that seemed good enough and big enough to keep. That's just off of the one plant.

Something I will definitely do next year is try and plant many more tomato plants outside but next time I must make a cordon for them to grow up.  

I eventually double dug the bed over and tried to protect it from the Rabbits - spot the professional fence. Although no dig may be the answer the fact is our soil is such heavy clay that it needs breaking up so I took the decision that I would double dig every bed, adding manure, sand etc the first season and then I'll have the option of trying no dig in the future. The beds are approximately 24" deep with big drainage channels around them. The channels are for 2 reasons, 1 being it is a weed block and the 2nd is that the soil that comes out of the channel goes into the bed which then raises it. Double dug raised beds. It seemed like a good idea. These were exceptionally difficult to dig in the spring and summer, so much so I couldn't get enough dug for the number of vegetables we wanted to plant so I'm hoping to do much more digging during the autumn and winter after rain since it may be messy but so much softer. Broccoli and Cabbage and Spring Onion will go into this last bit of the main bed.

 

Durham Early Cabbage

This Cabbage is supposed to be about the earliest large cabbage you can get, that's the claim, and although I'd like to say I chose it I didn't. It's all the Garden Centre had left yesterday so I bought a dozen plug plants and have managed to get them in the ground. My own cabbage was decimated by the Small and Large White Butterfly.

 

White Sprouting Broccoli

Nigel Slater wrote in the Guardian a few years ago about how good the White Sprouting Broccoli was so once again I'd have been happy if I chose to buy these but once again I didn't. Small Whites etc got my Purple Sprouting Broccoli. Out of all the veg as plug plants the garden centre had this and the Durham Early were all they had and so I bought a dozen of both.

 

Green  Alkanet

Green Alkanet

In the Spring I scattered many packets of Wild Flowers over the banks of the pond. I of course didn't write down what was in the packets but around 30 different flowers is what I seem to remember. Only a few came up, maybe 6 or 7 different ones but I do remember there being Forget-me-nots although I didn't think they came up and also they are supposed to be biennial. I was expecting, if they had worked to perhaps show themselves next spring but today I think I found a few, shown in the picture. I thought that they flower in April / June time but hey-ho.
Update 25th October
These turned out to be Green Alkanet and not Forget-Me-Nots as previously thought. Another Wild Flower learned :) 

 

Unidentified Flower

I am trying to learn how to identify Wild Flowers but today I found one that I can't find a reference to on the Internet and it doesn't appear to be in my Wild Flower books. I have no idea what it is although it's very hairy and has 4 petals with it's sepals well extended. Purple blue in colour with a white centre. The flower is where I shook all the Wild Flower seed so it is unlikely to have come from anywhere else. Before the pond was there it was simply a field which was well trampled by a horse for 14 years. It must have come from a packet of seed.

Any ideas? Clicking on the photos will enlarge them.
Update 25th October as per the comment below these have been confirmed as Borage for 2 reasons, firstly, a second person said it was Borage but secondly Borage does do this as is shown by the fact another flower opened on the same plant but with 5 petals :) It's hard enough for me to identify Wild Flowers as it is let alone when they don't know themselves what form to take!

More Wild Flowers Planted and Sown

Fritillary

After reading about how rare in the wild Fritillaries are I decided to buy another dozen bulbs and planted them in front of my compost heap. These ones were mixed purple and white, as opposed to just white that I planted the other day. In the wild there are only about 30 sites where these can be found in any quantity and if they are that rare then I thought I needed some more. 

I've never seen these before, apart from in pictures, but they seem an essential ingredient to our part of the field we want to turn into a wild flower meadow. In the wild it likes to grow in meadows that flood and stay damp and my field certainly floods, or has done in the past, and because it is mainly a heavy clay soil should stay at least moist in the dry months 4 plus inches deep.

Pheasant's Eye

While browsing 3 different garden centres I noticed that Unwins have a wild flower seed group and I managed to spot a packet of Pheasant's Eye seed. I've started to learn and identify wild flowers this year but my memory isn't as good as it ought to be but seeing the name rung some bells and on getting home I'm pleased to find that Pheasant's Eye ( Adonis annua) is another endangered flower and is on the Bio-Diversity Action Plan. I mean pleased that I spotted the seeds rather than pleased this flower is endangered :) I sprinkled these about and to be honest I can't remember exactly where, not even which side of the field I sprinkled them, so I'm looking forward to some of these popping up in the summer. It says on the packet that they can be sown outdoors in October but they may need a little protection. I'm just going to let nature take it's course.

Teasel

I have Gold Finches in the garden, sometimes a small flock, and I find them one of the prettiest birds there are and have been meaning to get some Teasel seeds for a while. I keep meaning to just pull a head off of a wild one next time I go for a walk but it never happens so again I was very pleased to see these seeds for sale. I scattered some of the seed along the hedge, sunny side, and a few elsewhere, plus I decided to sow some in the greenhouse just in case. To many people these are pure weeds but I don't mind the look of them and they can be quite pretty and should give the field some more height, which it is lacking. The big benefit of course is that the Gold Finches love them.

Anemone Bordeaux

I also picked up some Anemone bulbs, I don't know why, and I think I may have spotted a bulb next to this one and picked up the packet by mistake. Anyway, I now have some of these which are described as "ground cover" and I planted them but once again I can't remember where. Probably in the pile of earth which I keep putting upturned turfs on when I want to get rid of some. They look a bit like Poppies, although they are bulbs. Any flower is a nice flower but I doubt that these are native.

Field Scabious

There was a packet of Field Scabious seed which I picked up, read the back and saw the price. £4.99 for a few seeds of a wild flower! No chance. I'll have to find another source of this flower.

If half of these flowers come up the meadow area will look stunning next year, even more than this year.

It's only October and I'm already inpatient for spring to arrive! I guess that happens the more you get into your garden and vegetables :)

Trees in Autumn

One of the principles of Permaculture is to observe and interact. 

When viewing a simple photo of the start of Autumn I thought about what makes the leaves change colour and this lead to wondering why the same tree species planted together changes leaf colour at different rates. How trees grow is a lot more complex than I am about to portray but for the reason of trying to answer the question of why 3 same trees planted together change colour differently it is sufficient to start the ball rolling.

Marston Vale Forest School 2013

Chlorophyll is responsible for the colour and it is this that enables the tree to take water and Carbon Dioxide from the environment and convert it into sugars needed to grow. As the Chlorophyll diminishes other colour pigments can be seen which give browns, yellows and reds.

I began to think that the amount of Chlorophyll in the leaves may well be directly linked to how healthy the tree is. Those changing colour first may have less Chlorophyll and therefore were perhaps growing slower. If this is the case then perhaps it is an indication of which trees in the garden need more nutrients and minerals or are suffering from competition and need attention or removing.

Some more reading is required. The picture was taken from Marston Vale Forest School