the accidental smallholder :: diary archives

Wine, anyone?

Dan had a significant birthday a couple of weeks ago. My sister, getting into the swing of smallholding from a distance, sent him two quince, a spindle tree and two vines - one black, one white. All have been planted - the tree in the hedge, the quince in the orchard and the vines in the fruit bed where the raspberries currently are. The rasps are coming out at the end of this season.

We shall keep you posted of growth and development if we are sober enough.

Garlic, shallots and potatoes

I've finally received and planted the garlic; this is late for us - normally, we'd be looking to plant it before Christmas. However, I'm hoping that it will do fine. The variety is Wight Christo. I've planted three rows of 6 cloves, which will be enough for us. We don't use a huge amount of garlic, really.

I've also got our shallots - two varieties. These are round shallots this year. In previous years, the varieties we've chosen have been the long type. I hope to get them in early March as our soil is quite well drained.

Our seed potatoes are chitting - Anya, Mayan Gold, Desiree and Druid. I don't seem to have very many potatoes this year - although since we're usually struggling to find places to plant them, so maybe that's no bad thing! It's almost certain that I'll buy more sometime - there are so many varieties and I'm a bit of a salesman's dream.

It's nice to feel like the new season is now getting underway - despite the snow!

Pruning

It's been bitterly cold here today, but dry and sunny. Dan donned his comedy hat and headed out to prune the apple and pear trees in the orchard. It's not his favourite job - getting it wrong will impact in yields next year.

We had a good crop of apples this year and the cookers in particular are storing really well. I made an apple and mincemeat crumble today, with real custard. Yummy. So as long as Dan does this year what he did last, we should be OK.

So just the blackcurrants to do now - maybe tomorrow. The rhubarb needs to be lifted and split, but we'll need to wait until the ground thaws before we do that.

New strawberry patch

Dan planted out the new strawberry patch today. The plants were delivered this morning - a special offer from "Grow your own" magazine, I think. There are six each of three varieties - Amelia, Mae and Marshmello. We've planted them in the patio bed on the east side of the house. I hope to plant lettuce between the rows, as they are quite well spaced.

Our existing strawberry patch, Florence and Pegasus, has done well but it's three years old now, so we're moving it to fresh ground with new varieties. The existing patch will crop next year, then be removed. I intend to move the rhubarb into that area, since it will need split - I might invest in some new varieties - then plant new raspberry canes in the current rhubarb patch. The redcurrant, white currant and blueberry will then go where the raspberries currently are, beside the gooseberries and blackcurrants. I might have room for a couple of extra blueberry bushes.

I hope you've followed all this as there will be a quiz at the end...

Comedy Carrot

After an absence of probably several weeks, if not months, here I am back to lend some class and gravitas to the website. In the shape of a comedy vegetable.

I know it's puerile, but it made me laugh.

To quote from Blackadder:

Percy: ...we came across a turnip that was exactly the same shape...as a thingy!

Edmund: ...a "thingy."

Baldrick: ...a great big thingy! It was terrific.

Edmund: Size is no guarantee of quality, Baldrick. Most horses are very well endowed, but that does not necessarily make them sensitive lovers.

Baldrick: I found it particularly ironic, my lord, because I've got a thingy that's shaped just like a turnip!

Tomatoes

We had our first tomatoes yesterday - a few little "Sungold". Delicious!

Raspberries

I've said here before that if I could only grow one fruit, it would be raspberries - and now it's raspberry picking time, I haven't changed my mind.

I was on picking duty yesterday evening - it's really Dan's job but he was away on business- the sun was shining, the raspberries were plump and tasty, the ones damaged by birds were being shared with the hens, who were chooking about my feet, and all was right with the world.

Once I'd finished, I made a few pounds of raspberry jam. Now, my record with raspberry jam is not one to be proud of. Last year, I think I over boiled it (because I was too impatient to let it cool enough to check the set properly) so the jam is like toffee - tasty, but a real jaw breaker. This time, I stuck to the recipe and waited for a bit longer to check the set and it was OK first time. The result - jam-textured jam!! It will still give you dental caries, but it will leave existing filling in your mouth!

I've set aside a jar for The Show in September, unless I make a better batch another day.

Blackcurrant tomorrow!

Clackmannanshire Horticultural Society Show 2008

The above show will take place on Saturday 13th September 2008 in Devonvale Hall, Tillicoultry. It is open to the public from 1pm until 4.30pm. The hall is opposite Sterling Mills and next to Sterling Furniture Warehouse - so if you fancy some retail therapy, you can combine it with a visit to the show.

There are classes for vegetables, flowers and plants, craft, baking and preserves, floral art and photography. There are special classes for children and teenagers and I'm hoping that some of our schools might take part, since some now have vegetable gardens.

I'll certainly be entering something - but it's too early to tell what that will be. Depends on inspiration nearer the time - and the weather.

Weeding for Britain

It's been very warm and sunny here, with short spells of rain - ideal growing conditions, yes. But weeds like it too! Today, we peeled back the net from the brassica bed and spent a merry half hour weeding. Actually, it was quite satisfying, so we did the carrots and the parsnips as well. Then we sowed some runner beans, since the first lot seem to have failed, then some dwarf French Beans as well, since there was a space and we don't have many beans in this year.

Claire gave us a huge courgette last week, so that's been put in plus two rows of peas, to complete the line up.

We had our first new potatoes today - Red Duke of York - and they were lovely.

Our little patio

We have a little patio area under the kitchen window; it faces south east. As well as a slabbed area, there's a bed about this by that. Last year, I had my "Three Sisters" bed there; this year, we've planted potatoes, with lettuce in between the ridges, eight tomato plants and a courgette. Plus a clump of catmint for Cassius.

In pots, we've also got potatoes, which look lovely; tomatoes, cucumber and various herbs, including a lovely rosemary (naturally!) and a bay tree. There is a couple of pots of lavender and a small lilac, which is just coming into flower - when it does, the scent is absolutely beautiful. Finally, there is a pot of "rescued" strawberries, which are just starting to flower.

I'm really pleased with it - the rosemary, the chives, the potatoes and the catmint are flowering, lilacs, blues and pink. It's a lovely place to sit, especially in the morning when it gets the best of the sun. And it should be productive, too, hopefully.

What's happening in the vegetable garden?

Well, quite a lot, really. The weather has been really dry - cold and sunny and very windy.

We've got all our potatoes in - Red Duke of York and Desiree, and Mayan Gold, because I'm a sucker for marketing. We've a few seed potatoes left, but we might find a home for them yet.

Garlic, shallots (Longor and Mikor) and onions (Hercules) are all in, along with a couple of rows of spring onions (White Lisbon) that Dan found lurking in the shed. Leeks (Bandit and Hannibal) are outside in a tray and will be planted out when they are pencil sized. It's a rotten tray (an old cat litter tray) that they are in with no drainage (but it's nice and deep) so we have to keep an eye out for both drought and waterlogging, which is what happened last year and we had no leeks at all.

We've sown beetroot - Forono, which is a cylindrical beet, in one sowing for pickling and two rows of Boltardy for eating fresh. We'll sow another two rows at the start of May, June and July too.

Peas (Greenshaft) are started in guttering in the greenhouse to spite the weevils! Three sowings of two lengths of guttering have been made at two weekly intervals and will be planted out shortly. We'll hoe the soil this week and hopefully, the hens will make short work of any overwintering bugs.

Also in the greenhouse is one gutter of green sprouting calabrese. My record with brassicas is shameful. I've never tried it like this before, so it's about ready to go out now. We'll have to get the fleece ready, or the hens and insects will have a field day. The other brassicas are due to be direct sown in a couple of weeks at the start of May. We prepared half the seedbed this weekend and sowed swedes (Marion) - best keep the sheep off them this year!! Actually, we've sown a few more than usual, for the sheep.

Dan's been busy in the greenhouse - there are four varieties of tomato (Sungella, Gardener's Delight, Sungold and Tamina) doing well. There are 12 of each variety, so we'll probably sell a few. Cucumber (La Diva F1) is up; courgettes (Costa Romanesque) and sweetcorn (Sweet Nugget) are in pots but not showing yet. I have one gutter of cauliflower (Igloo) that I'm growing as mini cauliflower, sown 12th April, but not showing yet. I'm going to do a gutter every couple of weeks - about 8 seeds to each gutter - to avoid a glut. Actually, 4 cauliflowers a week is quite a lot, isn't it?

We've prepared the seedbed for the carrots (Resistafly F1 and Flyaway F1) and should get them sown this week. I would have done them today but poultry plucking took precedence. Again, we're going to sow carrots successionally, under fleece and with coriander to fool the carrot fly!

Finally, there's salad ready in the greenhouse and some herbs (parsley, basil). The outside herbs are coming away fine on the patio, along with some strawberry plants I found discarded but hanging on to life, so they deserved a chance. Hope they show their appreciation appropriately!

The May weekend is a big one for planting and sowing, so hopefully the weather will be kind.

March at TAS video

Messing around with my camera today I did a quick tour of what we're growing at the moment. It was very windy, so sorry for the rubbish sound at the start!

More of these to come, we'll work on the quality...

March at TAS from asmallholder on Vimeo.

Another March, another season starts

It must be a sign of old age. March seems to have come around quicker than ever, and the garden's already coming to life and reminding us that there's lots to be done. We got into the garden for a couple of hours this morning, before the torrential rain came on on, and it was lovely to be out and doing productive stuff again. Although we have pottered over the winter, it's never the same as doing something that has an end product.

I got our tomatoes sown today - Sungold, Gardener's Delight, Sungella and Tamina - and our leeks - Hannibal and Bandit. I added a few articles about growing tomatoes to the site, and plan to do the same with a few of the more popular veg we grow. As the season progresses we'll aim to add more.

The garlic and shallots are in the ground, we've got some mixed salad nearly ready to eat, with more just sown, and last weekend I planted some spuds in compost in big pots, including the Mayan Gold Rosemary persuaded me would live up to the advertising (to do that they'll need to peel and boil themselves).

Rosemary got stuck into the fruit garden, weeding, feeding and mulching, and forking in the manure that mulched the salad and potato bed over winter. The hens were happy to help, turning up enormous numbers of enormous worms.

So here's to a good growing season. As ever we're optimistic about doing better than last year, and hope you do the same. If you're growing anything unusual, or trying something new do let us know, either here or in the forums.

Seed sowing

The weather has been rather horrible here for the last few days (weeks?). I don't mind the cold, but cold, horizontal rain is just too much. However, this afternoon, I was having a wee doze in front of the fire and feeling fed-up when - the sun came out. It was a pretty watery affair but there was definitely some blue sky.

So on went the wellies and off I went to get Smokey. His field is a mudbath so I like to give him a treat by letting him on to our field for a wee while - so he can move about without the perpetual sound of squishing. Anyway, this made him all frisky - that and having his rug off - and he has a good blast around, bucking and carrying on. It's not hard to see how horses mess up the grass real quick - there are holes the sheep could fall down!

I cleaned out the hen ark - found eight eggs - and had a wander round the garden, planning. Then I sowed some "Saladini" sald mix - chicory, endive and something else. The seed tray is on the kitchen windowsill, so we'll see how it does there. Hope Felix doesn't think it's a litter tray!

Apple harvest

We planted our modest orchard 5 years ago now, and this year we've really started to reap the benefits. We got our first ever pears (all three of them!) and the plums are beginning to crop well, but it's the apple trees that are most gratifying.

Our Peasgood Nonsuch and Claygate Pearmain are long gone (bark ravaged by bunnies) but the Sunset, Egremont Russett and Dumelows Seedling are all now well established, and yesterday we harvested their fruit and put them into storage.

We don't have any ddedicated storage for apples, so we begged boxes and trays from the local Sainsbury's, and they very kindly put some aside for us. The unblemished fruit went into the boxes, stacked on shelving in the garage, the small damaged fruit went to the pigs, and the larger damaged fruit into a big "eat-now" bucket. It's eve's pudding tonight and some form of apple dessert every night for a month until they're gone!

I love russett appless, but the flavour of the Sunsets is to die for. They are entirely organic - no spray, no pesticides, no chemical fertilisers - which makes it even more frustrating that at this time of year the supermarkets (at least Tesco where we shop locally) only ever carry one variety of British apple (normally Cox) and a dozen from overseas.

Seed catalogues

Oh, what terrible time wasters these are! And they're starting to arrive already. I dreamed about tomatoes last night, because I was browsing the Thomson and Morgan catalogue in bed. And how they suck you in - during the summer, Dan and I agreed that we woudl be more selective in the species we grew and reduce the number of varieties. We agreed two varieties of potatoes - Red Duke of York and Desiree. Then the catalogues arrive and tempt you with the tastiest, highest yielding, disease resistant varieties, and it's awful hard to resist!

I did grow a variety called "Cara" this year and we had two baked last night. It was a delicious potato, so "Cara"'s back on the list again.

It's a nice day, so I'm going to get out in the garden. Dan's already been out and pruned the cherry and plum trees - and it's only just after 9am. He has a list - if he finishes it, he can watch the football this afternoon. If he's been really good, he can have a beer, too.

Show Day 2007

Well, if Dan was up at dawn fixing the fence, I was up too, collecting entries for the local horticultural show. This is the first year I've shown vegetables, although I've entered preserves and home baking before.

I had planned to enter three jams - strawberry, raspberry and blackcurrant, marmalade, a chutney, a fruit loaf, a traybake, muffins and pancakes. In the end, I didn't enter pancakes (no time to make them this morning) or the traybake (the chocolate brownie stuck to the bottom of the tin, much to Dan's delight). In retrospect, I could probably have salvaged four pieces but it won't go to waste.

I was delighted to get first prize for the fruit loaf, the muffins (although I WAS the only entry) and the blackcurrant jam. I was also pleased to get second for the marmalade and third for the strawberry jam. My chutney was unplaced (although that MIGHT have been because I forgot to name it) as was my raspberry jam, which is never great (tastes OK but odd texture)

I wanted to enter a marrow in the weight class. I've never grown marrows and I thought I had two that were a pretty good size. Dan thought they were too small. In the end, we got third, although Dan reckoned first and second were courgettes not marrows.

Our mini tomatoes picked up a first in quite a big class (well, about 8 entries, maybe). They did look lovely! Our three stalks of rhubarb were second (of two) in the quality class - I didn't prepare them properly, but I'll know next year. Our runner beans and coloured potatoes both took third in their classes. The first and second entries in the potatoes were absolutely beautiful. Next year, I'm going to grow some potatoes in pots and see if I can get them as shiny and perfect.

The flower entries were well down, probably due to the weather. Some of the vegetables were stunning - some folk really out a lot of work into them - but again, I thought the entries were down. The floral art and the handicrafts sections also seemed to have fewer entries this year. However, the Society has a new committee, so maybe they will be able to bring about a resurgence.

The show was held this year in the Devonvale Hall, in Tillicoultry.It was built for the community by the family that owned Devonvale papermill (now Sterling Furniture Warehouse). Although owned by Clackmannanshire Council, the Hall is leased to a community trust. It's a lovely hall and seemed to be well run - if the noticeboard was anything to go by, it's busy, too.

Beans

I can't believe that I haven't posted anything since 18th August - shocking! The weather's been better since the schools went back on the 20th August - typical. It's kind of autumnal now; some of the trees are changing colour and it's quite cool tonight. Hope it kills the midges. I've always told Dan that I won't live anywhere other than Scotland (Sean Connery take note!) - but the midges are soooo bad just now, I'd be tempted by a midge free zone. Poor Smokey is eaten alive.

Anyway, beans. We have NEVER had a crop of runner beans like we have had this year. The variety is Czar, which has a white flower - whether it is that or the season, but there are loads. It's the Horticultural Society show this weekend, so I'm planning to find six good beans and enter them. And a marrow - in the weight rather than quality class. And rhubarb, in quality class not weight. I don't really know what the criteria are, but we'll give it a go.

My pa-in-law tells me that if I let the beans go, they become butter beans, so I might try that. Inadvertantly, if nothing else.

Cabbages and cauliflower

As you will know, I have taken a (comparatively) more active role in the vegetable gardening this year because Dan has had less time than previously. I got terribly tense about the brassicas - not really sure why, except that the plants I grew from seed looked pretty pathetic.

I had a plan involving mini cauliflower, cabbage and three varieties of sprouting broccoli. I managed to mix up the cabbage and cauliflower seedlings - I've planted them out but won't know which is which until the heads form (if they do). I also started the broccoli in trays in the greenhouse. I don't knwo if I used the wrong compost or what but they were just embarrasingly pathetic. In the end, they went in the compost and I sowed the seeds direct. I've now got several rows of healthy looking plants, but I don't know if I sowed too late to get anything useful from them. I'll just have to be patient (not my strong point) and wait and see.

Part of the bed went unused this year - for the reasons above. It did grow a great crop of weed though. Today, I pulled them out - very therapeutic. The soil was lovely - black, friable and full of worms. I think we'll sow some green manures this year - Dan's perusing the choice just now. He's also looking for something to sow in the pigs pens when they become vacant. The grazing rye was OK but there are lots of options. We've got a bit of ground to reseed so we're going to use a grass / herbal mix developed for goats - but I'm sure the sheep (and the rabbits!) will love it!

Pickling and stuff

It's piddling rain here today. The hills have disappeared in a shroud of cloud. On the bright side. it's not cold and it's given me an opportunity to try out the Driza-bone coat that I bought in Australia! Dan and I took the dogs for a long walk this morning and then had a couple of hours in the garden - well, we were wet anyway. Dan was clearing a stoney part of the field so we can level it with topsoil and reseed it. I lifted the rest of the beetroot and weeded the brassica bed.

We've had the best crop of beetroot ever. We sowed two varieties - Boltardy and Forono. Forono is a cylindrical beet which I think is really good for pickling. In fact, I'm pickling both today. The pigs get the leaves, which they love. I've just taken the beetroot out of the oven; once it's cool enought to handle I'll remove the skins, slice and jar then prepare the vinegar, pour over and seal. Easy peasy.

I've also pickled some pears today. They're nice with cold meats and cheese. I bought pears for this - the four on our tree are for eating, if we get them before the wasps and other pear predators. In the past, I've used the recipe in Delia's Christmas book but this time (shock, horror) I'm using one from an old copy of "Country Living" magazine. They should be kept for a month before eating, so I'll have to wait to see how they do.

Just the shallots to go now! Oh, and the chutney...

Three sisters' bed

The three sisters' bed is growing well. The runner beans are cropping well, much to Dan's Mum's delight. The sweetcorn is growing but I think some of it may be too shaded by the beans to ripen, even if cobs form. The marrow, courgette, squash and pumpkin are all growing, but I think it's almost impossible to fail with these plants.

It also seems to be Cassius's preferred spot for hiding rabbit remains. Both dogs were going mad to get in there today - Meg was nearly strangled by the beans - then Tess appreared with a scraggy bit of rabbit skin (Cass doesn't leave much) and shot off down the field with Meg in hot pursuit.

However, apart from hiding grisly remains, it does look very nice, too.

Onions, garlic and shallots

It's been a lovely day here today, as was yesterday, so I've lifted all the garlic, onions and shallots and put them to dry in the sun. This involves quite a lot of our garden furniture so if you're coming to visit, bring your own chair! Of course, I had the hens helping me to clear the bed, so I wasn't lonely.

A significant number of the onions show white rot, so these have been discarded for burning. However, there's still a reasonable crop. My vegetable book says not to grow onions on that land for eight years, so I'll need to think about that. The shallots and the garlic don't seem to be affected, fortunately.

The shallots have done well - so Dan can get pickling this weekend. Peeling the shallots is mind-bending; given the reduced number of onions, I might keep some shallots unpickled. We planted four varieties of garlic and the yields look pretty good - the elephant garlic has lived up to its name.

The bed that the onions etc were in this year will have peas, beans and carrots next year, so I'll have to decide what to do with the bed now. I don't know whether to sow a green manure or mulch it with horse poo or compost. Decisions, decisions. I'll see what Dr Hessayon says!

Our five compost bins are full. They really need to be emptied and turned and the useable stuff put to use. I cleaned out the hens this morning and was carefully dividing the hemp between bins, wherever there was a wee bit space. A(nother) job for Dan, I think.

The fruit garden

The fruit garden is now finished for the year. I picked the last of the white currants yesterday and froze them. They look like pearls (or fish eggs, depending on how romantic you're feeling). They're good in summer pudding but I haven't found any other use for them.

We've had good crops this year, especially gooseberries. Dan cut back the raspberry canes last weekend and I tied them in. This is one of my favourite jobs because it makes it nice and tidy! We've mulched the bed with comfrey, of which we have LOADS (both barrels are full). The goosegogs, currants and strawberries will be pruned later on.

I made strawberry jam yesterday - with bought strawberries, I confess. The last lot I made was such a firm set it was like strawberry toffee. THis lot has a nice set but is a bit scummy and the fruit has come to the top. Tastes OK but not "show quality" so if anyone has tips for eliminating scum and floating fruit, I'd be glad to hear them - before 9th September, which is "show day"!

Strawberry madness

I'm away in London at the moment, and since I was out somewhere nice for lunch I've just grabbed a sandwich from Marks and Spencer for my supper. (As an aside having access to M&S is a luxury, since Alloa doesn't have one and isn't likely to for some time. Their food is quite expensive, but it is pretty darned tasty.)

Anyway, they had strawberries at half price so I bought a punnet, half for after my sarnie and half for breakfast tomorrow. I didn't check where they were produced, totally assuming that they'd be British.

Well, I'm back at my hotel tucking into them only to discover they are from the USA! And were air-freighted!

I'm absolutely staggered by this - M&S used to have a reputation for supporting British producers in all aspects of their business - and here we are in July, when most British strawberry growers will be approaching peak production, and M&S are flying fruit thousands of miles across the Atlantic. I despair. It's not even as if they taste that good...

The garden delivers!

Hip hooray! This weekend, we've had new potatoes, peas, broad beans, gooseberries and raspberries from the garden. Oh, it was lovely.

The goosebarries have gone mad - we've NEVER had a crop like this before. We did manure the bed this year, so that's probably what it was but it's a bumper crop and huge berries, to boot. Lorna and I finished the gooseberry crumble tonight for tea.

We had fresh raspberries on our Bran Flakes this morning, too. What luxury!

We've got wee, tiny courgettes and the tomatoes are starting to fruit - so small I needed Claire to point them out to me!! Dan got the squashes and pumpkins out yesterday, into the three sisters bed (in the rain). It's sunny today but blowing a gale and it's not very warm. Still, it keeps the midges away!

Planting plan progresses

Well, the implementation of the planting plan has progresed this week. The weather has been dry, sunny for the most part and warm during the day. It's been windy here, but it's always windy here.

It's amazing how much you can get done with a couple of hours concentrated effort. Dan and I spent Tuesday morning in the gardena nd got loads done. I get less done on my own because I get distracted - I take Smokey a carrot; decide to tidy the garage a bit; sweep up and so on. It's mostly productive in a way (or so I tell myself).

We spread some manure that wasn't well enough rotted, so we're having to remove it, mix it with horse poo and leave it to mulch under black plastic until the autumn. This is annoying, because it's extra work. However, we live and learn.

The onions (Sturon) went in early in the week. This was a mindless task although I got better at it as I wnet on and got a system sorted out. Preparing the ground properly helped too - trying to poke those wee onion sets into big clumps of earth was hopeless!!

The tomatoes seem to be doing OK, as are the cucumbers and courgettes. The aubergines have taken ages to show and look pretty pathetic so far. The peas and beans in the guttering have done well and we've planted some out. The broad beans are in with the early potatoes (Orla) in an attempt at companion planting. Some of the peas are in and some will go in this week. We direct sowed two rows at the same time as sowing two rows in guttering, so we'll see if there is any difference in performance. I've sown spinach between the rows of peas.

The climbing french beans are in guttering and ready to go out this weekend. I've just sown runner beans in the same way (Czar) and plan to use these in my Three Sisters bed.

I direct sowed beetroot yesterday - six rows of Forono, which is a cylindrical beet, for pickling and two rows of Boltardy, which I plan to sow successionally, for salads and roasting. In the greenhouse, I started cauliflower (Igloo) in modules - only nine as again, I plan to sow successionally to avoid a glut.

Our salad is looking awful. The stuff in pots in the greenhouse looks great. The stuff in the box and sink outside looks sick. I'll give it a dose of comfrey tomorrow.

So it's all go - and a big weekend ahead - potatoes, carrots and coriander to go in. And that's all I can remember this late at night.

Easter break

I'm on holiday for two weeks - I only work when the schools are in session. In addition to my springcleaning, I'm getting on in the garden. The weather has been brilliant - warm, sunny, bit of a breeze (just right for drying the washing!).

I've sowed cucumber, marrow and courgette in the greenhouse. I'm hoping to do a "three sisters" bed a la Carol Klein - using sweetcorn, beans and squashes together in one bed.

I also sowed some lupins, marigolds and alyssum - I never grow flowers and always regret it. Actually, I think I'll go and do some more now!

Onions, shallots and potatoes

I've promised Dan that I will take more to do with the vegetable growing this year and I do intend to keep it. Unlike last year, when I undertook to look after the orchard and didn't. Actually, pruning trees is a bit scary - I'm happy to scalp the buddliea every year beacuse it grows like a weed, but I'm a bit anxious about doing long term, or even terinal damage to the trees.

So today I sorted out my onion sets (Jet Set), which came yesterday. I took out any soft or rotten ones and spread the rest on a tray, which is now in the spare room, to keep them cool and dry until planting time in March.

We've got two varieties of shallots this year - Longor and Mikor. These will be stored with the onion sets until planing in the spring.

We're growing four varieties of potatoes this year. I've set them out in egg boxes tonight to chit.

We've got Orla, which is an early potato for harvesting July / August. I chose this variety becuase it has good resistance to blight, scab and blackleg. Then we've got Kestrel, a second early. Again it has good disease resistance, which is great if you don't want to use chemicals. It has also (according to the catalogue) and "old-fashioned" flavour and is great for baking, roasting and chips. Our early maincrop is Desiree, which we've grown every year I think, and is a brilliant roaster and keeps well. Finally, we've got Cara, a late maincrop that stores well.

We haven't got any salad potatoes this year but Dan's parents are growing Pink Fir Apple, so we'll trade!

Old seeds, new seeds

Because Dan's busy with work things, I've been delegated doing the seed order. As ususal, we ordered mainly from The Organic Catalogue. I've tried to pick varieties recommended by Sarah Raven in her book "the great vegetable plot". I couldn't get all of them but was pretty close. I've also ordered "Sungold" tomato seeds from Thomson and Morgan - the OC didn't have them and Sarah highly recommends them.

Having placed the orders, I then found a box of old seeds in the shed, not in the "seed box", where I had looked BEFORE placing the order. So I had a very satisfying clear out of them.

I'm now working on the sowing and planting plan. This should be fun since it involves counting backwards - and I'm not awfully hot at counting forwards!

Vegetable Expert

Just came across this advice site which I hadn't seen before: Vegetable Expert. It's got the sort of comprehensive growing advice we always intended to have here (but never got around to!) plus tips on storing and cooking veg.

Gourmet Garlic

One of the first bits on content added to our site was my short guide to growing garlic. In my enthusiastic naivety it was intended to be the first of many growing guides, but here we are over 3 years later and it's still a wee orphan. Anyway, I digress. We get a lot of visitors to the site arriving from Google and other search engines searching for information on growing garlic. Originally the guide suggested that buying and planting supermarket garlic was the best way to start, and would give perfectly good results.

But after a couple of years of disappointing crops of small, indeterminate garlic, it finally dawned on me that maybe there was something to recommend the garlic cultivars offered by specialist growers. So last autumn I bought and planted some Solent Wight and Purple Wight bulbs from the Garlic Farm, located on the Isle of Wight. The results have been excellent, and the guide has been updated accordingly - if you're growing garlic buy the best possible stock.

This year I've gone a step further and acquired a Garlic Lover's Growing Pack from the aforementioned Garlic Farm. It's advertised as featuring 6 different type of garlic, but ours came with 7 (we might just have been lucky):

• Solent Wight
• Early Purple Wight
• Elephant Garlic
• Albigensian Wight
• Iberian Wight
• Lautrec Wight
• Heritage Purple Moldovan

The Elephant Garlic will draw the crowds - the individual clove are the size of the whole heads of garlic you'll buy from the supermarket, and the plants grow to 5 foot tall apparently - but the descriptions of some of the other varieties in the excellent notes which accompanied the box had my mouth watering, especially the Lautrec, reputed to be the ultimate for flavour.

Following the expert advice of Colin Boswell at the Garlic Farm I planted all but the Solent Wight yesterday. The hardest part was keeping track of what I'd planted where with so many types, so I've made good notes for once! The Solent Wight will go in the ground in January, but in the meantime we need to convince it that it's still summer. I've also picked up some tips from the notes which should ensure we get the best possible crop - like removing the flowering heads when they appear, which can increase the ultimate size of the bulbs by up to 20%.

At a time of year when we're mostly lifting produce from the vegetable garden and clearing beds it's really nice to be able to plant something that will pay dividends next summer. I'll post from time to time with progress reports, and come next autumn we'll do some taste tests.

Victoria plums

Our Victoria plum tree did much better this year than last. If you recall, I ate the entire crop last year - four plums. This year, we got about four pounds of plums - they looked lovely on the tree, like big rubies.

Unfortunately, the heavy rain after the long dry spell caused them to split so, rather than share them with the earwigs, we picked them all and turned them into chutney.

I used Delia's "Old Dowerhouse" recipe. We haven't tried it yet as it has to mature for a month but the recipe was recommended, so we're sure it will be lovely.

In search of the perfect truss

No, I'm not looking for surgical support! I'm actually on a quest to replicate those perfect, uniformly ripe trusses of tomatoes on the vine which the supermarkets produce and peddle at exorbitant prices. Naturally mine will taste vastly superior, but that's no challenge.

This year I've done much better with my tomatoes than ever before, thanks largely to Sarah Raven's excellent book The Great Vegetable Plot. I've followed her advice of watering from the bottom and feeding from the top, and the results have been brilliant, especially for my cherry varieties, Sweet Million and Super Sweet 100. The Ailsa Craig have done less well, so there's room for improvement next time around.

Pictured to the right is the closest I've come to that supermarket perfection. But the fruit naturally ripens from the top down, since the top buds flower first and thus set fruit first. The challenge seems to be to get all the fruit on a truss to swell and ripen in the quickest time possible, avoiding over-ripeness at the top. The quest is really just a minor diversion to keep me interested in watering and feeding them, but if anyone does know the answer please share!

New recipe - Half-the-garden soup

Pretty much stolen from HFW, but it's so good I had to post it - Half-the-garden soup.

First crops

We had our first new potatoes of the season for dinner tonight. The variety - Red Duke of York. They were so yummy. It was a bit early to lift them and we'll lose some yield - but it was worth it.

Our strawberries are also cropping well - best we've ever had. The varieties are Florence and Pegasus. In fact, we're struggling to eat them so I'm going to make jam tomorrow.

Dan also picked the first ripe raspberry tonight and let me eat it. Lovely man.

The Orchard

The orchard is supposed to be my responsibility this year but I have to confess, I haven't been awfully diligent. I did start out quite enthusiastic - weeding the bases, top dressing, mulching - but it's kind of tailed off.

Fortunately, Dan has been paying more attention and noticed a heavy aphid infestation on the Victoria plum tree. This has now been treated with derris.

Two trees died over the winter and have been removed. We have one pear tree that looks quite sick but it's getting another chance.

The Victoria is covered in fruit - if you remember last year the total crop amounted to four plums. Some of the apple trees are well covered too, as is the Morello cherry. We'll see how they do as the season progresses. Dan gave them all a dose of comfrey liquid this morning, which won't do them any harm.

We will replace the dead trees but we will try to source trees more locally. I'm just off to check out Butterworth's Organic Nursery in Auchinleck. I found this in a magazine called "Reforesting Scotland", lent to us by Dan's dad. It's an old issue Summer 2001, but is quite interesting.

Marmalade and potatoes

Well, I made marmalade for the first time this week - 8lbs of it. It's rather nice (thank you, Delia) and I have enough oranges to make another 16lb, which will be enough for a year and then some.

Dan's chitting his potatoes, so out front hall is now full of the bench, egg boxes and potatoes. They are bigger but fewer in number than in previous years (being sold by weight, of course) - I don't know if we'll have to buy more to keep the stocks up.

the great vegetable plot

Dan spent all his pocket money last week on a new book - better than fags and sweeties, I say!

It's called "the great vegetable plot" by Sarah Raven. He got it in Waterstones half price (£10) so it seemed like a bargain. It's very, very good - at least we think so.

We've picked up loads of tips, particulraly about tomato growing. Dan's never been satisfied with his tomatoes, so he's going to folow Sarah's advice and see if he can do better.

We cleared one of our flower beds yesterday. I've never been happy with the planting plan, except for the lavender hedge. I bought a lot of cheap plants but I was never happy with the effect. So, it's cleared and we're planting potatoes in it this year. This will give me a chance to get it weed free and to plan the ornamental planting for next year.

Having looked at the pictures in "the great vegetable plot", I thought I might try combining ornamental plants with vegetables, which can of course be quite ornamental too. I thought beans, herbs, globe artichokes, maybe a lettuce border. I'm sure I can think of loads if I try. But it hasto be things we will eat - so no pumpkins, I'm afraid.

Maintaining soil fertility

A central tenet of organic growing is the principle of feeding the soil, not the plant. In practise this means keeping your soil in the best possible condition, and not relying on the application of chemical fertilisers to provide the nutrition and trace elements vital to the production of a successful crop. A lot of fruit and vegetables make great demands on your soil, sp it's important that you try to replace as much as possible.

I do three things to try to keep our soil ticking over:

1. Use green manures.

Green manures are short-term crops which are sown, grown and then dug back into the soil, normally before they set seed. They have a number of benefits including: improving soil structure; preventing panning through weathering by protecting the soil from the worst of the elements; suppressing weeds; and in some cases fixing nitrogen.

There are a wide variety of green manures you can grow, with the best choice depending on the time of year, the length of time you want the crop to be in situ, what you intend to grow after the green manure, and your type of soil. This year I'm using winter tares - a winter hardy vetch which will fix nitrogen and provide good protection, but in the past I've also used clovers, buckwheat, phacelia and grazing rye.

There's more information on green manures at the HDRA website, and I'd recommend getting a copy of their booklet (only a quid) which lists a load of different crops you can grow as GMs.

2. Composting

There's no excuse not to compost these days, with most local authorities (in the UK at least) selling bins at a hefty discount, and with the amount of sense it makes. It's not difficult - pretty much all we do is bung all our vegetable waste into our bins and leave them for a few months. The resultant compost is a fantastic soil improver, and it usually comes with a healthy population of beasties and micro-organisms which will contribute to your soil's health once incorporated into it. I tend to use our compost in spring, on beds which weren't manured over winter (see below) but which could do with a wee boost in preparation for the season's sowing or planting.

3. Manure

The only import into our fruit and veg beds is horse manure, dutifully supplied by Smokie and his pals. Since he's out most of the year it means the dung has to be lifted manually, but this year we've established a better routine, with our trailer a permanent fixture outside his field. The manure is brought back home, piled up, covered with black plastic and then left for a couple of months to mature. In the autumn months it's applied to the fruit beds, and to those vegetable beds due to have a crop the following year which will benefit from such a rich additive.

Even if you don't have a horse of your own you should be able to find some quite easily. Most horse yards maintain a large manure heap, and most will be happy for you to take away the odd trailer load, free of charge. Ideally you want manure from horses bedded on straw, since the straw soaks up urine and rots down with the manure to produce a great conditioner. Beware using manure from horses bedded on wood shavings - while the shavings will rot down eventually, it can take many months. It's best not to apply this to beds into which seeds are to be sown, since compounds released by the shavings as they rot down can inhibit seed germination. Fine for use on established fruit beds though.

This might all sound like a lot of work, but in reality it isn't. When you lift a crop in summer think about sowing a green manure - most can be broadcast sown and it only takes a few minutes. Since most GMs are fast-growing you won't need to do much more until it's ready to be dug in. Come late summer think about trying to source some manure - it's a couple of hour's work for me to get our manure back in the trailer, emptied and covered, and in the late autumn another hour or so to spread it on those beds which need it. And it pays dividends - you'll see yields increase, your worm and insect populations swell, and get a sense of satisfaction knowing that your soil is in fine fettle.

Blackberries and black bunnies

There's not much better in this life than getting something for nothing, and at this time of year that something is brambles, or wild blackberries. Yesterday morning while walking the dogs I noticed that this year's crop was starting to ripen and ready for picking, so this morning, armed with a suitable container, the dogs and I set off to forage along the field margins. We filled the tub with ripe fruit, and tonight it will join our windfalls in an apple and blackberry crumble.

It means for the next couple of weeks the dogs won't get their usual walk, but neither of them seem to mind much. Meg brings her tennis ball along, and as long as it's thrown or kicked every 5 minutes or so she's happy. And given our local rabbit situation Tess is in her element, sniffing, watching and chasing (but never quite catching).

There's one bunny that gives Tess the willies though - a wee, jet black chappie (or chappess) who shows a lot less fear than the rest of the warren. Who knows where it came from - an escapee from a garden perhaps? Tomorrow I'll take my camera with me to see if I can catch the wee blighter on film. Not quite the Beast of Bodmin Moor...

Windfalls

3 years after planting, our orchard is finally bearing fruit this year. Last year I rubbed the blossom fairly ruthlessly, allowing the trees to put more energy into growth and less into the intensive process of creating fruit. This year I was more circumspect, since a good few of the trees are now well-established and should support a small crop. The Victoria plum produced a grand total of four plums, but they were very tasty!

It's a wee bit early to be picking apples, but we've had blustery weather the past couple of days, and this morning I found a few windfalls from the Sunset (eating) and Dumelow's Seedling (cooking) apple trees. We'll make the most of them and cook something nice to eat, and it's a sign that we won't have to wait too long before harvesting and enjoying the rest.

Raspberry Rain

I've been picking raspberries every morning for about a week now, but this morning I needed to get into work early to prepare for a training course I was delivering, so they didn't get done. So tonight when I came home from work, despite the torrential rain, I threw on my Barbour and (bad) cowboy hat and got stuck in.

Rain has never really bothered me, maybe because when I worked as a forester I had no choice in the matter. When you're stuck up a hill 4 miles from the nearest mud track and it's chucking it down you don't really have a choice.

The result was a few pounds of prime Scottish rasps, with probably another half pound down my neck! They were perfectly ripe, and as sweet as honey - give me the choice between any confection under the sun or a bowl of these and the fruit wins every time. Most will end up in the freezer, but we had our first summer pudding last weekend and it was fab, so a good number will be kept back for this weekend's effort.

This afternoon also saw our first ripe Super Sweet 100 tomato of the year. Since it's R's birthday tomorrow and I haven't bought her a present or a card (bad man) I bestowed it upon her, and judging by her reaction it was better than anything I could have bought her anyway.

Magic beans

Yesterday we spent a good 5 hours in the garden catching up on grass-cutting, weeding, pruning and tidying, and got loads done.

While I was waging war on rampant thistles and nettles with my strimmer, Rosemary weeded the veg garden, saint that she is.

She called me over at one point to check whether a netted area had anything sown in it. It had - drying beans of variety Horsehead, sown the previous weekend, although you wouldn't know it looking at the bed. She grumbled something about there being no row markers, then soldiered on.

About 4 hours later, after a heavy shower and some glorius sunshine, I popped out with the dogs to check for eggs. And there they were, a good inch clear of the surface, rows and rows of Horsehead beans come to life just like that and lapping up the sun.

Appreciating the imperfect

When I first started growing fruit and veg I perceived it as a science, one which followed logical laws and principles, which could be learnt like any facts and put into practice with consistent and flawless results.

Sow seed variety x in month y at depth z at spacing a in rows b apart. Wait n days, undertake care instructions 1, 2 and 3, and there you have it, a perfect crop of carrots. Enjoy!

Of course one quickly realises that things just don't seem to work like that. It must be me, you say to yourself, and my lack of experience / skill / green-fingeredness, after all the pictures in the books show fantastic, uniform, unblemished veggies. You will have your early triumphs. The first year I grew sweetcorn the crop was fabulous, and in my naivety I believed it was all down to me, following those instructions to the letter and demonstrating my growing feel for, well, growing things. The next year my stumpy ears (of corn!) shattered the illusion, but got me thinking that maybe it wasn't all down to me.

What you eventually realise is that there are so many factors involved in growing stuff that a mixture of successes and failures is inevitable. The best you can do as a grower is to create the best conditions you can for growing, and observe your fruit and veg plot constantly. Learn to see the signs that your plants might need a helping hand from you (those gooseberry sawfly can devastate a bush in days if not hours), but at the end of the day it's just not possible to grown organically and produce flawless, photogenic results every time.

This year, for example, my early peas are gubbed. Something is eating them, and I don't know what. Even since the few remaining splindly shoots emerged they have been systematically nibbled and notched - mice or weevil I don't know. In previous years in my raised beds I've grown fantastic peas, sweet and copious (the freezer is still full of last year's crop). But hooray, my parsnips have germinated at a fantastic rate this year, and we're in for a bumper crop, something I've never managed before.

So don't be disheartened if things don't turn out quite the way you expected. The veggies won't have read the same books as you, and will just do their thing, whatever it is. Keep an eye on them, and offer a helping hand where you can, but learn to celebrate and enjoy the successes, because the occasional failure won't be far behind!

This year's menu

Where does the time go? I can't believe it's nearly May already, and most of our fruit and veg is well underway. This year I've more than doubled the size of the raised beds, by incorporating one of the pig pens into the veg garden. Strangely enough this hasn't seemed to double the effort required, and for the first time ever I feel almost in control of the veg growing... (Now just wait for some sort of disaster to befall me!)

So, we've got in the ground, or to shortly appear in the ground:

• Garlic, growing nicely. This is actually elephant garlic that we bought as a head from Edinburgh Farmers' Market in December, so we'll see how it goes.
• Shallots, also growing nicely, and again a new variety this year.
• Onion sets, red and yellow, which have shot up the past couple of weeks.
• Spring onions, in the onion bed and sown between the peas.
• Peas - Greenshaft and Sugar Pea Norli, the latter a mangetout.
• First lot of carrots just sown, Nantes 2 and Autumn King I think.
• Calabrese, sown in the greenhouse and planted out this weekend under fleece, where they will remain until harvest. I'm determined to successfully grow some brassicas this year, and the fleece is the answer I think....
• Cabbages (Holsteiner Platter) sown in the greenhouse, should be ready for planting out in a week or two.
• Parsnips, Tender & True, sown and just starting to show.
• Beetroot, Libero RZ in the ground and showing, we've also got some long ones to sow soon.
• Spuds, lots of Red Duke of York, and a few Pink Fir Apple, Maris Peer and Robinta, the latter two new to us this year.
• Tomatoes Super Sweet 100 potted on this weekend to their final big pots.
• Courgettes, sown in the greenhouse and gorwing nicely - Defender and Nero.
• Sweetcorn sown this weekend in the greenhouse and already sprouting thanks to the April sunshine.
• Loads of lettuces, in the greenhouse and planted into sinks outside - Little Gem, Rocket, Saladini, Frisby, amongst others.

Still to come are runner beans and drying beans, and a few other bits and pieces (I might try fennel again since I've got the seed and failed last year). This year I've abandoned the soil blocks and have sown straight into shop-bought seed compost in small pots. The germination rates have been excellent, and it's proved to be a time saver too. I'm sure there would be benefits to using a blocker when sowing and planting out large quantities, but this year has definitely been easier without them.

Digging at dawn

How's this for dedication? For the last two mornings, Dan has been out in the garden digging at 6.30am!!

The potatoes really needed to be planted and the weather is a bit unpredictable, so Dan's been taking advantage of the conditions over the last few days to prepare an additional potato bed for the Robinta and the Pink Fir Apple.

He's got all the Red Duke of York planted in the vegetable garden but there wasn't room for the other varieties, so another area has had to be prepared. It had potatoes on it four seasons ago so it should be OK to use again.

I'm sure it will be worth his dedication!

New tree

We have an addition to the orchard. One of of the original 14 trees died over the winter. It's been replaced by a plum tree, Oullins Golden Gage. This variety was carefully selected by virtue of being reduced to £10 in the graden centre. Actually it's a really well shaped tree and looks really healthy.

So, it's in. It should crop about August - a large, yellow dessert plum, sweet and juicy. Delicious eaten fresh, it also cooks well. So says the label. I can't wait.

Spring is sprung

We've had a busy couple of weekends in the garden.

Dan's finished constructing the new raised beds. The paths between have to be tidied up but the beds themselves are now ready for planting. Actually, some of them have been planted.

Shallots (Longor) are in, as are 800 (yes, eight hundred) onion sets (Jetset). We used Sturon last year, but they didn't keep well. Jetset is quite a new variety, so we'll see how it does.

Beetroot is in, too. We're using two varieties this year; Libero RZ and Carillon. We've grown Libero RZ before and it's very good, but we're trying Carillon for the first time. It's a cylindrical, long beet so it should be good for slicing for pickling, which is what we use our beetroot for, in the main.

We've used Tender and True parsnip variety. It's always done well in the past - lovely flavour and not woody, however big the roots get. We don't tend to get great germination but the flavour is so good it's worth it for the few we get.

We're trying calabrese for the first time. I can't remember the variety. Other than this, we're probably not going to grow any brassicas. If we do, they will be under fleece until they are harvested. We don't seem to be able to do these well.

Three varieties of peas have been sown. These will be planted successionally. We've got sugarpea Norli. We're only doing a couple of rows - we grew these last year and had a bumper crop. We were absolutely sick of looking at them The peas didn't freeze well and there is only so much soup you can eat!

In the greenhouse, tomatoes, lettuce and melon have been sown. We're only doing Supersweet 100 tomatoes this year. They were superb last year. The lettuce is up already so we're looking forward to fresh salad soon.

We're trying Sweetheart melon - because it's recommended for first time melon growers and that's us.

Hopefully, potatoes will go in this weekend.

Strawberries in the rain

The weather has taken a turn for the worse, just in time for our new strawberry plants to arrive. We've already planted ten "Pegasus" in the new strawberry bed. Ten "Florence" arrived day before yesterday.

Never daunted, Dan planted them out yesterday - in the gales and the rain. Tess huddled behind the fence and Meg threw her ball to him, as thay all got soaked.

When we're eating the strawberries, with some cream, on a warm summer's day, it will all seem like a distant memory. Meanwhile, Dan, keep taking the "Lemsip"!

Potatoes

Once again, the weather has been wonderful this weekend. As planned, the shallots have been planted.

Dan has built another raised bed, so that only leaves on more to do. We'll have to get topsoil soon and get the beds filled, ready for planting.

Potatoes are chitting in the front hall. They make an interesting addition to my Arts and Crafts style room. I suppose they are useful, and some may think they are beautiful, so no doubt William Morris would be OK with racks of spuds in egg boxes.

We're chitting a 3kg bag (about 30 tubers) of each of Red Duke of York, Robinta and Maris Peer. These will fill about 15 square metres. We'll also chit some Pink Fir Apple, from our own seed.

We have successfully grown both Red Duke of York and Pink Fir Apple in previous years. Robinta and Maris Peer will be first timers for us. We're growing Maris Peer as a salad potato. Robinta is a new variety, organic and a early maincrop. It's billed as the most disease resistant red potato ever! It replaces Desiree, a variety we've grown in previous years, so we'll see how they compare. Desiree is a great variety - fabulous roaster.

Raspberries, garlic and knobbly spuds

Things keep growing, whether we're ready for them or not.

Tonight I harvested another 1 1/2 pounds of raspberries, straight into the freezer for winter crumbles and pies. I also lifted all the garlic, 30-odd heads, which has reached a good size and will keep us going for a year. Just in time too I think, since 4 were damaged by some kind of mould or rot. They were disposed of, the rest are now in the garage to dry thoroughly.

I might have a go at pickling some this year - we only tried pickled garlic for the first time a few years ago at a fine establishment called the Jolly Sportsman in Sussex where we were on holiday, loved it and have always meant to try doing our own. Since there's plenty of vinegar left from last week's pickled eggs I've no excuses.

At the weekend we had 3 types of spuds with our Sunday dinner - the Red Duke of York earlies which we've been enjoying for a couple of weeks now; a couple of Desiree which were lifted out of pure curiousity to see how well they were doing; and last but definitely not least half a haulm's worth of Pink Fir Apple. These were a total experiment. On our way up the M6 from Oasis last year we stopped at a fantastic farm shop where apart from some wonderful cheeses like Stinking Bishop we bought a bag of Pink Fir Apple spuds. They look extremely strange, but have the most beautiful flavour and texture. Anyway, we kept a few tubers back and planted them in the spring and lo and behold it looks like we're going to have a bumper crop. Yum yum.

Harvest (contd.)

More rich pickings today - our first Red Duke of York spuds (duly despatched to the olds), 4lb of gooseberries, the first of the blackcurrants (just ripe, and really only picked to take some of the weight off of the overburdened branches), our first wee courgettes and more mange tout and spring onions, all for a stir fry.

The potatoes were very encouraging, being a good size and blemish-free. Red Duke of York are our favoured early variety, and it's nice to have them again after last year's order went unfulfilled because of our supplier's seed failure. Their colour straight out of the ground is fantastic - next time I lift some I must take a photo for the gallery...

Peas, peas everywhere

I continue to harvest early peas. The Douce Provence are cropping moderately, but the Pilot are cropping very heavily, and although the former were of a cropping size about a week earlier, the weight of the Pilot crop and the fact they are still covered in new flowers makes me think these will become our regular early pea. There is little to pick between them in terms of flavour.

So today's pickings yielded about a pound of shelled peas, popped straight into the freezer in a suitable container. There are a lot more to come, so maybe we will be self-sufficient in garden peas the coming year.

The other peas which continue to outperform expectations are the Sugar Pea Norli mange tout. I picked a good couple of pounds this afternoon, which were blanched for a minute and a half and frozen on a tray before decanting into a plastic container for freezer storage. This is a good tip for freezing many crops - for example raspberries and blackcurrants - and allows you to remove small portions rather than being left with a single massive ball of frozen veg. These too are covered in flowers, and were sown successionally so we can look forward to a prolonged and heavy crop.

There's more coming too. We've had our first few raspberries today, and the blackcurrants are nearly ready to pick, at least a first pass for the early ripeners. Both have cropped heavily. A quick explore under the early spuds revealed some good sized Red Duke of York tubers, we'll start lifting these to eat this week.

June Promises

This time of year is one of my favourite. Most of the hard work in the vegetable garden has been completed. We continue to cut and pick salad and spring onions, and other crops are starting to come to fruition - early peas, garlic, shallots, autumn-sown onions. And then there's the promise of a lot more to come:

Gooseberries about ready to harvest; strawberries with the first tinge of red; blackcurrants turning from bright green to deepest black; the first tomato fruits swelling daily; flowers on the capsicums; truss after truss of flowers on the super sweet 100 cherry tomatoes; sunset apples cropping heavily; douce provence peas; courgettes seeming to sprout from nowhere overnight.

June has it all - the satisfaction of harvest, the anticipation of more just around the corner, and the pleasure of investing in the sowing of late crops.

Early Peas

This is the first season I've grown early varieities of peas in addition to our maincrop favourite Greenshaft. On 21st February I sowed 2 rows of Douce Provence and 3 of Pilot.

Despite some early damage by weevils it's been a success, and we started picking and eating the Douce Provence last week, 16 weeks after sowing. The Douce Provence are low growing, at a height of 2-3 feet, while the Pilot are about twice that height. With all peas it's important to start picking as early as possible and regularly, to encourage further flowering and prolonged cropping, even is this means the peas themselves are on the small side - but they just taste all the sweeter for it.

Wednesday night is soup night

I'm an opportunisitc soup-maker. If I see something reduced to an outrageously low price in our local supermarket my first instinct is to buy it an make soup with it. And so it happened this afternoon - a big head of organic celery and a load of broccoli all at a knock-down price.

Fortunately my family and I all love soup, any time of the year. So although this probably isn't ideal weather for Celery and Stilton or Broccoli and Stilton soup, that's what we've got oodles of now. If you think they sound good here are the recipes - dead easy and very, very tasty.

Celery & Stilton

1 large onion
1 head celery
1.5 oz butter
1.5 pints vegetable stock
A splash of single cream
6 oz stilton

Chop the onion and celery (discarding any tough or leafy bits) and soften in the butter for a few minutes. Add the stock, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Leave to cool for 15 minutes then whizz up in a food processor or with a wandy thing like we've got. Add the stilton and cream and heat gently stirring often until the stilton has melted and the soup is hot. Season to taste. Yum.

Broccoli & Stilton

1 large onion
About 1lb broccoli
1 potato
1.5 oz butter
1 pint chicken stock
0.5 pints milk
A splash of single cream
6 oz stilton

Chop the onion and soften in the butter for a few minutes. Add the potato (peeled and diced) broccoli (just the florets, discard the stems and leaves) and cook for a few minutes. Add the stock, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Leave to cool for 15 minutes then whizz up in a food processor or with a wandy thing like we've got. Add the stilton, milk and cream and heat gently stirring often until the stilton has melted and the soup is hot. Season to taste.

Wednesday night is soup night

I'm an opportunisitc soup-maker. If I see something reduced to an outrageously low price in our local supermarket my first instinct is to buy it an make soup with it. And so it happened this afternoon - a big head of organic celery and a load of broccoli all at a knock-down price.

Fortunately my family and I all love soup, any time of the year. So although this probably isn't ideal weather for Celery and Stilton or Broccoli and Stilton soup, that's what we've got oodles of now. If you think they sound good here are the recipes - dead easy and very, very tasty.

Celery & Stilton

1 large onion
1 head celery
1.5 oz butter
1.5 pints vegetable stock
A splash of single cream
6 oz stilton

Chop the onion and celery (discarding any tough or leafy bits) and soften in the butter for a few minutes. Add the stock, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Leave to cool for 15 minutes then whizz up in a food processor or with a wandy thing like we've got. Add the stilton and cream and heat gently stirring often until the stilton has melted and the soup is hot. Season to taste. Yum.

Broccoli & Stilton

1 large onion
About 1lb broccoli
1 potato
1.5 oz butter
1 pint chicken stock
0.5 pints milk
A splash of single cream
6 oz stilton

Chop the onion and soften in the butter for a few minutes. Add the potato (peeled and diced) broccoli (just the florets, discard the stems and leaves) and cook for a few minutes. Add the stock, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Leave to cool for 15 minutes then whizz up in a food processor or with a wandy thing like we've got. Add the stilton, milk and cream and heat gently stirring often until the stilton has melted and the soup is hot. Season to taste.

A show novice

As mentioned previously here at TAS we joined the Clackmannanshire Horticultural Society this year, and I have been gently persuaded to operate the exhibitor database for this year's Annual Show. Now, wanting to take a full part in the society, we both intend to enter a good number of classes at the show, which is to be held on September 13th in Alva - Rosie in baking and perhaps some floral classes, myself in the vegetable classes.

The problem is I haven't the remotest of notions about what showing vegetables involves. A quick Google just scared me - how on earth do you produce carrots like these?

It would seem that actually growing the vegetables is the least significant part of the process - the careful cleaning, trimming, polishing and tying of the produce, and the presentation on a pristine white plate or spotless black felt tray are apparently the real key to success. Fortunately there is plenty of help on the web, and this PDF from the University of Wisconsin (136k) looks particularly helpful.

So I'll enter whatever grows, prepare it as best I can and see what transpires. A large part of me hopes I don't get drawn into the competitiveness of if all - after all we select and grow varieties for flavour, not for uniformity of size and colour, or to meet some arbitrary specification, and I'd hate to lose sight of that.

Late May sowing

Sown today:

• Butternut Squash
• Sugar Snap Pea Norli
• Pea Greenshaft
• Runner Bean Painted Lady
• Runner Bean Scarlet Flame
• Carrot Autumn King
• Carrot Parabel
• Carrot Cubic

That's about it for this year. We've got fennel and mangels to sow tomorrow, then it'll just be salad and spring onions and some green manures once harvest starts.

Holiday veg update

We've been on holiday the past 2 weeks which explains the lack of entries here (counter-intuitive I know, but we've been busy!). The veg garden has had a good bit of attention, this week I've planted out leeks, sweetcorn, beetroot, sprouting brocolli, 3 varieties of cabbage and a couple of courgette plants. The brassicas are under fleece this year for the first time. In previous years they've been ruined by aphids, so we're going for the barrier method this time around to see if we can defeat them.

Early spuds are well up, the mains showing well too. The Douce Provence early peas are flowering, but are a little stunted with the effects of the damned weevils. Next year it's raised beds all round for the peas. I'm late sowing runner beans, fennel and mangels (for Smokey and the pigs) but all will go in tomorrow.

Tomatoes, peppers and aubergines are doing well in the greenhouse, and the lettuces and spring onions continue to be a source of fresh food from the garden for us. The soft fruit bed looks fantastic this year, with raspberries and strawberries both covered in flowers, the blackcurrants heavy with fruit and the gooseberries almost sawfly free. The only slight disappointment is the blackberry which has much less growth than it did last year at this time. I think it's being shaded by one of the blackcurrant bushes, so that one will be hoiked out next year to give the blackberry a bit more light.

At the moment it looks like being a reasonable year for the productive garden - as ever next year will be better!

Plans are nothing, planning is everything

So said some famous military man, I forget who, but it's a sound observation. On Sunday we had about 2 1/2 tonne of screened soil sitting on our drive and nowhere to put it. It was the leftovers of the 3 tonne I had ordered to fill in the pond to make the bog garden - okay, so I overestimated just a tad how much we'd need!

What to do? Well, we had a quick review of what was what and decided to restrict the pig rotation to the two westerly pens (more a back-and-forth than a rotation then), and keep the third, east-most pen for a permanent vegetable garden. Going a step further we decided it would be a good use of the available space to remove the fence separating the east-most pen and the existing vegetable garden, and to extend the raised veg beds to the full length of the new-to-be-united vegetable garden. This will have a number of benefits - the pig ark never needs to be moved again, since it sits on the fence line between the two pens and has a door into each pen; I'll need to do a lot less digging each year; and we'll have a lot more space to grow vegetables, all in permanent raised beds.

So Monday I ordered the 91 metres of 2x8 inch board needed for the job, and a variety of other timber for the courtyard garden we're also building this week. Yesterday I started the deconstruction of the fence, enough to get a single bed extended (the rest will be done in the autumn) and got to digging the margins for the boards. Last night the timber arrived, so today I made the new bed which is now full of about 2 tonne of the screened soil, a good bit of compost and some well-rotted manure, which the hens have already done a pretty good job of incorporating into the somewhat sterile soil. The rest of the soil will be used in the courtyard and for filling in a few dips and divots around the field.

Mice or weevils?

Something has been eating our broad bean and pea seedlings. It's not a problem we've ever had before in the raised beds, and the only damage this year is happening in the new veg patch where the pigs were last year - the sugar snaps in the raised beds are unaffected.

I was convinced it was mice or some other small mammal - I've found many under stones and in overgrown areas of the garden before, and Cas certainly leaves the remains of enough around the place to know there is a fair population. But tonight Rosemary saw a bit in Scottish Farmer which says that incidence of pea and bean weevil is on the increase.

Now, this could be a cynical reaction but I'm not swayed. The source of the report? The insecticide product manager at a large agro-chem company....

If anyone can positively identify the culprit I'd been very grateful.

Gooseberry Sawfly

The little bastards are back, but this year I've caught them early and fully intend to destroy them. This morning the first evidence of the annual gooseberry sawfly invasion was found - a few leaves low on the larger of our two bushes had the tell-tale dotted lines of eggs running along their veins, and about a dozen leaves were swiss-cheese holey, meaning some of the eggs had hatched and the baby caterpillars were already munching their way to adulthood.

They are a voracious pest, and, as I can testify from a couple of years ago, can defoliate an entire bush overnight if left to their own devices. Luckily our bushes seem to be pretty hardy and admirably withstand the best efforts of the sawfly to do them in. In previous years I haven't managed to catch them early, and control has been impossible, with damage limitation the only hope. This consisted of picking off the mature caterpillars and feeding them to the hens, and a liberal application of derris powder. This year though I've picked off all the infested leaves I could find, and will exercise daily vigilance during the next few weeks to try to stop them getting a grip. It's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security - they can have 4 or 5 hatchings a season, so I may have won this battle but the war has hardly begun.

Honest toil

Our early spuds - Red Duke of York and Pink Fir Apple - finally went in the ground today, in last year's pig pen. Although the pigs did a fine job of clearing the grass and weeds, they didn't eat the stones, bricks and varied detritus located about 12 inches under the soil. So preparing the trenches for the spuds took just about all day, instead of the few hours I'd bargained for. It's not even a certainty that they'll grow into anything worthwhile - the chitting was less than smooth due to an alternately cold and warm shed, and it was only in the past few weeks that they've had a decent chance to sprout in our spare room.

There was enough time at the end of the day to make another batch of soil blocks, and to block on the last of the pepper (Hungarian Hot Wax, Jumbo & Sweet Nardello) and tomato (Harbinger & Super Sweer 100) seedlings. Another batch took some brussell sprout (Braveheart) seeds, some leeks (Musselburgh) and some beetroot (Libero RZ). A quick wander around the garden saw the onion sets (Sturon) sprouting strongly, the broad beans (Stereo) and early peas (Douce Provence & Pilot) pushing through the soil, and the spring onions (White Lisbon) sprouting.

Asparagus

Asparagus is something we've always intended to grow, but have never really got around to doing (other than a thoroughly unsuccessful attempt to grow from seed). This year though we ordered 10 crowns of Connover's Colossal, and they arrived yesterday.

Last weekend, in anticipation of their arrival, I prepared their bed. The perennial raised bed will be their home for the next 20 years or so, and it needed considerable attention to get it ready for the asparagus. The resident strawberry plants were removed, the soil dug deep and then riddled to a depth of 18 inches to remove large stones and other debris. Finally a good quantity of compost and well rotted manure were added, together with a few handfuls of sand to aid drainage.

The crowns were planted as per the instructions - 40cm apart, with the tips 10cm below the soil level - into a trench which allowed the lengthy roots to be spread out. It may seem like a lot of work, but considering their productive lifespan it should be worth it.

Trampolining hens

On Sunday afternoon I planted about 400 Sturon onion sets in the big bed beside our garage. Since onions form a part of just about every meal we eat these will keep us going for about 10 months after harvest.

One of the downsides of keeping hens is the need to protect everything in the garden which can be damaged by the hens pecking, and scratching. With many vegetables, especially those sown direct or planted as small sets or tubers, that means netting. You can probably see where this is going.

I spent a good deal of time before planting the sets making supports and pegs out of old fencing wire and unravelling a large (4mx5m) net to cover the bed. After planting I stretched the net across the fence and supports, and pegged firmly into the ground. It's just high enough to stay in situ until harvest, and easy enough to take down a couple of times during the growing season to weed (onions hate competition).

Yesterday I arrived home from work with the aim of blocking on the tomato and pepper seedlings which have already germinated. The onion netting was still in place, but there was a large hen dropping right in the middle which indicated that all was not quite right. Regardless I proceeded to make some soil block mixture in the shed. When I came out I was greeted by the sight of 4 hens bouncing on the netting pecking at the sets on their way down, and balancing themselves with open wings on the way up. It was extraordinary, and I watched for a few minutes before coming to my senses and shooing them off. I've erected a temporary barrier from various bits of wood, large pots and the wheelbarrow to try to stop them getting close again, but I suspect they had far too much fun to give up easily...

Spring sowings

Lots of veggies sown this weekend, and preparations made for future crops.

• Parsnip, Tender and True
• Beetroot, Libero RZ
• Tomato, Harbinger
• Tomato Super Sweet 100
• Pepper, Jumbo
• Pepper, Sweet Nardello
• Pepper, Hungarian Hot Wax
• Lettuce, Saladini
• Spring Onion, White Lisbon

One of my challenges this growing season was to keep better records of sowings, soil inputs and harvests. Although summaries will be posted here I'm also going to be recording the detail in a database which the saddest reader will be available to view. It will be extremely useful to be able to look back at what varieties did best where and with what inputs and techniques - otherwise I'm liable to make the same mistakes every year.

This afternoon the old strawberry plants were cleared from the raised perennial bed and the ground prepared for the arrival of our asparagus crowns later this month. The soil was forked over, hoed and then riddled to remove larger stones and other debris. A good quantity of compost was added, and a touch of sand, phosphate and lime sprinkled. Finally it got a good rake over and was securely netted - the hens were looking hungrily at all the worms I'd uncovered, and Cas was looking in admiration at the new latrine he thought I'd made for him.

Weekend past

Well, another glorious but cold weekend passes, and we're a little closer to being ready for our new pigs which we collect in 3 weeks. On Saturday we finished the fencing, stapling sheep netting to the rails, and on Sunday gave the pig ark and the old chook ark a coat of water-based preservative. They'll get at least one more coat in the next few weeks, and if we have the time and will another before the autumn.

Although the ground remains too hard to sow direct, meaning the parsnips still aren't in, the aubergines (Long Purple) were sown yesterday in soil blocks in the greenhouse. This morning the temperature in the greenhouse was -3.5 degrees C, the lowest it's been this winter, so everythign tender is on a heated pad, which doesn't really effect the ambient temperature but does provide sufficient bottom heat to prevent damage to seedlings.

Finally we detected a few common poultry louse on a couple of hens, so all were treated with powder on Saturday, to be repeated every week for the next month. We had a similar problem last year, which we're certain was imported on 3 new hens we bought, but it's not serious and does mean the hens get used to being handled, which is no bad thing.

Legumes and fencing

Another busy Saturday, thanks to the clement weather. I got out into the old pigpen (rotovated last weekend) and made beds for and planted broad beans (Stereo) and early peas (Douce Provence and Pilot). The pigpen is about 30 feet by 40 feet, and I'm using a system described by Eliot Coleman - 4 foot beds, each separated by a 12 inch path. The width of the bed allows access from both sides, reducing soil compaction and making maintenance a whole lot easier. The pen has been divided down the middle so in total we've got 12 beds measuring 4 feet x 18 feet.

Since the tilth isn't terribly fine the crops will be those which don't mind a few lumps and bumps - potatoes, beans, peas and courgette mostly. A couple of the beds will be given more attention, and fennel, mangels and sprouting broccoli sown in them.

The leeks sown on the 8th Feb have germinated well and are starting to straighten, and we've got loads of salad to be transplanted into coldframes tomorrow.

This afternoon we started fixing the rails to the fence posts for the new pigpens. Rather than risk my thumbs we hired a nailgun from the local hire centre. It may cost more than the alternative, but boy did it save time and produce a better end product. The fence is a bit odd in places with some posts sticking out above the top rail a lot more than others, but it'll keep the pigs in!

Clackmannanshire Horticultural Society Annual Open Show

The schedule arrived today for the local horticultural show (Saturday 18th September 2004, Cochrane Hall, Alva). Dan and I joined this year for the princely sum of £2 each. We're planning to exhibit in at least a few classes each. It's all quite serious - there a loads of rules about what you can and cannot do, but apparently exhibitors come from far and wide. For a top prize of £8 (for a hanging basket), that's pretty dedicated.

I'm focussing on the Baking and Preserves section so we'll have scones coming out of our ears, as practice gets into full swing.

The Society is quite old - established in 1835 - and boasts a fair selection of trophies. Dan's offered to do a website for the Society, so watch this space. I don't know if anyone's researched the history of the Society, but it would be quite interesting to do so. I'll add it to my retirement "To Do" list....

Soil blocks

This weekend has seen the start of the serious work surrounding the growing of vegetables. A sowing and planting schedule was produced yesterday, detailing which varieities of which vegetables I'm growing this year, where they are to be grown, when the sowing dates will be and the method of cultivation. Apart from planting shallots today's tasks included the sowing of early leeks, Startrack, possibly for showing at the local Horticultural Society show (I'm a new member this year and have never been to a show) but most certainly for munching come the autumn. The method of growing I'm adopting again this year for many crops, including leeks, is the soil block.

Soil blocks are exactly what the name says - blocks of soil. Well, not exactly soil but a mixture of peat, sand, compost, soil, lime and base fertiliser (I use a compound of phosphate, and fish, blood and bone). This mixture is watered to a slurry-like consistency and shaped into batches of 2-inch cubes using a soil blocker, which also makes an indent in the top of the block. The blocker ejects four blocks at the press of a sprung handle, 24 blocks fitting nicely into a standard seed tray. Seeds are dropped into the indentation on top and the tray placed in the greenhouse for the seeds to germinate - in the case of the leeks on a heated pad. Lots of benefits - none of the root binding associated with pots or modules; easy transplant with no root disturbance, just plant the whole block; high rates of germination and seedling survival, as the block mix caters precisely for the needs of the young plants; multiple seeds can be sown in a single block, for example 4 leek seeds in each block today; and blocks add fertility to the soil every year.

It's a technique championed by Eliot Coleman in his excellent book The New Organic Grower, and last year, my first using blocks, I had great success with most of the crops for which I used it. An article will be forthcoming, but for more information see the Coleman book or drop me a line and I'll try to help.

Growing Guide :: Garlic

Growing guide for garlic now completed.

Garlic planted

This morning I planted our garlic, 42 cloves in total, 6 rows of 7. Traditionally garlic is planted on the shortest day of the year and lifted on the longest, timing I've always kept to until this year. I'm a a little later than usual, but it won't make any difference to the end result.

Related article: Growing Garlic.

Parsnips for a week

This morning I lifted the last of our parsnips, so that I could fork some well-rotted manure into the raised beds in preparation for this year's sowing. I expected them to be quite large considering the length of time they've been in the ground, but not quite this large!

This bad boy in the photograph weighed in at 5 1/4 pounds and measured nearly 2 feet in length - enough to make a few gallons of roasted parsnip and parmesan soup and have a few left over for chips, roasters and parsnip pastry. Parsnips aren't something we've had great success with in the past. Germination is always a problem, even with fresh seed (which is a must for parsnips - never use last year's left-over seed). I understand It's not possible to transplant them, so it's direct sowing only, but it's testament to how tasty they are that we persevere year after year even with such a high failure rate.

Chitting time

Yesterday a very large cardboard box was waiting for me when I returned from work. At first I excitedly believed it to be my new digital camera (the fantastic Sony 717), but on closer inspection it was from Chase Organics. Disappointment soon turned to excitement again as I realised the package contained our seed potatoes, shallots and onion sets.

We're only growing 2 varieties of spuds this year - Red Duke of York for earlies and Desiree for main crop. The seed looks in good condition, and will now spend a couple of weeks in the cool, dark garage, until the first sprouts are visible. At that point they will be transferred to egg boxes and moved into the front hall of the house where the light will encourage stronger shoots. Sometime in March the earlies will go in the ground, with the Desiree following a couple of weeks after.

It's a welcome reminder that the work in the vegetable beds will begin again soon, although no doubt the fickle Scottish weather still has a few unexpected tricks up its sleave.