This year's veg garden is going to be a little different from usual.
Rather than a full on attempt at a horticultural veg show full of wonder and delight, this year I'm going to grow small amounts of what I actually eat, even if that means I run out before the end of the year.
Forgive me if that sounds like an obvious plan, but whenever I set about growing anything I never do it by halves. I always go great gusto and try and grow enough to feed the 5000 and then can't keep on top of it when life gets hectic. The weather/chickens/pests take over and that is that.
So this year, I will be growing the following across two beds:
- An early sweet Sweetcorn - 8 - 12 plants to share between our tuna and sweet corn bakes and the chickens. I'm only growing that many because you need them in blocks of four to cross fertilise.
- Mange tout - because I love this stuff. Easy to grow and eat raw.
- Spinach - picked at the baby stage for pasta and the chickens.
- Broccoli - purple sprouting because it looks nice, is cut and come again, they take up less ground, and there's less to lose if things go wrong than growing the normal headed variety.
- Tomatoes - two salad type plants, that's it. And a heirloom early variety to boot to avoid blight
- A bit of mixed lettuce in a trug - minor sandwich matter and that is it.
- A stumpy ball carrot variety - cannot grow proper long carrots in my ground, so always buying them.
- Basil - because nothing goes so well with tomatoes grilled with olive oil
- Leeks
In the autumn I'll plant lots of cabbages for the girls to forage on during the winter. And this year I've ordered seeds from the Real Seed Catalogue so they will be heirloom seeds and not F1 hybrids.
No onions or potatoes because over the last few years the yields have been bad and so have the diseases, and no climbing beans because I don't actually like them. There I said it. I don't like runner beans. I also don't like the way French beans squeak against my teeth so I don't eat those. Broad beans take up too much space for the yields and Borlotti/soup beans go mouldy in the pods before I get to them so I'm blowing a big raspberry to them all this year. Courgettes do not grow in my soil. They just don't. Seven years of trying, seven years of abject failures. I once planted a healthy full grown plant from the garden centre and it shrivelled up and disappeared over the growing season.
Fruit-wise the garden may grace me with rhubarb, raspberries, strawberries, pears, plums, blackberries, greengages, red currants, white currants, black currants, and possibly one or two mulberries, grapes, figs cherries, and kiwis, the latter three from my pot grown plants. May being the key word.
The garden in general has been bad this winter in terms of flooding. The soil is clay and badly compacted, not just in places but over the entire thing. It's made me stop and consider whether I'm doing the right thing by trying to change small areas. I know from experience an inch or two of soil conditioners just disappear when I spread them down. I keep thinking maybe I should be bolder, that I should get a damn digger in and strip off the lot and lay down fresh soil, but then I wake up in a cold sweat thinking that i'll spend time, effort and money doing it and then I'll walk out and the clay will have swallowed all the good soil like some B movie blob monster.
I've been following the activities of Charles Dowding, who runs a no-dig farm that produces veg for a box scheme, and he claims that part of his land used to be clay and over the years he turned it into good quality soil just by putting down thick horse manure ever year. I gleaned that from the free preview of his book on Amazon called the Vegetable Growing Course , which I'm considering buying.
[Sigh] All pemaculture roads seems to lead to horse manure in some way. I hate the smell of the stuff and so do the neighbours, so I've never used it. Mind you I do have an old book by Ruth Stout called the No Dig Garden, where she uses a considerable amount of hay eight inches deep across her whole garden, but after poor weather during the last few years so much hay destined for winter feed has been ruined before harvest due to the weather it has been very expensive. I've tried straw in its place, but it seems to compact when wet into a slimy mess and I once nearly lost a crop of potatoes because of it.
Anyway, I don't have to think manure until autumn time thankfully.
I ordered some necessary supplies this morning to put onto the veg beds along with some home grown compost, which then allows a good month for the earthworms to do their thang before I start planting. I actually got it all from Poddingtons garden centre in Wellingborough, who have got customer service down to a fine art. I rang this morning to find out how long it would take to deliver my order, cursing my forgetfulness because I probably wouldn't get it in time for my two days off early next week. A lovely gent called Jamie, who is in charge of deliveries, looked up the schedule and told me if I get the order in pronto there was a van coming to my area today and he would make sure it didn't leave without my stuff was on it.
I don't think I've ever typed my details into a website that fast before.
When I came home I found this:
The delivery driver left the order on the drive as requested, but had taken it upon himself/ herself to thoughtfully bring it right up the drive and tuck it into an accessible yet unobtrusive place behind the trailer. We had been preparing to find the order dumped at the front of the drive and have to drag it up ourselves so we could get the car in.
You see? Customer service....
Oh and this just in. The new owners of Hinge and Bracket...are no longer the new owners. They've pulled out citing they think having ducks might be too much trouble for them. So we're concocting a plan B...
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