In the greenhouse

Late as I am this year with getting seedlings started I've decided that it's better to do things properly, and by that I mean by traditional methods, than do my usual know-it-all shortcuts that so often lead to disaster. As a result the greenhouse is looking almost professional with lots of cell trays filled with freshly pricked out baby plants.

Mostly in the picture are tomato seedlings. This year I'm growing the old favourite Gezahnte Bührer-Keel. Wladecks, Clibran's Victory, two new to me varieties from Victoriana Seeds; Surender's Curry tomato and Harry's Italian and six plants of Tondino di Manduria, sourced from Kokopelli some years ago. I'm hoping to grow these outdoors under a cheap poly cloche-tunnel. Even with that the greenhouse is going to be overloaded again unless I harden my heart and discard some. I grew Clibran's Victory last year I think but treated the plants so badly I don't think I had any fruit at all, so I'm trying again. Although my seed came from the Heritage seed library there's almost no documentation on the web from anyone who's had a photogenic crop. Perhaps this year will make it into a new star.



Telsing from the Facebook group Friends of Vila Vila sent me seeds from her breeding programme, and I started some a few weeks ago. The baby plants aren't very big yet but they look healthy enough and will be about the right size to plant out by the end of May when the weather should be more reliable. The plan is to select the seedlings that are least spiky and painful to harvest but this year I'll be pleased just to achieve fruiting plants.



It seems I put a picture up of the Symphytum asperum every year but I can't resist those scorpioid cymes and the bees love the flowers.

Shallow Grave

In the last couple of years I've become a convert to bean trenching - digging a deep ditch where the beans are to grow and filling the bottom with organic material from grass clippings to vegetable kitchen waste before backfilling the topsoil and planting the beans. It's a good way of providing a well of moisture in high summer, using up compost materials that aren't fully decomposed and improving the soil at depth with little effort.

Even so I think I've gone a bit mad this year. Some of the land enclosed by our new deer proof fence is not of the best quality and has been lying fallow, growing docks and thistles for some time too. As part of the plan to recuperate this abandoned waste back into the productive plot I decided that a long row of beans and peas, with the associated trench, would be a good start. Digging such a trench, in stony compacted soil and twice the length I'd usually consider seemed like such exhausting work I co-opted the tractor in for the hard labour. A back hoe is a fine tool but maybe it's just a little bit over the top for this job.



There was barely enough room for the tractor to swing a cat but the job was done. It's remarkable how long and strong dock roots are when bodily dug out from their full depth. A day's work got the trench dug and filled with fully and half rotted stuff from the heap but now I have to push the topsoil back by hand after rain softened the surface so much that the tractor was doing more harm than good.

Still, I have high hopes for this bean row if all goes to plan and already have baby pea plants, Carlins and Irish Preans, started to be planted out. I've yet to select climbing beans but will certainly have some of the sort I call Corbieres (Riana's) beans and will grow dwarf Starley Road and Hutterite soup beans for winter use.

The splendid weather of the last week or so has gone away today making it a fine time to stay in and work on the computer. Not that I've done all that much outside either, mostly I've been reading Poldark and sunbathing. It's been so hot that the wood anemones and early bluebells are nearly over and I saw a first inflorescence on the elderberry that grows in the old haybarn.



The weeds are growing well too and I've spent a couple of mornings clearing out the perennial herb beds and freeing the blueberries from the ever encroaching mint and brambles. We only have one globe artichoke left and if I can I'll supplement that this year with a few plants from the garden centre as it's much too late to start any from seed now.

When we arrived a couple of weeks ago I started, again very late, tomatoes and various squashes and melons which are now up and will have to be hurried towards maturity. The ulluco, mashua and oca also went in and are just now beginning to shoot. They can grow on for a while before they need to be planted out, just as well, as there are no beds for them. I'm not sure I should even have bothered with the mashua - we don't like to eat them much and I notice many vigorous volunteers coming up where they were last year.

We continue to get harvests from the purple sprouting and perennial cabbages, a few shoots of asparagus and now Good King Henry and rhubarb are available. It's all good, but the work is already getting away from me. Anyone out there like to come over and give me a hand?

Saving yacon over winter and wapato

 It's very hard getting back into this. Asparagus from the garden, just enough for my tea tonight (along with some other things, I'm not wasting away at all). The patch is struggling with weeds as usual and the seed raised plants rather variable. If I trusted myself more I'd invest in a clutch of commercially prepared roots next autumn, it takes too long to bring them up from seed and even for just the two of us we need a lot more plants to make a few good meals each spring. But, I'm not sure it would be economic without a gardener to set to the weeding or a big change in my self discipline.




And so to Yacon. People sometimes have difficulty in overwintering the parts of the plant that form new growth in the spring. I've failed myself but last year I tried two methods and they were both successful. The simplest and easiest thing to do is to lift a plant comparatively early - yacon aren't slow to form tubers like oca or ulluco so you will still get a reasonably harvest from a plant lifted in mid to late October. Clean it up a bit and pot it in spent compost in a pot just big enough. There will still be a bit of green top growth so trim it back to a few inches. Keep the pot very slightly damp at about 10C. Light isn't too important so a garage window or warm shed will probably do, I keep ours in an unheated room in the house but our walls are thick and the temperature doesn't vary much. One plant preserved like this should make several in the spring when divided into growing points and potted up.

Alternatively wait until frost has killed the top growth but don't wait too long. Take up the plants, remove the storage tubers, shake off the dirt and keep the crowns just as they are until the spring. Again, it's the temperature that's important. Too warm and the roots will dry and die but too cold and they die from that instead. In the spring clean away the dead and dry roots and split the crown into growing tips. Pot and keep warm and lightly moist until they sprout. Plant out in the usual way.



A few weeks ago Rhizowen was kind enough to send me some of his seedling wapato tubers. We have newly cleared the quite extensive water works around the house and I was hoping to be able to introduce them straight into the pond and stream margins but the lovely tidy environment has attracted attention of a less welcome sort and the blasted coypu is back, as can be seen from the rather blurry picture above. He (or she) is currently enjoying the watercress and other water plants and a lingering  doubt about liver flukes leaves me fairly content with this but it does mean I dare not introduce the wapato or indeed put the waterlilies back in position after they were moved during the works.

So for the moment they've been potted into holding pots and are living in the baby bath bought for my son just before his birth 33 years ago... how little I could have imagined that then! I've no idea what I'll do when they start to outgrow this nursery bed, it's not like I'll shoot the wretched creature but I'm at a loss how to encourage it to move away.

By the way, if you interested in odd Andean vegetables take a look at the Oca Breeders Guild where crowd sourcing is being used to speed up development of day length neutral oca varieties suitable for cultivation in Europe and North America. 

Just a quickie

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to blog regularly again but here is a picture of some purple sprouting.

And a swallow.

Back in France,  lots to do and talk about but I've forgotten how to ramble on. More later maybe.

Spudulike

Last autumn when I wasn't really paying much attention at all, too depressed, Paul got the seed potato order organised for me.

The one variety we try always to grow is Ambo but in 2014 we weren't able to source any. We grew a row from some saved tubers which seemed healthy and I'm not sure if they were the cause but we had terrible blight last year which I wasn't able to do much about. So I didn't want to risk home saved seed tubers again. The only supplier we could find this year was Tuckers. They are a well established company with a big range and we've used them before but all the packs of seed potatoes are quite large, 2kg minimum which means we now have 18kg of spuds to plant, with carriage costing over £50.

You can buy an awful lot of commodity potatoes for that sort of money. Still, we've managed to secure a good range of our favourites and perhaps I can find a few local peeps who'd like a handful of novelties to try out for next year.

We have this year then:

Maris Piper - rather more conventional than our usual choices but we wanted to see why they've been so popular for so long.

Sarpo Mira - as everyone knows one of the first varieties with excellent blight resistance from the Sárvári Research Trust

Kestrel - a potato I have mixed feelings about. It's good but in some seasons produces rock hard tubers, fine for slug resistance but strangely unappealing in the kitchen. Seems to be better here in France than on the old allotment in Newport Pagnell.

British Queen - the potato we grow for chips. She's lovely but not terribly tough and needs good soil for a big crop.

BF15 - has a following of devoted fans and I've been one for years. Easier to get in France than the UK, I first grew it from tubers from a packet bought for dinner in a supermarket.

Arran Victory - sturdy, late, lovely purple skin and they do well for us.

Ambo - a good general purpose potato that we've grown since our first gardens together. Makes lovely big baking potatoes and nice roasted. Suits the way we grow potatoes.

Epicure - another old favourite. A first early, not quite as fast as some but much better flavoured.

Shetland Black - delicious, great for soups and stews. There's lots of erudite discussion about the 'true' black but these are the commercially accepted sort and I like them very much.

Reviewing the list it's clear that we are keen on high dry matter, floury potatoes and that seems to set us apart from the French. Judging by the supermarket selections, they mostly prefer the sort known as 'waxy' although that's not a very good description in my opinion and should be reserved for salad potatoes like Pink Fir apple and Ratte. Another reason for growing our own.

Making planks

Living in a forest with lots of trees on our land we do a lot of work with wood. When we have a lovely healthy trunk, like this section of a beech tree, it seems wasteful to simply chop it up for firewood although that is our major fuel need.

We've tried lots of traditional ways to get workable wood for furniture and building from trees but splitting and sawing and smoothing huge boles that weigh tons by hand needs a full team of burly lumberjacks or much more time than we have.

However commercial sawmill equipment is very expensive and not economic for the relatively small amounts of wood that we process for home use, so we've been investigating alternative ways.



Chainsaws are the dangerous but extremely useful and powerful tools that have become standard equipment for cutting down trees but they are much more difficult to use for anything like precision work, some very clever chainsaw sculptors notwithstanding. However a method has been devised to frame them and use the frame as a guide to make parallel cuts through a body of wood, which might more easily be described as making planks.

This kit of parts for a Granberg chainsaw mill came from Alaskan Mills. This was our first attempt at using it.



As part of the preparation for the work it's necessary to make the knobbly and uneven surface of your felled tree horizontal. You can buy another kit of bars to support the saw during this difficult first cut but, if you have one, a light ladder (provided it's not warped) will do the job. It simply has to hold the saw frame level for one cut and after that the trunk itself provides the bearing surface.



First the larger bumps were trimmed away so the ladder would lie fairly flat. This was freehand chainsaw work.



We held the ladder to the trunk with some plywood and screws. It's important to set the depth of the first cut to allow for the ladder frame and the ends of the screws within the wood, cutting metal with a chainsaw ruins your chain at best.

Once the ladder or frame is secured you can make the first cut. The piece of wood you remove will mostly be bark and sapwood and will end up as firewood.

 

Making the first cut is quite scary. Although the chainsaw is enclosed in bars and firmly held in position it still seems wrong to have it on its side and to be pushing it along a trunk.



I had to stop taking photos at this moment and hold the near end of the ladder down so that the whole thing didn't lift up with the weight of saw, frame and overhanging ladder as the cut was completed.



After the first cut you can still see an indention but the majority of the top surface is now levelled and ready to start turning into planks.



Nice and smooth, the surface is clean and will require relatively small amounts of finishing for a good appearance. Not so much positive can be said for the appearance of my thumb there.



The first plank cut was just 2" thick and has a hole in it where that indentation was still visible. I'm going to have this one and turn it into solid beech chopping boards, hoping eventually to build a small business selling natural wood products as a sideline.



We took three 3" planks but it quickly became more difficult to work as the trunk was removed and each cut was closer to the ground.



In this picture you can see the wedges that were inserted into the cuts as they were made to hold the slab up, keeping the cut level and easing the work of the chainsaw.

A final thin and narrow plank was taken before the bottom bark was sent to the fire. Now the wood has to season until it's ready to use. Apart from my slice it's currently destined to become a new workbench in a couple of years time.