Comparing The Past - February

Comparing The Past - February

It's been three years developing the little field and every so often I like to compare month for month between the years.

Click on images to enlarge.

February 2013

The first year saw flooding.

February 2014

The second year saw trees and a pond plus drainage ditches.

February 2015

The third year saw areas taking shape.

February 2016

The start of the fourth year.












On the enlarged pictures the trees are now getting big enough to see from a distance and there are many lumps and bumps. Bit by bit we are trying to put some height into the field to reduce the wind. Within the last few months a Poly tunnel went in but the wind damaged it and recently some trellis screening went in to protect it (far left with most of it out of view).

The fox has still been an issue for the chickens, well more than an issue, it killed them all, and so better fencing with a better electric fence has just gone in because we took delivery of another 20 chickens this week. The water proof electric fence controller turned out to be not water proof and died. The chicken run has now got 6 ft fences and has been split into 3 pens. Two of which I hope to roof. The theory being that if the fox does get in again chances are it will only get in to one pen before we realise and can react to protect the other chickens quicker.

The drainage ditches are also being redug, because although they work they are slowly filling up and this winter has seen a fair few very boggy patches - no flooding though.

This week I have also ordered 10 Silver Birch, 10 Hazel trees and 10 Sweet chestnut to go mainly around the boundary.  

Still Harvesting Tomatoes

Still Harvesting Tomatoes

It's January 10th and we are still getting ripe tomatoes from the greenhouse. I think the plants are slowly dying, some tomatoes have got black marks and many leaves are now dead, but tomatoes are still ripening! Only 3 frosts this winter so far and one of those was slight.

Amazingly they are also sweet. I think this is largely due to the lack of watering that they have received which has helped concentrate the sugars which would have otherwise been diluted by the water. They are taking a long while to ripen as expected.

Mushrooms and Poly Tunnel

Mushrooms and Poly Tunnel

Earlier on in the year I tried growing mushrooms.

Previous posts:

Mushroom Part 1

Mushroom part 2

I didn't think that the temperature was right and gave up on them but over the last couple of days they have appeared. I say they but more correctly "it" appeared.

One mushroom has grown:

It shows that it worked but hasn't exactly been a great success. I think I'll put the idea of growing mushrooms outdoors to the back of my mind for now :)

The poly tunnel on the other hand is going great. Everything is growing strongly even to the point where a harvest can now be taken from the salad leaves. The Spring Onions have germinated as well as the radish. The garlic, although not showing yet has grown some roots and is about to poke through the soil and the field beans sown in a corner to see if they will fruit earlier than outdoors have started to grow.

(Click to enlarge pictures)

On the left the Oak leaf lettuce and Mizuna are going very well as is the beetroot, on the right the Chard and Pak Choi are also growing very strongly.

In the middle the Spinach, Radish, Garlic, Spring Onion, Strawberry and Chinese Cabbage are doing just as well.

What is immediately noticeable is that none of the leaves have been nibbled so everything is looking perfect. The Cape Gooseberry has even flowered. It's only been a few weeks since we put the Poly Tunnel in (see: Poly Tunnel Post) but the extra warmth and humidity has made a big difference as has the fact that it hasn't needed watering much since the humidity and lack of a drying wind has kept the soil moist. The roof of the Tunnel collects water droplets and automatically waters the beds as well, which is a nice bonus.

Today has been a rather breezy day but the Tunnel's plastic isn't noticing the wind much which bodes well for the much windier days ahead. This week the max temp reached 30 deg C and the minimum went down to 1.2 deg C so no frosty conditions inside the tunnel even though a few people have commented that they have had a ground frost in the area. It is now noticeable that the day time sun is not effective enough to warm the soil to keep the night time temp higher than the outside by the end of the night and I think that after a few hours of darkness any residual heat has dissipated by midnight.

My next job, and probably tonight, will be to put a heater inside set to the anti-frost setting, on for 2 hours from midnight to see if that will keep the inside temp a degree or two above the outside temp. The tunnel is probably too big for the heater to raise the temperature enough so that it can turn off the heat. If it fails to heat up quickly and be able to turn off then it will be a waste of time as the cost of the electricity will be a waste of energy but it's worth a test. A 2 kW heater on for 2 hours is going to cost 26p a night but if it can manage to do it's job and only be on for 45 minutes then at under 10p a night it might just extend the growing season for a few more weeks before the proper cold weather sets in. Once the proper cold spell starts the idea of a heater becomes silly, price and energy wastage wise but if the plants can just be allowed to grow for another 2 weeks then the amount of salad leaves we get and can sell will make it worth while. The same will apply at the end of the winter. If we can get the temperature up by just a degree or 2 during the night late February and the day time sun starts to heat the tunnel then we might get a months head start on some crops for next year. If we can sell the leaves (as we currently do) a couple of weeks later and a few weeks earlier than the other Alford Country Market growers then we'll have one month per year being the only one selling these products and therefore no competition.

One of the problems with selling home grown produce is that when winter starts the customers will be forced back into the super markets to buy their greens for juicing. By postponing that by a few weeks you can keep them loyal for longer and they can keep their habit of buying from us. By starting to sell the greens earlier in the new year using a poly tunnel we will have more time to pull them back in and get them back in the habit of buying locally again before the main season starts.I can see the possibility that once the regular customers go back to the supermarket over winter they may not start to come back to the country market by the time we start selling again but if we have some of what they want before the start of the main season we can start to grab them back one by one slowly so they are already on the look out and thinking about the country market when our main produce starts coming through. Instead of being a slow start to the main season we may be able to get up to full speed selling quicker....anyway, if we don't try we'll never find the thing that works for us :)

Still hoping that the money and time spent on the poly tunnel will pay big dividends.    

Poly Tunnel!

Poly Tunnel

After years of wanting one but not liking the eye sore that they can be nor the expense we finally bit the bullet and got a very cheap one. So cheap we wouldn't be losing much if it didn't last or ended up not being what we wanted.

We've looked at ones costing over £1000 but this one is £200 reduced down to £139. Surely too cheap to last or be any good? As it turns out it is remarkably good for the money structure wise but did need some extra support to stiffen it up. It is 6m long by 3m wide by 6m high (19.6ft by 9.8ft by 6.5ft). Would have been nice to have a taller one but then again you always want bigger.

Plastic cover wise only time will tell but it is supposed to be UV protected and new covers are £60.

We didn't have a good place to put it so it went where it was assembled and we'll move the path instead.

I had to dig a trench to sit the metal frame into and then peg down the frame. The turf that came out of the trench was then placed on the outside over the plastic skirt to hold it down and stop the wind from blowing it away.

Three beds were dug, 0.5 wide on the sides (they look smaller in the picture) and 1m wide bed in the middle. At the end there is space for a couple of chairs and I intend on having a grape vine at the end in the centre so it can travel the length on the tunnel. The hay actually covers the edges of the beds deliberately to help stop the grass.

A thick layer of hay to kill the grass, a load of manure and we're done. About a day to do.

Finally a load of salad plants go in, which have been waiting for a home, a few posts to stabilise the structure and the centre ones (a couple missing in the picture) have string attached from them to the roof for tomato plants to grow up and they also anchor the structure more. I'll add wooden edges to the beds during the next week to make them into raised beds. 

With the door closed, today, which was over cast for 90% of it, the temp rose at one point to over 40 deg C, opening the door reduced it to 23 deg C while the temp outside hit 18 deg C. I dread to think how hot it could get in the height of the summer!. Last night the outside temp went down to 9.8 C and the minimum temp in the poly tunnel went down to 10.7 C which was the result of 4 or so hours of heating from the sun in the evening when the tunnel was first up so tunnel made 1 deg of difference. 

So the tunnel made 5 C difference during the day and 1 C during the night to the minimum temps. A small heater during the coldest winter nights (or water butt inside) and we might be able to avoid all but the worst frosts.

Planted so far are:

Wild Rocket

Spinach

Ruby Chard

Lettuce

Pak Choi
Chinese Cabbage
Mizuna

Beetroot to see if they grow.

Hopefully we can have salad and leafy greens during the winter and the green house can be freed up for seedlings but these are just planted now in the hope they will grow. Really the tunnel is for next spring but we couldn't resist planting it now.

Just need to cross fingers with the wind and hope the plastic doesn't go brittle with severe frosts and cold spells but if we hadn't of got it we'd never know if a cheap one would work!

Update

Raised bed borders added plus filled up beds with manure, soil and compost.

Added some field beans to see if they fruit earlier than outdoors plus a load of garlic.

Added a small section of staging and strengthened the structure at the back and front against wind problems.


Also sown or planted
Radish "French Breakfast"
Ramrod Spring Onion
Cape Gooseberry that was grown last year and survived the winter, then this summer and is still going, small and pot bound and neglected, but now planted in the soil as it has a few fruits on. 

A Goal Reached!

A Goal Reached!

Back in the Spring I was hoping to harvest 250 to 300kg of produce. I thought that was possibly going to be to upper limit for this year but today I totalled up the last few days harvesting and found that the 300 kg has been reached!

We have done barely any shopping for the last month, literally emptying the cupboards and fridge of food and only popping out to buy milk and peanut butter for sandwiches etc which has forced us to have far more vegetable dinners and the odd bit of meat from the freezer. I've even been getting more adventurous with the cooking and roast vegetables are becoming common place.

We bought half a pig from a friend earlier in the year and these chops were the last of the pig. It's been the best pork we have eaten for years. 4 of our own apples chopped with 3 of our onions and cooked in apple juice.

Part roasted small potatoes and whole onions, then carrots, courgette, chopped red and white onion with a few cloves of our garlic, a few tomatoes and then finish roasting. Very nice. All our own grown.

Today I picked 2 sweetcorn, simply boiled and ate corn on the cob. The picture doesn't do the corn much justice but it was very nice. Also a surprise because we didn't think they would ripen and become ready with the lack of sun but the last few days of sunshine have brought them on.

We have never had a lot of luck with sweetcorn and this year was looking the same, planted too late and then had not enough sun but it now looks like we'll get a full harvest of about 30 cobs. Not good enough quality to sell as there are patches of corn that haven't puffed out but perfectly good enough to eat! These 2 were growing 20 minutes before I had eaten them - it doesn't get fresher than that.

With squashes, leeks, a load more tomatoes (fingers crossed they ripen), kale, spinach and some parsnip still to come I think it highly likely that we'll surpass 350 kg. There are even a couple of dozen apples still on the trees, raspberries still being harvested and courgettes in full flow and I think the caterpillars have left us some sprouts, it could even be 400 kg. Next years target is going to need to be 550 kg plus.

A fair few failures this year. A mole went through the carrots, swede and French beans as they germinated. The runner beans were gotten by slugs as where the cauliflowers not to mention a whole bed of onions just not growing at all. We forgot to sow beetroot and radish which was daft!

As a friend once said....

"we may be poor, but we eat like kings"

The harvest so far is at http://ourlittlefield.blogspot.co.uk/p/produce.html

New seeds and planning early

New seeds and planning early

We've been planning for the spring because most years we leave it late and when the time comes we forget to do or buy all the things we wanted to. Now, as soon as I thing of something to try, I'm buying it! Just have to remember to be organised enough not to lose them.

Lemon grass seeds. Something different to try. 

Lettuce Saladin seeds.

Broccoli green sprouting - this and the lettuce came free with other seeds.

Bolt hardy Beetroot - lots of seeds because we never have enough seed.

Fennel Florence - we already have the other type of fennel.

Strawberry Spinach. Spinach sells well and we eat a fair amount. This type not only has edible leaves but also edible berries. The berries are said to be a bit bland but as a different variety it may open up other possibilities and may prove interesting.

Climbing Strawberries - the idea being they will extend the season and produce a lot more fruit for the space. Could also be an interesting garden feature.

Another plan is to get a Poly-tunnel in the next few weeks to extend the season and try other plants. Lemon grass won't survive outside but it might just work in a Poly-tunnel, although may still require protecting, and may be able to stay in situ. The problem with the greenhouse, apart from being a bit small for us, is that everything goes into pots and requires watering or feeding. The Poly-tunnel will allow us to still grow in the soil where watering isn't so much of an issue but also free up the greenhouse for seedlings which may allow us to achieve successive sowing, something we always fail to do partly because the greenhouse is full of tomatoes and there isn't enough room to work in there potting up etc.

This year we weren't geared up for selling enough produce and as the Autumn and Winter approach it is clear that we will be missing out selling produce. Next year we need to scale up more and extend the season at both ends. Better planning and more under cover space will be needed.

The Alford Country Market is proving to be a good place to sell things people can't easily buy elsewhere and speciality produce like Bulb Fennel, Spinach, Lemon Grass, Kale and produce grown without any chemicals is likely to do well.

Autumn Sowing

Autumn Sowing

Normally I'm a little late with sowing in the Autumn but this year I'm ready!

Some field beans are now sown from seed saved from this years crop and I will do more in another week or two.

Two bulbs of Germidour Garlic (red garlic) have gone in. These are large and can be colourful but since each clove is also large I only got about 20 cloves. These are the far side of the leeks.

The other side of the leeks are the field beans, then I've sown a mixture of red, white and golden onions - no names - just a cheap "Wilo" 50 set. I've always been impressed with Wilko Onions but have never known what they are :) probably different every year!

Next to them are 2 beds of Wilko Japanese Onions (100 sets) and last of all, and closest to the camera are another 3 garlic bulbs split into about 50 (didn't count) of Allium Sativum Casablanca. A pinkish garlic.

Hopefully next week I'll get some large white garlic to go in as well as some of this years crop that was saved.

This bed has just been dug over and had potatoes in before. Last year I had placed about 2 feet deep of manure over the entire bed and that seems to have made the soil very workable. Still some clay clods in it but another year or so and I think this bed will have the best soil of the entire field.

The rest of this bed, in front of camera and to the left, still has a squash and a couple of sprouts in it so has been left. Half of it is empty and only had a little manure last year so this part has now had another 4 barrow loads heaped on top and left to rot down for the winter.