Well what a difference a week makes. Lots of heavy rain. It’s hammering down right now. On the plus side, pond is now full again, on the down-side, some plants don’t like too much of a good thing. The courgettes, for example, have dropped flowers due to rain and wind before they have formed fruit. Hopefully they will recover. The bees are looking very wet and bedraggled and looking at me accusingly as they gather at the hive entrance in a soggy mass. They definitely need some warm dry weather and soon.
And, needless to say, the rain wakes up the slugs.
Patch:
Mostly growing well. Even the peas are looking good. Every grower has a weak spot and mine is peas. I have to work ridiculously hard each year to get a halfway decent pea crop. Which is a nuisance as fresh raw garden peas are Jane’s favourite thing in the whole world!
Have added strawberries, blackcurrants and jostaberries (a delicious and prolific cross between gooseberries and blackcurrants) to list of crops for kitchen. Fruit trees covered in apples and pears. Proof, if ever needed, that a thorough “wassailing” in January clearly works! Our lone walnut tree has masses of young walnuts (our son Joe pickles them) which is great as we are normally lucky to get ten nuts for xmas.
The nice thing about this time of year is just watching it all grow after the heavy work of digging and preparing beds in the spring. Just a bit if hoeing and weeding (weather permitting), otherwise just sitting back and watching nature doing the hard work.
One of the challenges for those seeking to be as self-sufficient as possible is ironing out the gluts. No matter how we try for succession growing we find that cucumbers, for example, always seem to need picking at the same time. If you don’t pick them promptly, they don’t bother to produce more fruit. This year we have pickled some in white wine vinegar and very nice they are too. Excess raspberries can go in the freezer. More on preserving ideas later in the year.
What we particularly like about this time of year is making meals on the basis of what needs eating rather than going to the supermarket which offers everything 365 days a year. God only knows what the carbon foot-print must be of sending everything round the world so we can have grapes in December. Jane informs me that Wales only produces about 3% of our fruit and veg. Quite an indictment in a country so well blessed with a gentle growing climate and an abundance of rain.
Jane is trying out her new incubator. We normally wait for a bantam to go broody and pop fertilised duck eggs under her. This has worked really well. They make excellent mothers and are highly nurturing and protective. It’s quite a sight to see a tiny bantam seeing off a large cockerel if he gets too near the ducklings for comfort. Stressful for mother, though, when the ducklings keep trying to hurl themselves into the pond. No broody bantam this year so we will keep you informed if they hatch to plan.
On the Wild Side:
I put up a small stock fence to limit our lurcher’s range a bit. Despite being a lovely dog, we cannot trust her with access to chickens or ducks. If anything moves quickly, she can’t resist chasing it. However, the fence has been broken down. I think it can only be a badger that is strong enough for this sort of damage.
Our daughter had a bat in her bedroom. They live in the roof space and sometimes fly in through an open window by mistake. She dealt with it well by vacating the room having left the windows wide open. Best not to try and waft it out as it will panic and hurt itself. It found its own way safely out eventually. No harm done- but a bit unnerving when you have just watched the box-set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Energy:
We have spent the last ten years weaning ourselves off fossil fuels as and when we can afford to introduce new energy sources. We started by putting in serious insulation throughout. We then added Solar PV and solar thermal. We switched to a renewable energy supplier (Good Energy) and have electric cars. However, for our basic heating and hot water we have a Stanley wood-burning stove linked to under floor heating. This has been hard work, to put it mildly. By coppicing, cutting, splitting, drying and moving between five and ten tons of wood a year, we have managed to keep the house warm- most of the time. The real problem is if you go away. Without permanent stoking, (in a cold spell I literally sit by the range hurling log after log into the flames) the house quickly turns into an icebox which then takes about two days to bring back up to tolerable levels.
After a lot of thinking about it, and Jane reasonably asking if I want to be doing this much physical work in ten years’ time, we went for a ground source heat pump. Eye- watering up-front costs, but sums not too bad over a ten year period. As with any new system it’s had one or two teething problems, but we now have a fantastically warm house at the touch of a button. Ironically, and sadly, we are moving away from a wood economy just as large amounts of dead ash trees become available due to the inexorable destruction of our native woodlands by “ash dieback”.
God knows what I’ll do with all the spare time I’ll now have.
Tip of the week:
If you haven’t already done it, draw a plan of your plot so can record what is growing where. I find it impossible to remember exactly what I grew where last year and this is essential for crop rotation. If you don’t rotate crops (I try for a four year cycle) you end up with a build up of diseases and pests.
Good gardening and keep thoughts and suggestions coming.