Busy as a stump-tailed cow in fly time (367)

by Max Akroyd

So many sayings are applicable to gardening you could probably give up growing plants and just cultivate annoying dictums instead.

That one about having too many pots on the boil is on my mind at the moment. With a poorly wife, four kids to entertain and a big pig with a limp it’s tempting to give up on gardening and write country and western songs instead!

A whistling woman and a crowing hen never comes to a very good end… Clearly, you can’t have it all and some projects will not come to fruition. Before today, the Perennial Beds were starting to look a bit like this year’s losers. I’ve advocated the perennial vegetable to self-sufficient types before and I’m still convinced of all this. But an aspect of their wild and unreformed nature is the difficulty getting the seeds to germinate: good king Henry, patience dock and Turkish Rocket have all failed to materialise. I’m presently awaiting results of sorrel, Witloof and seakale sowings. Hopefully they will join the rhubarb and Welsh onions which have made it through the drought and keep the theme of this area alive.

 

Unproductive.

 

But after giving the area a good haircut with the strimmer and the mower this morning it’s apparent there will be plenty of vacant bed space – some of it even cultivated – to accommodate non-perennial things. Enter stage left the host of May sowings which are sprouting within hours of hitting that nice warm compost. Just goes to show even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then.

This afternoon I have to explain to my nine year old that he can’t watch the England friendly but has to help me shift rocks instead. That will not be as easy as sliding off a greasy log backward.

Building a herb garden (376 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

Summer can be a bit over-rated – appearance-wise it’s the gone-over time. The reward for those long winter months spent trying to kindle spring’s awakening is this. Warm, warm sun and cool sea-breeze by day, evenings full of colour but defined by deep shadow. Being inside feels like an offence against your mud-caked winter self.

Since I’m not allowed to just sit in the long grass on the field all day contemplating the view, the next best thing I can think of to honour the season is construction of our herb garden. Until today this area was merely a large ‘L’ shape of plastic mulch punctuated by the ten lavender plants I got in yesterday. There also a fork, with a broken tine, lying in the grass.

Today saw the introduction of some more herbs grown from seed. Dill and valerian found places behind the lavender and chives and chamomile in front. It still looks terrible, but there’s borage, hyssop, parsley, rosemary, summer savory, achillea and foxgloves in the offing – so one day, maybe next spring, a fragrant but eminently usable scene will be set. Once the plants are established we intend to edge the area with some old roof slates and cover the plastic with gravel.

In the meantime, it’s always nice to stand back from your work in the garden and see how you’ve improved things. Unfortunately, right now my herb garden looks like an explosion at a bargain-basement garden centre. Fortunately there were some other interesting things around the place to post here instead.

 

"Look at that strange looking human"

 

On days like this even the mowing – which will occupy much of the afternoon – seems purposeful; a useful enhancement of a fine picture of Spring.

Some hope, cardoons – and thank you Sophie Grigson (378)

by Max Akroyd

Losing all my potatoes recently was the kind of setback that you just have to get used to in this line of work. I’d witnessed a bit of frost damage on potato leaves in the past, but this looked like wholesale destruction. All that remained of this cornerstone crop was two hundred hopeless, blackened stumps. Gardening life has continued, but with a joyless gait.

You can imagine my delight yesterday evening when Emma spotted signs of life on the deadened haulms here, there and everywhere. Little emerald leaves appearing in the wreckage. Just to see a defiant fight back is invigorating.

 

 

Similarly, the sight of a fully-recovered goat was a shot in the (other) arm. Despite her misguided experiment in eating azalea, Handa is now back to her usual annoying self: standing on the hens and butting her neurotic goathousemate.

It seems unlikely that, after their recent experiences, the potatoes will produce a decent crop – and impossible that Handa will become any cleverer  – but I was inspired by the change in fortunes to finally get those cardoons in.

Because of the drought I had to find a bed under plastic mulch. Because of the expected size of the mature cardoons it had to be a long section! In the end I chose a bed midway up the Triangle. Planting cardoons represents another, much-needed vertical enhancement to the field and in this postion also honours an old field boundary. Which seems only polite.

 

Before ...

As I planted out the eighteen cardoons, a memory of a TV programme from (I think) the early eighties came to mind. As a sullen teenager I can’t imagine why I was watching Sophie Grigson presenting a show about growing vegetables – but I can vividly recall her enthusiasm about cardoons. Resident as I was in a sooty Northern suburb, gardening at that time only meant hybrid-t’s, rhodedendrons and raking up endless quantities of my Dad’s lawn cuttings. I realised today that it was Grigson’s sunny vision of vegetable abundance that awakened something in my genetic memory which is finally finding expression over twenty years later.

So, thank you Ms Grigson. I now have my very own cardoon bed – all thanks to you.

 

... after.

The sow’s here (379)

by Max Akroyd

Money and family things are year-round competitors for my attention, but something changes in the texture of gardening days from now until October. The task list starts to tower in the mind and knowing where to begin becomes a bit elusive… However, with Emma in the last, immobile stretch of pregnancy, tasks such as business administration and keeping the boys entertained are fixing in the orbit of her increased mass. By default, I’ve been granted carte blanche to tackle the garden. With a summer of broken nights in prospect, the next four to six weeks will determine the success of this growing season.

The recent weather has confused the picture considerably. Due to prevailing cool and dry weather, seedlings in the queue to plant out are still standing small in their big pots. Similarly, it’s difficult for the gardener to unfold mentally and embrace the growing season after a series of weary setbacks and false starts. But, ready or not, the change to warm weather is about to join the party of increased light and everything worth having will happen in the next five months. The false sense of human control over nature granted by the cold and dark months is about to be extinguished. Which at least builds character and stamina, if you like that kind of thing…

Although you might not think it if you saw it, keeping the garden looking orderly is a big priority. A semblance of order imposed by the mower and the strimmer takes up a lot of time but keeping the big picture tidy stops morale caving in. Notionally, the garden area is split into six sections for this purpose and I try and mow and strim one each day. Today, for example, is the turn of the gite garden and the area ‘front of house’ to feel the teeth of my creaky machines. I suppose every area of gardening – sowing, hoeing etc –   could probably be apportioned to a rigid daily allocation like this, but I fear such a high level of organisation would cause my brain to combust. And anyway, with farm animals on the scene, nothing goes completely according to the script.

 

Behind the wire ...

    

This morning’s decision to get the Triangle area tamed before getting stuck in on the gite garden turned out a bit of a major detour. The big thistles and docks fell and the strimmer wire made dust devils appear in the bone dry soil. But when I eventually stood back to admire my work I realised I had company. One of the little piglets was out in the Triangle too: even through my sap-splattered visor I could see she was most definitely on the wrong side of her enclosure. Chasing her back in was relatively easy – after all I was armed with a noisy strimmer – but detecting the cause of the power outage, less so.

I painstakingly strimmed the weeds and grass away from under the bottom wire. It’s difficult to work tentatively with a strimmer, but the fear of acquaintance with any residual current made it possible. Job done? While putting the strimmer away I noticed the mains lead had come loose from the bottom of the energiser box. As I trudged back to the house I told myself that all that under-wire strimming was a job that needed doing anyway. (Just not today).

Getting my goats (380 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

Naughty.

Our goats have made two bids for freedom in the last twenty four hours. On the first occasion they pushed, nibbled and generally distorted the corner of their enclosure sufficiently to make a tiny opening. Big enough, seemingly, for two goats and six hens to squeeze through. By the time we discovered them all, my prized quince trees were looking worser for wear than I was, the comfrey plantation had been hard-pruned and the hens were bustling through the flower beds having a whale of a time. 

At least, fence-mending and livestock-retrieving make for an unusual birthday evening. Most smallholders know that animals time their mayhem for your lowest point of capability – maybe they smell the wine!

And goats are the hungover farmer’s nemesis. Sharp as a tack, they know exactly when to strike. And they did – again – this morning. Their tethers slipped through my slightly arthritic grasp and they were off – galloping through the garlic, crushing the kales and plundering the plums. At this point, I feared a rerun of the terrible great goat escape. But for some goaty reason, they ended up back in their barn chasing the hens around. Business as usual in other words.

However, as the morning progressed it became apparent that all was not as it should be. Handa, the young and crazy one, had clearly ingested something not to her tummy’s liking and started to look unhappy. Silly goat. A trip to vets quickly ensued, followed equally rapidly by the administration of a charcoal solution.

Do you know that scene from Alien when they chop the robot’s head off? At least there’s something about holding a goat’s face while it sneezes and snorts a load of bile-coloured medicine all over you that warms the heart. It’s a bonding thing, like staying up all night with a poorly child.

By contrast, this afternoon I have a business meeting. I know, I can’t believe it either… a suit has been dragged out of deep storage. My hair has been tamed. But as the talk goes round and round, I suspect only my head will be full of goats and the cardoons I want to plant when I get back.

Happy baking (birth)day (380)

by Max Akroyd

 

When I was little, and we went on family holidays, it made a big impression on me how my parents were transformed by a bit of sun and fresh air. Why couldn’t every day be like that, I wondered? Why did big swathes of time have to be consigned to office or school, which made them all stressed and grey? To my child mind it seemed a terrible waste of all the other non-holiday days.

Thirty-eight years later, when my own five year old asks asks me what I’m doing on my birthday, I say: “Oh, nothing special. Just the usual stuff”. And he’s alright with that.

Today is the return of Baking Day. Last week’s prototype was such a success that it will be a permanent fixture in the family’s week from now on. Nothing spectacular happened, I didn’t reinvent the cabbage or anything, but we could just keep going in the greenhouse uninterrupted by the need to prepare a meal. Stuff like that.

Today’s target is the same as last week’s: bread, sauces and chutneys. The fact that I’m only half way through this list explains the unusually concise nature of this post – all those metaphors about pots on the boil describe accurately the present scene in our kitchen! Right, must fly…

 

Soil test (381)

by Max Akroyd

I love to hoe. It’s effective, but meditative too. As the blade slices through the weeds, the focus at soil level becomes almost trance-like. With spring sunshine on my shoulders, there’s few better places to be.

Only there’s a troubling thought that won’t go away. The growing year so far has been difficult, either dry and warm or dry and cold. For a garden on a south-facing slope this has been a trial and only certain crops have acquitted themselves well. The brassicas are doing nicely, netted and planted through plastic. The garlic, shallots, early peas and broad beans – all well established before the drought – are in good form. The potatoes were doing fine before the frost took them.

 

Not bad: cauliflowers....

 

... and peas

 

But all the other outdoor sowings represent varying degrees of failure: patchy, infested with weeds and generally a bit hopeless. Some, like the parsnips, sweet peas and onions, I might have salvaged by painstakingly removing the weeds and watering them regularly. But the beetroot, second peas and the onions from seed have plain failed. And I can’t just blame the weather… excuses are inedible. Before the new week brings a big new wave of planting outs there’s a reality check to be undertaken.

 

Terrible. Onions.

 

Fact is, my soil just isn’t good enough. By nature, wind-swept and rain-soaked Breton soil only welcomes trees and weeds. For one reason and another, I squandered any small natural advantage in the soil I inherited and accordingly, particularly in the raised beds, there simply isn’t enough heart in the soil to support early sowings in adverse conditions. Even onion sets withered and died. The soil has failed the weather’s test.

With the prospect of this soil entirely supporting my diet in future, the problem can’t be ignored any longer: for anything which can’t be planted in a trench or through plastic I need a soil remedy. The fact that most of the crops in question end up in raised beds doesn’t help much either, you can’t disrupt the structure of said beds with a spot of double-digging!

Ideally, I’d buy a ton of seaweed meal and the like and liberally scatter it around. Not an option on my budget. The books would prescribe a thick mulch of compost. But I don’t do compost, I have pigs! The contents of my compost bin would be a revolting mix of the banana and onion skins which my pigs won’t touch. But I do need a fibrous, rich and spreadable substance to mulch my raised beds with… 

After a bit of thought, these are my available ingredients for this magical, life-saving compound:

• leaves
• perennial weeds
• grass cuttings and other garden waste 
• manure & straw
• cardboard and other compostable household odds and ends
• comfrey

My plan for the week ahead, then, is to create a veritable compost laboratory in the corner of the hangar. Sure it’s going to stink a bit, but the pigs are in there already… The first two things, leaves and perennial weeds will need seperate treatment, thrown into big bins, soaked and left to rot down . The other ingredients will come available when the final trench has been filled on the field. I’m going to build two large, adjacent bays to compost and process this stuff, the idea being to combine all these composted elements together at the end to produce the final mix.

Right, that’s decided. Looks like I might do compost after all. But enough pondering out loud, where did I put that hoe? 

Planting by the moon (382 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

Yesterday afternoon I collected some grain for the animals from a local farmer. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and compared notes about the challenges of the local weather. His maize had been ‘burnt’ by the frost. Agreeing that the soil was unusually cold and dry for this time of year, I went on to point out that I’d been unable to effect my main carrot sowing.

I’m a fluent French speaker. Well, fluent as a two year old French child. So such conversations are a bit frustrating for both parties. On this occasion, though, I could make out a lot of his words and they seemed to be suggesting, seriously, that I should be sowing carrots in accordance with the lunar cycle. The international language of sceptical noises ensured that the farmer knew he was dealing with a non-believer lunacy-wise!

I was ushered indoors and, after a bit of searching for scissors, was handed the following extract from the local paper:

 

 

Sorry it’s a bit crumpled. From my conversation and the table above I deduce that Sunday is the best day for sowing carrots. Before 4:30 pm, no less.

From what I’ve read, it’s the gravitational influence of the moon which can be harnessed to the advantage of certain vegetables at certain times. This has a lot of currency in France, but I was still surprised that my friend the farmer, so unlike Mystic Meg in every other respect, was so certain that the theory was true.

Moreover, my further research (well, a few minutes on Google) suggests the astrological influence spreads to animal husbandry too. Apparently April 18-19 was the best time to castrate an animal, although I suspect there would never be a good time for the animal concerned. 

At the time, I tried to express concern that gravity was a pathetically weak force in the universe and the moon could no more influence a carrot than it could me. Although I think it’s a full moon at the moment and I do have a beard… Could there be truth in this loony theory?

The farmer and I decided to do a test. I agreed to sow a line of carrots today. And then another tomorrow, before 16:30 of course! We will then compare the two. At this point we both agreed that the effect of the local slug population might be far more influential upon the outcome.

But a deal is a deal and this morning, in addition to the hoeing and mowing, I sowed the first of my long lines of carrots…

Greenhouse Day (383)

by Max Akroyd

Yesterday morning’s frost turned out to be quite an event. It obliterated all my potatoes. Every single one of the two hundred plants now resembles a limp, dark seaweed.

Surprisingly, in the intervening time, this hasn’t felt as bad as it might: because the frost wasn’t forecast I can’t claim I would have fleeced them even if I had any fleece. I’d done my best with the crop and if the weather decided to take it, what’s a man to do?  At least it wasn’t next year, if you see what I mean.

Fortunately, potatoes were the only frost-tender things out on the field, the rest were still lurking in the ‘greenshed’ in pots where the short, sharp blast of May frost missed them. Or they’re still in the seed packets. Hitherto it’s been difficult to eke out enough sensible time in a day to sow comprehensively. So I resolved to devote today entirely to greenhouse work. To sowing and potting on and generally (re)building the garden’s future.

 

 

I’m noticing more and more that, even on the modest scale of this operation, the sowings and plantings out want to organise themselves into big phases. It’s a bit production line-like but this seems to be the only way my brain can organise it. The brassicas are a good example of this unmagical mental mapping in action. Starting with October sowings which get planted out in February, the next phase is the February sowings planted out in April and I’m now in the flurry of pak chois, cabbages and brocollis which comprise May’s efforts. Everything pegged, parcelled and organised. Good job the eating bit is pure abandon.

Having pricked out and potted on hundreds of brassicas the focus fell on sweet corns and pumpkins. Packet after packet. If summer ever arrives I intend to soak up those rays with a thousand sweet crops to avenge the one I lost yesterday. If those potatoes don’t recover at least I’ll have plenty of vacant bed space!

Human Daddy v. Mummy Pigs (384)

by Max Akroyd

Cunning attack pigs. Ok, not really ...

Beware the bored pig. After many weeks of happily and methodically turning over a section of their field, the signs are that the mummy pigs are getting restless.

I don’t know if it’s the wild boar in their genetic mix, but I know them well enough now to spot that beady look in their eye. The grass is starting to look a lot better on the other side of the electric fence and an escape plan will be hatched soon enough.

I’ve noticed that, by contrast, our big pig  – being more highly bred – is much more docile. And boring. If there’s something she doesn’t like she generally just grunts and goes off to sleep. I’ve occasionally found her snoring in the corner of her shed with the piglets standing on top of her.

With the mummy pigs it’s a whole different ball game. I reckon I have a week in which to expand their domain before chaos ensues. This dreadful event would, no doubt, entail them breaking out, visiting my French neighbour (they always do that), digging up one of my prize crops and – inevitably – calling in on the daddy pigs. A week may sound like a long lead-in time, but the difficulties of extending the electric fence while those two are inside it must be factored in … No paltry human gate can hold these girls for long and I don’t have any tranquiliser darts.

In fact, the only Achilles heel in their strategic armour-plating is a more-than-slight penchant for food. So incremental steps can be taken, things tweaked here and there, while their big heads are stuck in the troughs. I’ll be nervously fiddling with a section of wire awaiting the meal’s end: at this point they will come galloping and oinking down the field like small, deranged hippos to see what I’m up to… 

That’s for later in the week. This morning I strimmed the outline of the new section and marked it out with spare fence posts. Time-consuming, but easy compared to trying to refit the wires to the new position before they spot their opportunity.

Despite their propensity for chaos, I’m very grateful to these ladies. Apart from providing us with lots of healthy piglets, they have tamed a lot of the field which seriously heavy machinery would have baulked at. The large area they’ve cleared so far will be put down to forage crops once the fence has been moved. Mangel-wurzels and lucerne being the first I’m going to attempt. Once the whole field has been turned over the pigs will be relocated – somehow – and the field put to grass. Ready for a nice, friendly, biddable cow.

This afternoon will be dedicated to those typical May things:  hoeing, mowing and sowing. This will be attempted with my eyes shut so I don’t have to see the frost damage on my potatoes.

UPDATE: While the mummy pigs were enjoying their siesta, I seized the opportunity to extend the electric fence. A reckless act of cunning which I just about got away with, the pigs only detecting me as I fixed the uppermost wire. Here they are surveying the new territory:

 

A good recipe (385)

by Max Akroyd

This work has many perks. From seeing a beautiful May dawn to the weary but happy dusk-end of another day spent outside, it can be a real privilege.

The best bit is the ability to get priorities in the right order: family, animals, then fruit and vegetable growing. Sometimes they get into conflict, a hen escapes and unmulches your raspberry beds, the kids’ idea of planting delicate seedlings maybe on the heavy-handed side … but generally everything falls into place in a natural and strangely familiar arrangement.

Sometimes the animals provide an education to their human keepers, particularly when it comes to parenting. You can only be impressed by the dedication of a mother pig to her piglets.  A goose lacking thermal insulation for her nest plucks out a few of her own feathers to make it just so. In this way, the animals enhance understanding of ourselves.

So, despite misgivings about the work I’ll be overloading the rest of the week with, I’m taking the day off. Our youngest is four today and I’m lucky enough to share this time with him. Follow him around on his new bike in that uncomfortable crooked way, and try and soothe him when it all gets a bit much later on!

 

 

In the absence of any gardening news, I thought I’d share this recipe instead. It’s nothing glamourous but it captures the same alchemy which occurs when you take some simple ingredients and apply a little care and attention.

This, then, is Rhubarb and Raisin chutney:

900 g rhubarb, cut into 5cm chunks (important detail, to retain texture)

450 g onions, chopped

115 g raisins

300 ml water

300 ml cider vinegar

450 g demerara sugar

1 tablespoon ginger

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper (more if want to make a mango chutney substitute)

Just chuck all that in a pan and simmer it down until there’s no liquid obvious. That makes just over two 0.5 litre jars-full.

We’re enjoying it so much that any suggestion of letting it mature for a month or two would be absurd. And I’m going to make to double quantaties on the next baking day.

Fair weather … and fowl (385 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

My polytunnel is a bit like a space ship – something strange but interesting which landed in the garden ten months ago.

I’ve happily harvested salad in there for weeks, but now that’s all going to seed and being stared at longingly by the goats and the hens. Meanwhile, the tomatoes and cucumbers are almost big enough to suggest that they should move in there soon. But I’m guessing. Whereas I have a fair idea about what planting strategies will succeed and fail in the open garden, or even in a greenhouse, I’m a polytunnelling virgin. Basically, I don’t know what I’m doing and it always feels a bit weird to be in there.

Talking about weird, this odd weather continues. It’s neither good nor bad, it just goes on being mainly dry. What happened to the weeks full of rain we’re accustomed to at this time of year? They serve as an aide-memoire to keep things up-to-date in the polytunnel. Without a good soaking to the skin outside, I tend to forget to find an excuse to shelter under the plastic and just default to milling around in the field.

I think the realisation that a healthy looking clump of dandelions had already managed to complete its life cycle in the polytunnel finally pushed me to act. I’ve spent the morning carefully thinning out the gone-over salad, but keeping things like Red Deer Tongue lettuce, spring onions and coriander which are still going strong. The prospect of some cold nights ahead stayed my hand when it came to planting out the cucumbers and tomatoes; but I got their planting positions ready – just in case it ever warms up. I had hoped to form proper-looking beds with wooden boards this year but, as ever, there seems to be more urgent priorities.

Like duckling food. And – I’m pleased to report – the goose is finally sitting. Suddenly a nest has appeared, in a ridiculously exposed corner of her domain, and there appears to be about six eggs inside. Sitting on top of it, night and day, rain or shine, is Queen Goose. Who isn’t exactly cuddly at the best of times, but now hisses at you and looks ugly if you get within twenty foot of her. Somehow this afternoon I’ve got to top up their little pond and generally tidy up a bit without getting pecked. Could be a challenge.

New arrivals (386)

by Max Akroyd

The prospects for today might seem a bit glum. With the next flurry of guests for the gite arriving soon, today will dedicated to that tricky task of trying to get the outside looking presentable.

It’s difficult to keep things tidy. The ‘to do’ list is on an epic scale at this time of year and the appearance of the place suffers. Buckets and tools get left lying around at the fag end of tiring days. Weeds grow in front of the house. The dogs leave bones and sticks lying around and the pigs dig up strange items. Not a good look. All the pots front of house need emptying of their tulips and replacing with the next batch of flowers from the greenhouse. Not a burning priority for me normally, especially when there’s potatoes still to plant and a thousand other jobs to be done in the field. Which is why having a gite is good for us: it stops us subsiding completely into rural idiocy!

But I will be mucking out, mowing, strimming and sweeping with a spring in my step today. For yesterday saw the long awaited arrival of some ducklings!

 

 

They’re little fluffy bundles of optimism to my mind. And if I was looking for a dedicated role model it would be mother duck. She has been so attentive to her eggs and ignored all temptations to bob about on the pond instead.  She’s now absolutely starving and funnels up all the wheat and corn I throw her way. Dad is strutting about proudly, but at a slight distance, accepting that he’s no longer the centre of her world.

Baking day (387)

by Max Akroyd

 

Get to work for 9 am, finish at 5:30 pm. Make meal. Slump on settee for a few hours’ television. Let’s call it the Industrial Day. There’s been variations of course, but generally that’s the framework I’ve been subject to… well, since birth.

Maybe it’s a man thing, maybe it’s a me thing, but it took almost 43 years for me to realise that this timetable is completely unsuited to the peasant life. There’s been hints along the way. I’ve commented before on how the weather is my new boss and defines what I do to a great extent. The animals want to be up and about at first light, not some arbitary fixed point on a clock. Seeds are best sown in the evening, leaving daylight hours for field work. But the timetable of the industrial day has been a difficult habit to break. Yesterday, I resolved to dissolve it.

 

 

The trigger was an enduring problem, where to find time in the gardening day to process crops and preserve things? It’s not often that you return from the field at 5 pm and feel inspired to create a meal, let alone start a marathon preserving session. The supermarket beckons at this point; with its array of pumped up preparations and potions, the spell is difficult for a weary manual worker to break.

So this is a tiny war declared upon the sickly regime of the supermarket, a battle against having my already shallow pocket emptied by their shareholders.

Somehow, in consultation with Emma, I got from this realisation to the notion of a baking day. One day a week, probably the rainiest, we’ll set about filling the freezer with cakes, bread and basic soups and sauces to liberate time and save money later. It’s not a real baking day, more a processing day: but necessary to protect us from being led astray by the supermarket. We’re comforted to know that our oldest relative has always done this and her memory extends back before consumer society. 

Undeterred by a house with very few ingredients in it, we all got stuck in this morning . Immediately the good sense of the venture was apparent: the oven only needed heating once, the dough was three times bigger than usual but only took the same effort to knead, chopping twenty onions is almost as easy as chopping three… almost. So far we’ve made six loaves, a big pot of tomato sauce and enough vegetable curry for three meals. Emma has made cakes sufficient for a few normal person’s days – or one of mine – and  is presently creating a range of biscuits…

This afternoon I’m going to attack the rhubarb patch and bring home enough stalks for rhubarb chutney and rhubarb juice. Emma will be tied to a production line of cake creation that Henry Ford would have been proud of!

The ties of the supermarket will only be finally cut when cropping is perfected. (Unless the money markets sever them prematurely, like next week…). But at least we’ll be ready to receive the harvest.

A bit of a reckoning (388 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

The correct response is to shrug, hoe off the weeds and try again.

Distill out the dubious benefits derived from a failed 20 metre sowing of expensive beetroot seeds – exercise, meditative calm – and learn any lessons. In this case, I’ve learned that early sowings of anything less than super-rubust into a wintry, famished soil are misguided.

Next year, my early sowing of beetroot will be in modules in February for transplanting now.

Next no show: late February-sown peas. That dry spell, and some voracious voles, have meant very patchy results. It’s unfair, our six year old helped me sow all those. The injustice of it all! Never mind, he enjoyed that sunny afternoon and forgot about the peas since. Shut up and sow some more.

The parsnips are patchy, I’ve chitted some more and sowed them in the gaps. In microcosm the pragmatic approach imposed on an unruly mind by the need to be self-sufficient.

This morning was reluctantly sacrificed to the past: making good and patching up. Forgiving and moving on.

Then I stood back and I admired the crab apple blossom.

 

Money matters (392)

by Max Akroyd

 

With grumpy hens, and seeds unsown, I couldn’t hold it off any longer. A trip to the farm shop was required this morning.

Or was it? A look at the items on my receipt reveals some unremarkable things : potting composts, hen food and dog food. But these items, upon closer inspection, are a bit odd. Mysterious composites of stuff, provenance unknown, bought to replace two obvious and naturally occurring things, soil and food.  

I’m used to scouring supermarket receipts and thinking, “hey I can grow that/process that myself”. The farm shop purchases have escaped this scrutiny, until now. Generally, I’m finding the best yardstick to use in such matters is to ask whether a seventeeenth century peasant would have used or needed the thing in question. (Let’s set aside the inconvenient fact that some things – like a tetanus jab – fall foul of this strategy). 

Or, to look at it the other way, it seems the essence of progress is to buy something you could make, but shrink-wrapped in colourful plastic packaging.

You could argue that these products are time-saving. But I’ve missed a precious morning in the garden. The cost of the purchases, plus that of the petrol going to get them, represents a lot of time and effort in itself. Money is time. And I suppose I should also be mindful of all the finite energy resources inherent in manufacturing and transporting all these heavy consumer items.

If you get fancy ideas about replicating a product at home, there’s usually some expert to tell you that things will go wrong. Your chickens’ heads will fall off for sure due to the imperfect nutrition of homemade hen food. They need genetically modified soya you know – after all it’s only natural. Your seedlings will twist and die in your homely mix of seed compost. Well, I’m starting to think experts exist to obfuscate the bleedin’ obvious … for cash.

So that’s it. I’m resolved. No more soft handouts to agrochemical industry. I’m going to overlay my existing undertakings with some more: producing my own hen food, dog food and seed composts. But how? Dog food is straightforward because it was expertly covered here. The other two are slightly more testing. For the 21st century peasant, research always  starts with an internet search. So far I’ve found this for hen food and this for seed compost. I’d like to avoid having to buy one of these. And also any textbooks on hen nutrition, if possible, my insomnia isn’t that bad.

The next step is to throw the question open to the kind readers of one’s blog! If you have any answers or suggestions, please let me know. 

In the meantime, I’m off to spend the afternoon pushing an underpowered grass-cutting device round and round in circles to satisfy the perceived expectation of others that grass should look a certain way. Modern life, eh?

Bean trenching (393)

by Max Akroyd

After yesterday’s outrageous slackery, it was high time to get to grips with the bean trenches.

This was the unpromising scene awaiting me in the neglected corner of the Kitchen Garden I’d earmarked for this task:

 

Where to begin?

A morning’s weeding, digging and malleting (?) achieved, well, a half-finished war-zone type look:

 

Work in progress...

Having persuaded myself that dinner (lunch) was for wimps who lack bean trenches, I got the job done:

 

Time for a coffee break

I’ve half-heartedly put in a couple of canes to show how the thing will work. The top section is for a row of runner beans whose trenches will be completed at that future date my back has forgiven me for this morning’s endeavours…

Otherwise, all that remains is to fork over the trench and fill it with manure and grass cuttings – which is handy because there’s more mowing to do this afternoon. In an effort to retain moisture in the bean trench, old-timers used to fill their trenches with newspapers. But we don’t get a newspaper, and I find this technique doesn’t work so well with the online edition.

French Beans (394 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

Regarding most of May’s sowings and planting outs I’ve got beds prepared, or at least in a state of readiness. The realisation dawned today that, with the French beans, I’m nowhere.

Extra potatoes and the celery/celeriac have pushed their way forward in the queue and got their names on the remaining trenches. The cardoons and artichokes will get planted through some mulched sections once we’re through the Saints de Glace period. The runner beans at least have one edge of the Perennial Beds plan to themselves. Where to put the French beans? 

To clarify, these are the climbing versions. To order things in my old brain, I reserve the dwarf type as a follow on crop from the potatoes: it’s simplicity itself to rake over these beds once the spuds are out and throw in a few rows of beans. But arranging things vertically for the rest of the French bean crop maximises yield. Not sure I’ve got enough canes but I can always coppice some of the many hazels around the place. The bean seed are in to soak, just to get a root shoot off each one before bringing them on in pots.

All the plan now lacks is some growing space. And time. Today has been allocated to seeing our delightful bank manager and going to an art exhibition with Emma. Two years of servitude to the new baby will make such things nigh on impossible for us soon, so we’re seizing the chance today!

Green support (395)

by Max Akroyd

 

An advantage of the Hungry Gap is an enhanced appreciation of anything that fills it. Chances are, that thing will be green, wrongly under-appreciated during the rest of the year and will keep you regular. Exhibit A (above) is a Portuguese kale.

This robust plant has been generously giving up its outer leaves for a week or so now. Coarser and more mustard-y than the couve tronchuda, it’s an excellent addition to curries. The stem, cut into sections, is very edible too: I boil them in the water below the cut leaves, which sit in the steamer above.

Next item under consideration: rhubarb. As a sometime resident of the Rhubarb Triangle, it’s not so much a case of appreciating this harvest more but trying to find new things to do with it… 

I’d already reconciled myself to no coffee next year but the prospect of unadulterated tap water is a bit grim. The water here is ok, but not much fun. So I was pleased to discover this simple recipe and will endeavour to create my own rhubarb juice. Some time this week. When I consider everything that needs doing outside (it unfurls in my mind’s eye like a big swathe of weeds) the prospect of the requisite preserving seems a bit remote.

 

In fact, if I’d known this morning would consist of:

1. Discovering more chitted second early potatoes to be planted 
2. Digging and forking over a ten metre trench to accommodate said spuds
3. Mowing a large section of rough grass
4. Mucking out all the animals
5. Chasing round after an angry, orange-bottomed bee in an attempt to impress another blogger;

Then I’d probably have discovered I had a bad case of jogger’s nipple and retired to my bed. However, if all but 5. could be incorporated into a neat little package of a job, then: no problem! If the product of 3. & 4. can be used in the cultivation of 1. – then I’m completely sold on the concept. Hell, I might even cut the grass in a peculiar triangular pattern to reflect the shape of the vegetable beds below:

 

Yes I did climb a tree...

 

All done and dusted. Well apart from actually putting the potatoes into their manure and grass-cutting lined rows. With the distinct possibility of a frost tonight I’ll be spending a lot of the afternoon mulching the more advanced potatoes with straw. It’s all good exercise.

Oh, and the bee. A career in wildlife photography? Glad I’ve got a day job:

 

Bombus orangus arsus

 

Just do it. Kind of.

by Max Akroyd

 

I bring you good tidings this Sunday morning. You are fitter than you thought you were.

Unless you are ridiculously young anyway or an olympian in your spare time – you know who you are – all that gardening is enough to make you passably fit. I know this because I’ve just completed my second ‘run’ of this week. And it wasn’t that bad.

Unfortunately, becoming a peasant hasn’t made me any brighter and I’ve unwisely undertaken, before my children no less, to run a half marathon next year. So first thing this morning I was up early enough to notice all the new light around the place. Collecting our two dogs, who were just as stiff in leg and uncertain in mind about a repeat of this idea, we headed off to the local forest.

How beautiful the spring morning by the river Hyère was, emerald light passing through the new-formed canopy … shame about the ungainly peasant giant lumbering through the scene with his ragged dogs, causing all the panicked local fauna to fly off or sploosh into the river. I managed to complete the three miles or so by splitting it into sections of jogging, staggering and stopping for a wheezey respite. I believe this systematic approach to running is called a fartlek among fellow professionals. 

As I sprinted lustily forward, it was gratifying to look back and see Poppy – our hound thing – miles behind, like a hairy barrel with a little pink strip of tongue stuck on the front. Less so to look down to see Lucy, our labrador, keeping up with me without even breaking into a jog. Oh well, we all made it back to the car without medical intervention, then home for coffee and a bacon butty. The Rural Idiocy fitness plan completed for another day.

Gardening today will comprise sowing seeds in the greenhouse and a bit of potting on. The fact that this means I can sit on my arse all day is purely coincidental. 

Quote

by Max Akroyd

“For all the blitheness of spirit, wise heads watch for frost in the first week in May…”

Monty Don

Slug traps and wood ash (397)

by Max Akroyd

Despite the availability of a range of excellent Breton ales, beer isn’t a commodity seen very often chez-nous. If there’s any spare money it tends to be ‘invested’ in excellent wines available at low prices – France is a cheap option if you’re a cheese-loving alcoholic, but expensive for the rest of us.

Anyway, if I did have beer I wouldn’t share it with a devious, no-good, slimy mollusc intent on depriving me of my chance of subsistence. This is in no way a reference to contenders in the forthcoming election in the UK, but to the bizarre practice of some organic gardeners of filling their slug traps with beer. It’s just not going to happen here. Having had only partial success with organic slug pellets, I’ve been on the look out for an alternative snail killer. The ducks are patrolling the polytunnel/greenhouse area very effectively but the field is largely undefended…

No more! It’s not often that someone’s been excited by a bucket of pig food accidentally left out in the rain, but I was that someone when I noticed how many slugs and snails had converged on this soggy but simple mix of wheat and water. All that was left for me to do was find enough containers to replicate this outcome on the field and to inspire the boys to engage wth me in this wild beast hunt. Not difficult. An additional benefit is the ability to pick up said receptacles and deliver them to the omniverous farm animals to fight over. I’m sure the love of snails isn’t just confined to French pigs and hens.

 

I hope you like it, it's my only one.

The rest of the morning was spent tending to my peas and broad beans. Despite the attentions of the pigeons, the peas are flourishing. Not a word I’d ascribe to the broad beans. I’ve been spraying them with seaweed solution previously and today spread wood ash among them. But, sown in October, these are rugged and ragged survivors of the deep freeze of winter and my questionable decision to plant them at the windiest point of the field. I replaced the predictable casualties with a freshly sown, small variety called ‘Greeny’.  

You may regard this as an ad hoc, overdue contingency arrangement. I’m calling it a successional planting.

 

Hanging in there... Aquadulce broad beans

May

by Max Akroyd

 

For me, May is the watershed month.

Fruit and vegetable-wise the harvest is still a bit thin as the long wait for fruition continues. But this starts to change quite rapidly by the end of the month as the rest – the leaves, roots and shoots we eat – start to come thick and fast. The opportunity to sow things is comensurately reduced though: the vast majority of seeds sown from June will be an uneasy ‘late sowing’. The foundations for every edible plan need to be laid this month or filed, improbably, under ‘maybe next year’…

Inedible things are burgeoning too. Making our cultivated food crops look like the overbred weaklings they are – weeds, grasses and everything else farm animals conveniently process for us – swamp the last vestiges of winter’s sparseness.

With that mud and drear a distant memory, this is the time of abundance for the animals. Leaves for the goats, endless vegetable peelings and trimmings for the hens and, in the case of the pigs, there’s the regular chance to take their siestas outoors in the bramble patch. It’s capturing this contentment, as much as the diversity of  their outdoor diet, which makes the end product so rich.

Hopefully this month will see the arrival of lots of ducklings – poor mother duck has certainly been sitting for long enough. And the conception of some goslings too, if the gander diverts some of the energy spent squawking and shaking his head at all and sundry into a bit of bird on bird action.

The new month will also see the (slightly delayed) arrival of the meat hens. It would be easy to stay as a pork monoculture, but instinct suggests that we need another broad supply of animal protein. Another animal-related certainty is the need to radically reduce imported grain in their diet. Forage crops are going to be mentioned quite a bit this month. Which is nice because I’ll be able to say mangel-wurzel a lot.  

It’s just as well the animals are hard at work. If the sowing train is leaving I’m definitely faced with a last-minute, undignified sprint to get on board this year! My determination to get planting spaces ready on the field has meant the absolute basics are in pots and open soil, but nothing more. And there’s a new throng of good things joining April’s ranks of the unsown: beans, sweet corn and squash.

Fortunately motivation isn’t lacking to get these wonderful, abundant crops going. Just time…

Ouch marks the spot (398)

by Max Akroyd

 

The garden is starting to assume its rain forest aspect. The leaves are finally appearing and unfurling and the trees are closing in, bringing their twittering/social networking residents with them. In fact, all morning the birds around me seemed to be engaged in a daytime equivalent of the Keighley night out – the three ‘F’s – feeving, fighting and… I can’t remember the other one…

 

My gooseberry bed ... no really

 

This morning I was in the furthest, most afforested corner of the field, tackling the much-postponed job of mulching the gooseberry bed. Spurred on by the success of this operation with the currants I tackled the prickly customers below them in this area of the Allotment.

 

Here's some I made earlier ... the currant beds

 

First step was to strim off the monster weeds around the plants, their fallen leaves and stems to be buried under the plastic and thus turned to good use for a change. Next, I lifted one of the lengths of mulch from a bed further up the hill. I did this in sections because trying to negotiate the retro-mulching of more than three gooseberry bushes at once is too much to handle.

The major (prickly) problem was trying to locate the tiniest of the plants among the throng of weeds. I alighted on a method of feeling through the undergrowth until I felt the inevitable spines sticking into my hand. Now I don’t have “the hands of a lady” but it still was a bracing experience and even a Keighley bird would have blushed at the consequential expletives. I recommend this method as highly as testing an electric fence by urinating on it.

Once located, a cross was cut in the plastic at a point roughly according to the position of the gooseberry. Et voila, the mulch goes down:

 

Work in progress...

 

And finally the job was done and the bed could take it’s place unashamedly among the other soft fruit. I’m conscious that it looks terrible, all this plastic, but the demands of self-sufficiency detached gardening from its aesthetic basis long ago in my mind. And anyway, in a few years I’ll be able to whisk the plastic away, pretend it never happened and be all smug and knowing like a TV gardener. After all, who’s to know?

 

The finished (plastic) product

 

Back to normal? (399)

by Max Akroyd

 

As I write this there’s a faint pitter-patter of rain on the skylight above me. Maybe the strange summer-spring is over and the cooler, damper normality of Spring in Brittany is here.

During autumn and winter this part of France is very like a lot of the west of the British Isles, familiar texures in a different arrangement. But Spring and Summer are different. They even smell different! It’s hard to explain, but there’s a dizzying force of nature inhabiting every part of the local landscape. Summer can be fuggy with it, but the sharper contrasts in the Spring light can take your breath away.

After the dry restraint of the last few weeks, I suspect we’re really going to cop for it now! The weeds and the predators will be making up for lost time and the grass will grow so fast around you, you’ll think you’re dead. Time for a review of the fruit and vegetables.

Unlike the animals, whose vitality is a cause of habitual concern, I have to force myself to regularly assess things growing in the field. Attempting self-sufficiency is a strict task-master. Spontaneity isn’t everything it used to be and you tend to dwell on crop failures. There’s been a few already: the hard frosts – remember those weeks under ice? – destroyed half my nascent November-sown broad beans. Lesson learnt: sow them in early October instead. Only 50% of my parsnips are showing. Lesson: put more than one chitted seed at each station, stupid. Apart from that things are doing ok (technical horticultural measure, that) but would benefit from a good soaking for a week or two, even if the gardener wouldn’t.

A rare visit to the positive side of things would reveal success so far with all three methods of potato planting. The ones in trenches are poking through the straw mulch and it’s particularly pleasing to see those green leaves emerging from the lazy beds. I’m going to try and capture the benefit of today’s meagre rainfall and finally plant the rest of the second earlies this afternoon.

 

Fresh from the Kervéguen salon... coping with climate change, boar style...

 

If the new climate* means long spells of high pressure (weeks of ice in winter, weeks of sun in spring) then it’ll pay to have tested coping strategies. I’ve discovered – completely by accident I hasten to add – that keeping the trenches filled with organic matter open to the rain over winter kept them plantable in the subsequent dry spell. Similarly, the smaller transplants have all been placed in mini trenches – even in the raised beds. This has shaded them a bit, pooled the hard-won water delivered from the watering can and provided shelter from the wind to boot. It didn’t stop a pigeon pulling out all my onion seedlings, however, and thus ending another year’s foray into bulb onions from seed…   

Planting through plastic has been a revelation. It’s kept the potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and strawberries going through the drought. The dilpidated fruit bushes are reborn now they’re surrounded by a sea of black plastic. I really must do that gooseberry bed tomorrow! The cutting of endless holes in the fabric with a stanley knife is a bore, but less so than seeing your plants consumed by a tide of weeds.

I say this even after a morning spent transplanting endless stawberries from a weedy, non-mulched bed into a sterile, black one. I’ve trained our five year old to pinch off any flowers he sees on the hundreds of plants – without informing him that this will mean great root structure but no strawberries this year. That kind of delayed gratification isn’t really his thing!

(*I’m an agnostic regarding climate change, being generally wary of certainty. I’m sure one should be wary of certainty)

Harvest begins (400 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

A new word for this year is entering the family’s lexicon: “harvest”.

Unlike flower growers, who would be mortally depressed if nothing had happened before the end of April, vegetable growers have to wait patiently to enjoy the rewards of their efforts. You can buck this trend and eat leaves sown in January undercover. Or take a leaf  (so to speak) out of the flower gardeners book and eat the flower heads of biennials like brocolli. Or the shoots of big-rooted perennials like rhubarb and asparagus.

If you’re trying to eke out nutrition from your land these strategies become an obsession. The disaster that was last year means few crops here derived from the biennials or perennials – lots of rhubarb, but that’s about it.  The contents of the polytunnel have, therefore, been the mainstay of our garden diet so far. A salad bowl full of mixed leaves each and every day:

 

 

Any other harvest at this early stage is a source of considerable enthusiasm. So the cutting of our first cabbage of the year was a big deal! In October last year I sowed a range of Portuguese kales and cabbages – I understand they call them couves. One day I’ll disentangle this part of the cabbage family tree. I’m growing them alongside collards to determine if they are indeed the same. One thing’s for sure, these ancient plants have been adopted by diverse cultures and are valued by people with a lot of manual work to do! This was the couve tronchuda I harvested yesterday.

 

 

It was a bit immature size-wise but tasted lovely and sweet and there’s lots more out there – so why wait for the caterpillars? All in all a perfect partner to the omnivore’s other homegrown food of choice, pork. 

The feeling of easy abundance doesn’t really kick in though until the new potatoes arrive in June. In the meantime the unrequited labour continues: this musing about esoteric cabbages disguises the fact that I’ve spent the whole morning weeding the beetroot bed and hoeing the broad beans.

Seedling plans (401 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

 

A mini-watershed moment arrived yesterday as I finally cleared the hardening off tables – the last of the lettucey things and brassicas taking their places on the field.

Attention quickly switched to the next sowings. I attempted to step back from the flurry of activity momentarily and organise things according to defined needs. For example, I need a range of tomatoes. Ones for preserving, ones for cooking, ones for eating fresh… This required a modest analysis of the tomato seedlings which have made it so far. The slings and arrows of the weather, and some really crappy seed compost, have reduced their numbers and diversity considerably. Anyway, I potted them all on and noted down their names. Luckily they represent a decent range of varieties, 25 in total, and potential uses (blight willing).

Next under review were the herbs. At present just a large right angle of plastic mulch, we’re planning an extensive herb garden adjacent to the Kitchen Garden area. I scoured the pots of seedlings to find some likely candidates for planting their. I found these:

• Sage (5 plants)
• Valerian (9 plants – the nice wild one, not the ubiquitous red one)
• Summer savory (12 plants – is this the weediest seedling known to humankind? Great herb though…)
• Chamomile (loads)
• Rosemary (6)
• Achillea (we’ll pretend it’s yarrow)
• French Tarragon (2)
• Basil (lots)
• Foxgloves (ditto)

A reasonable start, but there’s lots more still to sow: hyssop, borage and marjoram being the ones I’m most enthusiastic about. I finally got the parsley sorted, and in doing so reminded myself why I usually forget this plant: it needs soaking for a while in hot water first. (I was going to soak them in urine like the old texts say, but when it came to sowing them I’d just been…). By the time you’ve strained each variety and tried to unstick it from your fingers after you’ve sown them, it all amounts to a whole heap of faff. But what’s the point of cooking without herbs? 

Monday morning maintenance (402)

by Max Akroyd

If you did a pie chart of the smallholder’s day, I suspect a large section of it would be apportioned to running to stand still. If this morning goes according to plan, it’ll be entirely devoted to maintaining things.

Unsurprising, the biggest time burden is keeping the animals fed and reasonably tidy but, as Spring intensifies, a lengthy battle with unwanted greenery is joined. The sound of mower and strimmer becomes a daily grind. I aim to replace these noisy things completely with animals and a scythe in the near future, just as the pigs have superceded the rotavator, but at the moment I’m still trapped into the time-saving myth of minor mechanisation.

Next on the list of time consumers has to be weeding. When the vegetable seedlings are as small as they are, most of this process has to be carried out by hand. It’s a job I really enjoy in small doses, but it takes an iron will to attend to it daily when there are larger, and seemingly more pressing, matters to be getting on with. Once cleared of weeds, the potential crops need thinning out, watering, checking for pests and feeding. It’s the turn of the broad beans today.

The last, and most neglected, area of maintenance concerns the effective upkeep of the smallholder him/herself. I had little idea of the bodily stresses and strains I’d encounter doing this work full time. Not a day passes without some obscure area of one’s anatomy being bruised, or strained or hurting in some way or other. The sheer diversity of movements involved in the partially successful beating-into-submission of six acres of land seems designed to enhance generalised strength/aches and pains! I understand fully now why a stereotypical peasant is slow moving, has terrible posture and is prone to lubrication with alcohol – it just goes with the territory…

 

 

The rewards in terms of freedom and great food are massive and I wouldn’t do anthing else. But, unlike most ‘normal’ jobs, those rewards are completely commensurate with effort and I’m still getting accustomed to that!

Lettuces and the like (403)

by Max Akroyd

The sound of rain on the roof in the small hours of the morning was such a surprise even the dogs started barking. The forecast is for sunny business as usual next week, so it was all systems go for planting out this morning.

 

 

Early starts, so transplants beat the heat, are now de rigeur. I’ve already planted out an assortment of 86 lettuces, endives, chicories and celtuce today. The harvest of salad leaves from the polytunnel, which has formed the cornerstone of our dinners (you may know this meal as lunch) for the last six weeks, has now largely gone to seed. Still edible, but less enticing.

The need to dovetail the end of the under-cover crop with the first lettuces from the field means I should have sown the latter two weeks earlier. Somehow, I will try and remember this next year. If I also get winter lettuces and the like sown in the polytunnel in October, and get the witloof chicory roots going next month, I might have sorted ‘lunches’ for the winter. Which is a good thing.

The tough guys, Itallian lettuces, leaf chicories and endives, were planted in a long, slightly windy row between the parsnips. This catch crop will benefit from the daily watering that I appear to committed to for their neighbours.

Untypically, the animals are causing a lot less bother than the vegetables at present. The mummy pigs – I should really start calling them my breeding sows – have been quietly getting on with things on a big scale. It’s a strange experience to visit their field and discover they’ve almost finished digging me a large allotment.

 

Thanks, girls!

 

Big pig was keen to show you her relatively paltry efforts. That’s breeding for you. Hopefully the piglets – daughters of the mummy pigs and now confident enough to be in the field all day every day – will show her how it’s done…

 

5/10 - must try harder!

Back to the vegetable grindstone for me this afternoon though. Another forty brassicas to plant out, through plastic and into the cool, damp soil beneath…

Look busy! (404 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

Never mind the bleary hour our three year old decides to wake me up. By the time we get to the bottom of our creaky old staircase, I have a pretty good idea what the day ahead holds.

Some things, like tending to the animals – once someone else’s life – are now as habitual as eating breakfast. (Sometimes the animals are breakfast). Other things, like sowing and mowing come and go with the seasons which present you with a clear map if you choose to look. But the problem is this is becoming a strange Summer/Spring and the map doesn’t correspond to the terrain.

Confronted with a baked-dry field, complete with wilting sweet peas and beetroot seedlings on life support, I don’t know what to do today. I’ve sown seeds in every container imaginable. I even helped Emma sow flower seeds yesterday. 

This is a potentially risky situation. If I’m clearly underoccupied, strange leisure pursuits will threaten to take me away from the farm. I like it here. It’s very beautiful in the rest of Brittany, and it might not be much of a farm, but I’m happiest here with my family and the pigs. Already a market in delightful St. Rivoal has been mentioned for this afternoon. That means a bath and a shave first. 

Bloody weather! 

Force majeure (405)

by Max Akroyd

 

It’s now very dry on the field. I’m keeping the seedlings of parsnips, beetroot, sweet peas and radishes ticking over with a daily soaking, but most other soil-based activity is – reluctantly – on hold. Along with the weeds and the slugs, I’m waiting for Sunday when we’re promised rain before a hot start to next week, with temperatures up in the 20’s.

 

Good weather for goats...

 

I’m not sure there was ever a gardener who ever said (with a clear conscience): “There’s nothing I can do today – I’m off to the pub!”. There’s always something to do in any weather. It’s often just not very desirable, that’s all. My unwelcome task this morning was to unveil the asparagus bed. This had fallen victim to even more intractable circumstances than drought last year (my wife’s car crash). The weeds soon overtook a lot of hard work in this thirty metre bed at the very top of the Kitchen Garden, and I had no option other than to mulch the lot last autumn and hope for the best.

So, with asparagus season notionally around the corner, it was high time to uncover the asparagus bed today. What lay beneath?

 

Hmmm....

 

Well, at least the jungle of weeds had been largely extinguished – just some etiolated old docks poking through. There were, however, tiny signs of life evident in 12 of the 15 asparagus crowns originally planted. If nothing other than a miniscule stand against life’s uncontrollables, I’m determined to coax them to full strength over the next few seasons.

The plastic mulch liberated thus was immediately put down over some short lateral beds in the Kitchen Garden. Once the awkward middle section of this big area is mastered I’m faced with the surprising prospect of actually completing an area of the garden, planting-wise. In fact, in the sense that every space that can be planted is planted, ‘finishing’ the garden is a realistic prospect by the end of June.

Which is just as well. A new, elemental force capable of huge distraction from gardening matters is (touch wood) approaching fast! Hope he isn’t expecting asparagus too soon…

 

 

Optimism = melons (406)

by Max Akroyd

Every spring it’s the same. When spring is more like summer it’s worse. How many seasons of gardening will quell this anxiety?

 

Phew!

 

I took the cue from the joyous appearance of the first potato leaves to wield the azada and create new trenches for main crop potatoes. I’m throwing caution – and good sense – to the wind. They will be be blighted for sure, but I’m going to sow some main crop spuds with the main purpose of opening up the bad soil in this area of the garden:

 

 

Who knows, this may be the first year in a hundred when Brittany isn’t subject to potato blight? I may even get a crop… By the way, even in this reckless frame of mind, I’m not falling for that old saw that potatoes work the soil for you. But they certainly incentivise a hungry gardener to cultivate and improve an otherwise neglected plot. The soil in this area is very clay and compressed, and my forearms are still reverberating to the clang of the blade on its hard surface!

Gentler pursuits this afternoon as we (the boys and I) settle down to some serious sowing. Of melons, among other things. Having written yesterday that only the chillies would occupy the greenshed in the height of summer, I stumbled across the advice that melons would also thrive in a hot house planted in big pots. Trying to fight off fantasies that the dank old greenshed could become a luscious melon emporium, I’m pressing ahead regardless with a foray into melon growing.

In the Greenshed (407ish days to go)

by Max Akroyd

“The Greenshed” was the spontaneous name applied to our greenhouse by my daughter during the Easter holiday. It captures the nature of the place so precisely, it has become the official name of our baby plant production line.

If only it was a production line: a smooth transition from seed, to seedling, to potting on, to hardening off, to planting out. I’ve bemoaned the spasmodic nature of  my seedlings’ reality before, and clearly failed to do anything about it since! I blame those pigs.

This morning was spent engaged in what can only be described as a salvage operation. A lurching form of progress during which each plant was assessed, fed, watered and moved on – or given up as a lost cause accompanied by much self-berating. 

At least space on the outdoor hardening off benches was earned by yesterday’s efforts:

 

Planting out brassicas...

This space was instantly filled this morning by a load of lettuces, chicories and yet more brassicas moved out from protected hardening off – which is just an inappropriately fancy name for an old table standing in a sheltered corner of an open barn. The celery, celeriac, cardoon and artichoke seedlings then took their place, ready for planting out next month. They needed to escape the burgeoning heat of the greenshed, preferably a week ago. I had to hastily construct another platform to accommodate their numbers and sprinkle the lot with organic slug pellets like electric blue confetti – and about as effective.

What remained in the greenshed after this exodus are suited by the rising temperatures: my tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, cucumbers, courgettes, squash and trays of flower seedlings – all of which needed potting on. I got about a third of them done. Clearly an evening shift is required to get this particular backlog cleared… Everything in that list will also have vacated the greenshed by June, apart from the chillies which will stay in there, in pots, to be cruelly hot-housed to fruition over the hot summer months…

*

I always forget to sow parsley. It’s a strange mental block which I’m determined to overcome this year and which invoked much rummaging in my seed boxes – the earliest stage of the whole growing process chez-moi. I spent ages pulling out packets of this and that which needed sowing now – maybe a night shift is in order too…

 

Back to the start

 

 But I refuse to spend any more of this beautiful daytime indoors. I’m off to dig a trench.

Choices (407)

by Max Akroyd

 

Another thing that fades away with this occupation is the ability to enjoy being away from home. A couple of days’ change of scene is fine, but any longer and I’d be climbing the walls with stress about a major, world-changing issue – like the health of my parsnip seedlings..! It’s this all-consuming nature that would make subsistence farming pretty wretched if you didn’t choose to do it. 

In Brittany, growth rates are usually explosive at this time of year – with annual weeds swamping optimism and the grass growing as fast as you can cut it. But this very warm, dry spell is helpfully keeping things in check a bit. Even those other great hope-munchers, the slugs and snails, are in abeyance. In nature there’s always a pay back though, and yesterday I was standing in the twilight watering things, instead of doing something useful like talking over my wife’s favourite TV programme.

The seed beds are now dust dry. Any more sowing direct now means more watering, so I’m going to hold off for the rest of this (dry) week. I’m also not convinced that there won’t be another frost, so that rules out another tier of tender planting outs.

What remains are the ranks of second wave brassicas. Everything sown in October (cauliflowers, Portuguese cabbages) is already in the ground, but there are trays and trays of kales, summer cabbages and brussel sprouts ready for the off. If I plant them through plastic they will have damp soil to spread their roots into and a wash or two with seaweed solution should see them through.

 

Home (408)

by Max Akroyd

 

I’ve just completed another round trip to the North of England.

You certainly do justice to the distance when completing it by a combination of car, boat and rail. Plenty of time, then, to mull things over: questions of identity, “where is home?” and, most weightily of all, “how many of the childrens’ sweets can I eat without being sick?”…

It’s a kind of catharsis, I think (the travelling, not the sweet-related nausea). Leeds, where I spent my formative years, seemed grey, boarded-up and contained a disproportionate number of people shouting obscenities into the middle of the afternoon. Normandy was big, misty and majestic. Ille et Vilaine was interminable and very foggy. 

But by the time I reached Finistère, spring was ablaze and it all felt like home – but without the complexity of belonging.

This is the scene just three miles from the garden, with nature untamed, impossible to culivate, or with the roots of things showing:

 

 

Nature at her most un-ownable, but appreciated universally. It belongs to no one, and to me. 

Hiatus (413)

by Max Akroyd

Spring has now fully immersed the garden in her first colours. The race to fruit, seed and generally go forth and multiply defines the scene.

The animals are very different beasts to their soporific winter versions. The burgeoning plant life draws them out first thing in the morning and makes them reluctant to be shut in at night. It’s our first Spring together and it’s an education to watch them submerge themselves completely  in Spring’s flow.

The hens have been at their generous best for weeks now, but the remaining guineas and the fowl are now laying regularly. Mother duck is now on her nest of eight eggs like a statue, unshifting while her husband bobs around on the pond patiently, loyally awaiting her return. The goose leaves her preposterously large eggs just lying around the place – so far – but I’m hoping the pair of them will stop concentrating on making a noise like giant seagulls, and get on with building a nest.

The pigs and goats are suddenly like exaggerated versions of themselves – more foraging, more mischief – and all the females are in season!

 

For the relatively marginal, human component of the farm the Easter holiday is still in full swing in this part of France. I’m going to make like a mother duck for a couple of days and give the family undistracted time.

Back on Monday, enjoy your sunny weekend! 

Dry (414)

by Max Akroyd

A very pleasant combination of warm sun and steady, cool breeze for the last fortnight has tuned the top layers of our soil into a fragile dust. (I did think I’d heard approaching rain at one point this morning – but it turned out to be the sound of my sinuses draining).

There’s a limit to how much watering can be done by hand – enough to keep the seedlings going really – and sowing anything new into the open soil would be pointless until the rain returns.

In these circumstances the plastic mulch is coming into its own. It allowed me to plant another dozen cauliflowers this morning through the fabric and into the ‘just right ‘soil below. I’ve no evidence that this method will work at all in the long run, but the early indications taken from the Portuguese kales I planted out in February are quite encouraging:

 

Portuguese kale, maybe the same as collards?

 

The mulches also allow me to get a proper start in the Perennial Beds. Although neglected by most, perennial vegetables are a mainstream concern for anyone interested in self-sufficiency. April is a big month sowing-wise in this department, and I sowed lots of seakale seeds this morning to join the good king henry and sorrel sown previously. Unfortunately, my Turkish rocket and patience dock seed seems to have mislaid its viability – a reflection of how different my concerns are to the majority of other folk!

I’d bought in six new rhubarb crowns and got these in the ground today, together with some bunches of welsh onions sown last October. The perennials-used-as-annuals, Witloof chicory and runner beans, get sown next month and will give this area of the garden a reassuring feeling of completeness.

The good companions (415 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

I’ve been battling manfully with a man cold for the last few days – you know, not complaining at all about the severity of it all… Did I mention my finger still hurts, too?

Latterly I’ve been picking soft tasks, like weeding, or no jobs at all. Today, I couldn’t bear the inertia any more. There are good plants going bad in pots, a depleting thing in the world gnawing at me like a debt. 

So, casting my syptoms to one side, I heroically trudged onto the field to create the first carrot growing space. In the onion beds. Stealing my ideas wholesale from here, I’m approaching carrots in two ways this year. First phase (today’s) is interplanting them with onions – being some remainder red onion sets, and a lot of rather pot bound Ailsa seedlings, sown on January 12th by my own rugged hand. Phase two relies upon Emma and her sewing machine to knock some enviromesh into something resembling Joy’s sterling efforts and will follow later in the month.

I don’t know if it’s my terrible cold (I may have referred to this earlier) or an unusual brush with self-awareness, but the sound of my prose is really pissing me off today. So I present the rest of this post as a self-explanatory silence. (You’ll have to take my word for it that I’d have artfully woven reference to our three year old as another sort of good companion into my gilded text):

 

    

Weeding time (416)

by Max Akroyd

Just a dose of some sort of selective herbicide and this job would be over in minutes. Instead this one man is bent over a long parsnip bed for most of the afternoon, trying to select the right seedling to pull out.

For the first hour or so he’s fine: there’s something meditative about this weeding process. He can listen to the birds sing (if the geese aren’t honking) and feel the sun on the back of his neck.  The contents of his bucket, barely edible to him, will delight the hens and confer their nutritional benefits to him through their eggs. Anything the hens don’t want will come back, composted with the rest of their waste, and help feed next year’s crop. Everything feels more or less connected and, well, as it should be.

The local farmers trundle past every now and again, doing big jobs, in big fields in big tractors.

After the second hour, with the job still not completed and feet bored of being contorted into strange positions in their boots, heretical thoughts about the use of chemicals start to form in his mind: after all, it’s their industrial scale application that matters. If everyone farmed like him – he tells himself – perhaps small-scale application wouldn’t be so harmful to the environment? 

Maybe he’d look kind of important in a spacesuit lugging a preparation of chemicals around on his back… Or is their a machine that could mangle the weeds for him? A specialist bit of kit that would deafen the bloody geese and could work down the rows so he didn’t have to… He would only have to produce about 300 parsnips a year for the next 175 years to offset the cost… 

It seems the exchange for saving time on this job would be hungry hens, possible destitution and tainted parsnips that he wouldn’t feed to himself, let alone his family.

Back to the weeding. Barefoot.

The geese have landed! (417 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

 

It’s been a maniacal morning, readying the area for our new barter acquisitions – a breeding pair of Chinese Brown geese.

It appears my brain can’t compute the names of any more farm animals! When I want to refer to the geese it always comes out a bit like ‘goat’ – so I’ve had to settle for ‘ghost’. This, then, is the ghost house, hastily completed today:

 

Under construction: NOT the Taj Mahal

 

There was also a pond to dig; a very modest affair formed from an old water butt. As I dug the hole for the pond I couldn’t help noticing how good the soil was in this area of the field. Oh well, too late to move the enclosure now.

The final (comedy) act was to transport the water for the pond by wheelbarrow from the nearest point the hose pipe could reach. Not the ideal task when you’re in a hurry.

I’d just tipped the last load of water into the pond, when the birds arrived. (By van. They didn’t fly here). Understandably, upon their release, I got hissed at bit – but not pecked once. And now their honking has joined the happy cacophony of the smallholding.

 

Mr and Mrs Ghost

 

Now eat that grass, and make ghostlings! I’m off for a coffee. 

In praise of other people’s hard work (418)

by Max Akroyd

 

I’m having a day off today. That’s the sort of day off known only to smallholders, where all the animals and plants need attention and maintenance just like other days! And then there’s the parental duties, plus the laundry, cooking and cleaning. Thinking about it, maybe digging trenches is just a subtle form of skiving off…

But at least my slightly battered body will get a rest – did I mention my finger still hurts? I found myself pondering this morning how our ancestors managed all this subsistence stuff, without things like… well, washing machines. I especially can’t imagine doing all that laundry by hand. I’m getting a flavour of how tough this life can be in term of physical wear and tear, and appreciate it’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to most of human experience in most of the world and in most of history… Puts a damaged finger, and other bits and pieces, into perspective.

The reward, though, is great: being able to eat the best things. Things otherwise unavailable to people of modest means in a civilised society.   

Salsify and other vegetable oddities (419)

by Max Akroyd

The weather in Brttany isn’t doing anything by halves this year: if you get a sunny day, you get a sunny week. Which is great, until it rains and then you risk being washed away by the seventh day.

But with pigs napping in the sun without a care and goats nibbling at Spring’s new growth, it’s not a sensible time to worry too much about weather patterns; it’s time to keep sowing and planting. The next vacant bed in my Kitchen Garden plan – no. 25 – is allocated to what most people would consider oddities: salsify, scorzonera and Hamburg parsley.

Whenever I see reference to an unusual vegetable though, I tend to pay close attention. I’m discovering that a lot of these obscure edibles are very relevant to a plan for self-sufficiency. A lot of them tend to crop in times where most, more popular, vegetables don’t. One of the reasons they’ve lapsed into obscurity is presumbly that they’re difficult to process mechanically/industrially and, instead, need a gnarly old peasant to coax them out of the ground. Well, here I am!

By the same token, I’m also finding that the older books are more relevant to my recent life-choices  – here’s a relevant extract from How to Grow and Produce Your Own Food, 1946:

 

 

Salsify and scorzonera fit the ‘useful oddity’ definition very well. I’ve grown them before and the brittle roots were so big and deep I couldn’t get them out of the ground. Apparently you need a crow bar. But their roots offer a gourmet winter alternative and, if left in the ground and blanched in early spring, the shoots are edible as ‘chards’. It’s this latter, hungry gap crop which has particularly caught my eye and spurred me on to create a decent space for them this morning.

Next stop bulbous chervil?

***

A beautiful day all spent outdoors.

After weeding the bed and forming the drill for the salsify, scorzonera and Hamburg parsley, I realised there was enough room for a parallel sowing of radishes. I mixed the seeds of about a dozen varieties and my daughter sowed them. Which is about the most interesting thing that can happen to radishes: I grow them but we all eat them only under protest.

I went off to find the oddity seeds but only came back with the salsify: the parsley (I discovered by reading the packet) is best started in modules and the scorzonera seeds have vanished. Oh well, I’m sure they’ll show up one day. At least less time sowing meant I had more time to set up the geese’s enclosure.

I then somehow got roped into painting the top of a wall, so I’m now a strange mix of slightly sun-tanned and dappled with white paint. Worst was to follow when I embarked on mowing the Allotment area: the mower hit a mole hill and the corner of the handlebar rebounded into my groin! Thankfully only big pig was witness to the indignity of a grown man sobbing…

A cold beer in hand and the pain is mainly a memory!

Goose house (420)

by Max Akroyd

Even more than six months in, I’m finding this pregnancy very straightforward. A little pain in my lower back but otherwise no problems. My wife, on the other hand, is slowing down a bit…

This Friday being a gite changeover day means I will doing my impression of a house and garden, many-armed demi-god: mower in one hand, mop, vacuum cleaner, strimmer, bed linen, iron in the others. I’ll just finish this coffee.

While I’m multi-tasking, I’m conscious that a fellow smallholder back in Blighty is, conversely, sitting with her arms crossed on the pretext that she’s awaiting sight of my goose house. It’s unacceptable to me for her to be so under-employed. The sun is shining and she should be out there shovelling manure or something. 

Here, then, is a sneak preview of the goose house crafted by my own fair hands:

 

The pond still needs a bit of work...

 

Now, back to work please.

Back to my roots (421)

by Max Akroyd

After yesterday’s soft peddling I was raring to go again in the field’s fresh air. The weather definitely contributes to progress at this time of year. In fact, if there was a meteorological pause button I’d be pressing it now while the sun is warm and the breeze is cool. Who needs summer?

 

Today's trenches (and base camp)

 

Even cleaning out all the animal houses didn’t dent my enthusiasm. So I wielded my azada and completed two sections of potato trench. This, when combined with another large bed under plastic mulch, will see the conclusion of potato planting for this year. Unless I lose my senses and go for a stab at a main crop sowing and almost certainly lose out to blight later.

With all the lovely beans, cucurbits and corn waiting in the wings for next month, I think it’s desirable to have seed in the ground for all the big root crops before the end of April.  My scorecard so far is:

• potatoes – over half in the ground
• jerusalem artichokes – sown
• parsnips – chitted and sown (ever to be seen again?)
• beetroot – sown, not showing yet…
• celeriac – in pots in the greenhouse, looking a bit small
• salsify & scorzonera – bed almost ready. More on these two next week.
• oca – must consult books on what to do with this one!

The glaring omission from this list is carrots. I’ve  propped up the bottom line of the seed companies for too long by sowing them too early, so I’m intending to hold on until the last day of April.

Much more pressingly, there’s a goose shelter to construct and that means a trip to Espace Emeraude, my favourite everything shop.

***

I’m not sure how much a picture of a bowl containing some green stuff will enhance today’s post, but here goes nothing:

 

A culinary first chez-nous...

 

It’s wild garlic pesto prepared by me and my daughter. And very nice too, although I’m not sure the additional clove of garlic in the recipe added anything – except enhanced vampire deterrence.

The happiness of cardoons (422 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

A chaos of pots in the greenhouse

 

There are some leaden days – a body designed for sitting down and watching TV aches from days of physical exertion. A slug has eaten my gherkins. And, swirling my thoughts towards it, a meeting with someone in a suit this afternoon has pulled the plug out of the day.

But today I am a content gardener thanks to my extensive range of cardoon seedlings which I potted on this morning. What’s not to like about cardoons? Maybe the taste – who knows? – but they’re a big, happy addition to the kitchen garden which you can only grow if you want to eat one fresh.

The weather was less delightful than it has been of late, so I tarried in the greenhouse potting on aubergines, tomatoes and even some flowers (I must be in a good mood). Although I’m going to sneak the achillea into the herb garden under the cover of yarrow. As soon as pots and trays were emptied of one set of seedlings they were instantly replenished with something else. That’s April for you.

Basils, chamomile, kohl rabi, cabbages, sprouts – the sowings were coming thick and fast. A mass sowing of pak choi followed – green, white, purple. I should have sown these in February to be ready to follow on from the tatsoi in the polytunnel. (If things like a seamless succession of obscure oriental brassicas interest you, then I’ve started a list of planting notes on each crop here).

I then sowed more tomatoes and aubergines to supplement the doughty survivors from February and March. I could have stayed in there all day, but now I have to do a spreadsheet. Do cardoons count as collateral?

Planning for the 3 sisters … and some geese (423)

by Max Akroyd

Regular readers may recall that I traded four piglets for two ducks (already installed next the polytunnel and happily awaiting the birth of eight offspring) and two geese. Plus some other ducklings at a future date. Well, the arrival of the geese is scheduled in the next week so much of this one will be devoted to setting up their living quarters. So far I’ve managed to mark out the area, which will be the first of four as they work their way around the field:

 

A bit more work to do here...

 

I’ll mow it later today and do a minimal shopping list for any bits and pieces I might need which I can’t find lying around the place. Today’s big priority, though, was to salvage the area recently vacated by big pig. Nothing around here stays weed free for long and her efforts were under threat:

 

Big pig's old area

 

The minute the potato backlog was cleared, my thoughts immediately turned to the next task: preparing for pumpkins, sweet corn and climbing beans. I won’t be planting them together in a true ‘three sister’ compilation but they definitely occupy a close proximity in my gardening brain. Big pig’s efforts provided an excellent foundation for a pumpkin patch.  

After a morning’s weeding and scraping around it looked like this (from the other end):

 

I wish I could train the dog to dig

 

Hardly perfect, but good enough for stage two of pumpkin patch construction, which comprises digging ‘pockets’ in the soil and filling them with the richest stuff I can find. A pumpkin seedling will be planted atop each station and allowed to sprawl away at will around the patch – suppressing the weeds a bit as they go. Behind the wheelbarrow you can see the parallel lines of mulch where the climbing beans will go – trenches to dig first! The potential sweetcorn patch is off camera on the left. 

As I stumped off for a coffee I noticed a very welcome spring arrival, almost buried in the grass:

 

 

Potato day (424)

by Max Akroyd

If the theme this week has been ‘getting stuff in the ground quickly because it’s April’, then today was definitely on message.

While I tussled manfully with a long stretch of plastic mulch – never a winning strategy on a windy day – Emma quietly and methodically worked her way around the vacant trenches and lazy beds. It was a bit annoying to me how quickly she completed the planting of these enormous (to my mind) and hard won areas, and how many seed potatoes were left at the end of her efforts.

The final potato planting permutation, planting through plastic mulch, slowed her down a bit though:

 

Slower going...

 

This latter exposition of gardening as very hard work would be a cunning plan realised, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve got to go and complete the row now. Sigh.

87 Strawberries, 38 Sweet peas and 4 Easter eggs (and 425 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

With the sun in the sky again and the promise of an Easter egg hunt, it wasn’t hard to lure the whole family out on to the field today.

It took the kids less than five minutes to discover the eggs I’d taken ages to hide around the garden: but at least that meant they weren’t eaten by a goat, pig or hen first. 

Supercharged by chocolate, the many hands on offer were put to good use ferrying plants to and fro as Emma and I planted out sweet peas:

 

And then strawberry offsets:

.

The area we call the Triangle is so big that getting to the end of a row seems to take a lifetime: an interminable process of cutting the plastic mulch, digging a little hole, inserting the plant and repeat. But assisted by more-or-less willing helpers, surrounded by family chit chat and an intimidating job defeated, it’s been my best Easter Sunday in years.

A feeling enhanced by seeing the broad beans sown last month finally breaking the surface. With the annual weeds appearing everywhere now, the long wait is over.

Changeover Saturday (426)

by Max Akroyd

From now until the end of the gite season, Saturdays will be a bit barren gardening-wise.

For today is the day of departure for one set of gite guests, shortly followed by the arrival of the next ones a few hours later. In the interim there is much to-ing and fro-ing with hoovers, mops and sundry other equipment usually not associated with the good life.

The departing guests had two sunny-ish days and five atrocious ones. At one point today I feared the incoming guests would be forced to arrive by boat such was the force of hail, rain and any other form of precipitation you care to mention. Even the hens saw the sense of being inside. However, almost unbelievably, the forecast has transformed into wall-to-wall sun for the coming week. Which is very welcome, the extent of the mud around the place is starting to resemble the dark depths of January.

It is great greenhouse weather, though. I managed a break from cleaning products long enough to pot on my tomatoes, aubergines and peppers. The progress of this tribe has been disappointingly slow so far this year (I’m sure the weather has something to do with that!) but potting on seems to give them a real kick start. Which is exactly the effect I’ll be looking for in general – a spiritual changeover – when the sun finally returns.  

Bad Dog on Good Friday (427)

by Max Akroyd

Most of the time this life is sweet completeness. But, it has to be said, when it goes wrong it can be pretty unpleasant, gory stuff.

Unforseen events today knocked my plans over like so many skittles. The last thing I want to do is taint your Easter with my small but sorry tale. I’ve typed the ugly bit in white, so if you want to feel the downside of smallholding highlight the space below, otherwise feel free to admire the harvest below that! 

Today we had a visit from a stray dog. A friendly, black, curly creature with a purple collar. She woofed at the goats and then went off to play with the dogs across the road. She looked owned so we rang around a few neighbours to see if she was known to them. She wasn’t, so I readied the car to take her down to the Mairie, where such things are dealt with in rural France. It was at this point I saw her standing in the pigs’ enclosure surrounded by the muddied, lifeless forms of our guinea fowl.

It didn’t get any better. As I went to collar her I could see that the wrecked birds were still alive and I had to dispatch them myself and quickly. Experienced keepers of animals will identify straight away that I should never have left a stray dog unguarded even if  I thought our enclosures were secure.  

I used to think that farmers who shot dogs were brutal. I don’t any more. And I couldn’t help thinking how big and heavy the birds were as I bagged them for disposal. The dog was contained in a barn to be taken away by the nice lady dog warden. Another life randomly and needlessly extinguished.

***

By the time all that nasty business was concluded the day had limped aimlessly to a conclusion. As garden therapy I went to the polytunnel and assembled a small salad to go with tea.

 

 

All but the lettuce (sown in October) represented an “in-year” harvest, sown on 19 January directly into the polytunnel beds. For the record: coriander, lambs lettuce, chervil, rocket, beet leaves, mizuna and leaf chicory.

Onwards and upwards.

  

Solanum tuberosum planting methodologies (428)

by Max Akroyd

Being a highly-paid executive in a former life taught me a thing or two.

Well, actually, just two things. Firstly, you can take a common-sense process, like finding ways to plant spuds, give it a really fancy name and make it sound like something professional, complex and expensive. If I could medicalise it too – perhaps identify a microbe on seed potatoes potentially lethal to gardeners – I could be rich… rich I tell you! Where am I going with this? Oh yes, that explains today’s title.

The second thing I learnt was to have an unreasonable fear of deadlines. In all seriousness, the fact that I haven’t got enough spuds planted yet fills me with a similar dread (I imagine) to discovering some part of my anatomy had developed gangrene.

So it’s high time to organise spud planting in case that dreadful unspecified, generalised thing might happen if I don’t. To my mind, there are three planting options (sorry, I don’t know why everything is numbered today).

1. The sensible way
2. Planting through plastic mulch
3. Lazy beds

As insurance really, I’ve planted quite a few seed potatoes the conventional way. But 2 & 3 appeal to me because they turn nature against herself using weeds and manure to feed the spuds. Of all three methods I like the lazy beds best because it doesn’t require any alien oil-based substance. This is the first lazy bed being completed this morning – at last:

 

April

by Max Akroyd

One day last summer we visited a beach. It was new to us, a lovely little cove that sheltered us from the wind on that otherwise hot day.

There were a few people there: some tourists who, like us, headed for the flat, open sands and set up camp in the sun. Then there were the locals who sat right at the back of the cove, which puzzled us a bit because they were sitting in partial shade. But we went about enjoying our day; the children built castles and other, less recognisable, structures and the adults let the sun and the sea erase their thoughts.

The reason for the locals’ location became apparent soon enough. A shallow but inexorable tide slid rapidly up the beach, engulfing equally the children’s creations and the more sophisticated cares of the adults. A stampede of wet-towel bearing, but wiser, foreigners headed for the back of the cove and the amused smiles of the locals.

I only mention all this because, in all but one respect, April is just like March. You can sow more or less the same stuff, just with slightly more confidence it won’t get slugged or frozen. The potential harvest is still very limited: flowers may appear everywhere but the vegetable garden is still mustering its strength and the hungry gap continues… alleviated only by some brassicas, salad leaves and rhubarb.

The key difference between April and March is that nature is now joining the fun. March conferred an illusion of control, April’s tide of weeds and other natural growth will sweep that away. A little local knowledge will help avoid getting swamped, but can never stop the tide itself.

It’s not something to be happy or sad about. And I suppose it’s good for us, in a way.

Back under cover (429 days to go)…

by Max Akroyd

Having four children means I rarely miss the dawn chorus. In fact, our house has one of it’s own: whisperings, floorboards creaking under little feet, the toilet seat being accidentally dropped…

Today the early morning sounds from outside had a quality about them which was unmistakably wet, again. There was the wind again, so sea breeze-y that the house could have been adrift in the Atlantic. 

Unlike other outdoor activities – like going for a walk – when you go gardening you’re a sitting target for the elements. This March brand of wetness would have you soaked to the skin in no time, so another day under cover beckons. Well a morning actually. It has been decreed we’re going on a new seascape hunt this afternoon this morning.

No shortage of things to do inside: there can’t be much you couldn’t sow today if you felt like it. From melons to brussels sprouts, it’s all possible – constrained only by a lack of vacant pots and trays in my case. My 3″ pots ran out weeks ago. Those A4-size trays: full up by the end of February.

I’m now left with pondering the neglected, cobwebby odds and sods selection which includes modules torn and battered after years of service and pots so big I could sow a coconut or two… Oh well, the cucurbit family will enjoy the space – all those squashes, cucumbers, melons, courgettes and acochas (no I don’t know what they are either).

***

The official weather forecast and my interpretation of the dawn chorus were both wrong. It turned into a lovely day. Which meant the ‘greenshed’ was out of the question and the mowing was the priority.

A picture of the mower, or the mown, wouldn’t be very exciting – so here’s some pictures from this morning’s trip to the beach instead… These scenes are less than an hour from our front door which means, I suppose, that the sea is out of sight but shouldn’t be out of mind in gardening terms.

 

 

Sowing weather (430)

by Max Akroyd

I suppose some March days are meant to be this windy and wet. And it does offer a much needed oppotunity to catch up with the month’s sowings.

So it’s a day under glass, or corrugated translucent plastic in my case, for me. An updated list of my endeavours will appear here, later on. But I couldn’t resist recording the first appearance of three different types of egg at Kervéguen this morning.

 

Duck, hen, guinea fowl

 

The duck egg was lying abandonned and forlorn in the middle of the ducks’ enclosure. I’m taking the fact that Mme. Canard is sitting on three other eggs as a sign that she’s happy with her new accommodation. Although it’s a bit galling that she’s set up camp under a bush, next door to the expensive duck house which I bought off some M.P. on ebay. (No, not really).

Pampered parsnips (431)

by Max Akroyd

The forecast may be wild but the weather hasn’t read it yet and is grey and docile. A perfect opportunity to get the parsnips planted. I say planted rather than sown because the seeds have already germinated on damp kitchen roll, each sending out a fragile white root.

Placing them carefully in the trench was a job for fingers a lot less clumsy than mine. After raking the soil out, forming the drills and making a spacing stick out of a hazel twig, I could stand back and watch our nine year old dexterously plant the chitted seeds…

 

First rule of gardening, son: get your rows straight!

I then followed him down the row and gently placed a small handful of seed compost on top of each seed. And thus about 80 parsnips are as good as in the bag – or should be if there’s any gardening justice (there isn’t). One day my soil will be in such good shape the seeds will sow themselves – but today is not that day!

After freeing son no. 1 from his ball and chain, my daughter appeared looking for gainful employment – at least that’s how I interpreted her relaxed Easter holiday demeanour. Fortunately she was just the right size and shape to put on top of each wheelbarrow full of straw, thus ensuring that none of the dozen loads or so fell off before they reached the hen house.

***

Mowing season proper has arrived. I mowed the paths around the Allotment area and – instead of the odourless, dry relics of last year – the mower box was full of thick, sweet-smelling new growth. This means about an hour per dry day on average devoted to this activity until November.

A bit daunting, but the product of grass cuttings is a welcome addition to the pigs’ diet, to the trenches into which a lot of my crops get planted and to the surface of the raised beds as a mulch between plants. Today’s quota got tipped over the lazy beds: potato planting is going to be a big feature of the next fortnight. Chitting the seed potatoes can substitute for progress in the ground until the end of March, but now they need soil.

Before the school run there was just time to pot on some collards and to sow some brussels sprouts. There can’t have been many parents at the school gate who could claim that this afternoon – or would want to!

A rather paltry list of March sowings has finally appeared here.

My first (real) harvest of 2010 (432)

by Max Akroyd

There are lettuces in the offing, but tatsoi has won the prize for best October sowing. Today I harvested the almost flowering shoots:

 

Yum?

 

I’m not claiming it will be a culinary delight. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was meant to eaten at the leaf stage. But last time I grew tatsoi the plant grew into a rosette about the size of a dinner plate so I was waiting for this to happen again. It didn’t and, presumably due to the intervening cold of winter, went to seed instead. No matter. With enough soy sauce and butter it’ll taste fine. Moreover, it valiantly took the hit of the first slugs and thus protected my lettuces as a kind of sacrificial crop.

I bet that’s the most anybody will write about tatsoi today.

There isn’t much else to talk about with the weather this vile and me having as much get up and go after the journey as a limp tatsoi leaf. I got the animals mucked out and then retreated to the greenhouse.

My work undercover is, I’ve decided too spasmodic: I build up queues of things to sow, thin out, prick out, pot on, harden off instead of achieving an orderly and smooth succession. I thought the best way to tackle this was to group all the seedlings into their respective stages of development, before attacking the backlogs. The worst of which is the sowing. But after all the reorganising there was only time to sow artichokes and basils…

At least I’ve go at extra pair of hands – or four – now Easter is coming…

 

On the production line at 9 years old...

The 434-days-to-go review

by Max Akroyd

Instead of complaining about the antics of my porcine friends today, I thought I’d try and step back from the hustle and bustle of mundane events and take stock a bit. A storm is coming in, and my old bones needed an excuse for a day off.

For better or for worse I’m trying to hit a target of self-sufficiency by 1 June 2011, a mere 434 days from now. How am I doing? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, don’t rush with the truth!)

As well as being great fun to write, this blog has a selfish two-fold purpose. Firstly, it acts as a much needed kick up the bum for me. It would be hard to record “Dear readers, today I sat on my backside, ate chocolate and watched Flog It.” (Even though that’s precisely my plan for this day!) Secondly, it will act as an aide-memoire for next year, which is why I record almost every detail now: if something really works I want to be sure to repeat it next year when it really matters.

So, in retrospect, what has “really worked” so far? Specific things that spring to mind include the October sowings which are a real success so far: I have caulflowers and kales in the field growing away (or feeding the slugs) already, and plants lurking at the back of the polytunnel which I could eat now (no, not the dandelions). Tatsoi might not be everybody’s culinary delight, but anything which bridges the hungry gap is fine with me. Still having half a pig in the freezer at this time of year helps alleviate a lot of worries.

A diet of arcane brassicas and pork will be much improved by some nice things preserved in jars. It is this export from the present to the forthcoming year of self-sufficiency which will take its place on centre stage in the coming weeks and months.

An unrelated, but equally important, theme will no doubt arise from my desire to complete the livestock on the smallholding with a donkey and a cow. There, I’ve confessed: the cow and her milk are an obvious addition, but something has welled-up in my incipient peasant conciousness which demands that I own a donkey. Hopefully I’ll work out why in due course!  

In more general terms, this project has been upgraded in my own perception from ‘highly improbable’ to ‘almost possible’. The efforts with our animals and vegetables obviously help this process, but it’s also down to the barter network which is forming. No man is an island, and success is far more likely with local trading partners.

This sense of support I feel is greatly enhanced by the comments received on this blog. I’m going to take this opportunity to make you all cringe and to thank you sincerely, from the damp depths of my smelly wellies in fact, for your continued, morale-boosting support. The good life is definitely much better when shared. 

Finally, I’ve taken a picture of every growing area in the garden and will repeat this at the start of forthcoming seasons (unless I forget). So here it is, warts – or at least docks – and all…

Edit: my photo of the area we call “the Allotment” seems to have vanished. I’ll add it back in later… in the meantime, you can guess the picture: long beds, lots of plastic mulch…

Right, where did I put that chocolate?

After the battle (435 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

Shhh! The girls are sleeping... (Those round black things are piglets)

 

I returned to the site of yesterday’s great piglet battle with a bit of a heavy heart, diminished somewhat by the pain in my throbbing finger. The former cow stall turned pig pen is now forlorn, empty and in need of a proper clean. Best to just get on with these things and plan for the future.

The area in question will be home to our meat hens. These birds don’t get a big outdoor area in which they would only exercise off their value, but I’m determined they should have a large, comfortable indoor space – it’s about 7 metres by 5 metres of floor space. The small outdoor enclosure will be shut off to them at first and will be resown after being denuded by the previous piggy residents. I’m going to try a sowing of green purslane there; I read this was a good way to get get omega 6 oils into our diet via the hens. I’m trying something similar with the laying hens too – a sowing of chicory for them to eat, which is meant to make the yolks of their eggs a wonderful deep orange colour.

Funds permitting, we’ll take a trip to the market in beautiful Châteauneuf-du-Faou during the Easter holidays and stock up with about twenty birds – the idea being to get on with self-sufficiency in poultry with no further ado. That’s the plan from now on, in fact: to focus on each major food type and get them sorted for home production one by one. More on this bigger picture tomorrow.

Without being hassled by pigs it was very straightforward to get the place clean, although I’ll attack it with the power washer before the hens move in. The same can’t be said off all the other animal houses which also needed a clear out today: there’s only so many hens you can stroke and pigs’ ears you can scratch before time becomes of the essence. For there was yet more cementing to do… from another gate post to, of all things, a rotary clothes line! 

There’s another storm forecast for tomorrow so I did a fair bit of batonning down before deciding to put my feet up for the rest of the day. It’s been a busy ten days or so, my body is falling apart at the seams and, joy of joys, this year’s tax return has just arrived!

Au revoir M. P_______ ? (436)

by Max Akroyd

Most efforts today chez-nous were directed towards sprucing the place up, ready for the incoming gite guests.

There was still time for one last bit of piglet-related chaos, though. It all started peacefully enough: the only reminder of the piglets being the occasional squawk as they slowly learned the one golden rule relating to electric fences.

Half way through a morning of putting up fencing and gate posts, the local farmer arrived with some friends to take away two of our piglets. One of whom was to be the terrible Mr P. – a piglet capable of causing chaos far in excess of his tiny stature. Catching his sister was relatively easy since she made a charge for the (surprisingly porous) gate between the two pig pens: being a bit fatter than Mr P. (who has had plenty of exercise recently) she got stuck like a cork in a bottle. I pulled her out and deposited her in the box the farmer had brought for the purpose.

Now for Mr P. Inevitably this is where things started to go horribly wrong. After running around after him for a bit, I rugby tackled him successfully and carried him kicking and screaming towards the box. Just as he was about to join his sister he broke free of my grasp. By now big pig had come to see what all of the fuss was about. Unhappy at the prospect of seeing her beau being chased around, she reared up against the enclosure and – being 16 stone – managed to break a corner post. Mr P. was loose, big pig was angry and about to get even, and I looked like an Englishman in the middle of a panic attack! 

 

Daddy loses the plot...

 

The situation only worsened when I entered big pig’s pen to tempt her back in… somehow I managed to semi-crush a finger in that bloody gate. Acting increasingly like I was about to turn into the Hulk (albeit with a bit of a beer belly), and offering my new French friends a crash course in English expletives, I shut big pig in, grabbed Mr P. and stuck him in the box. Even through the pain of my finger, I felt elated.

So goodbye Mr. P. Well, actually, probably just au revoir? I’m not sure there’s a pen that can hold that pig. I told the farmer that I half expected to see Mr P. again and that I could then sell the piglet back to him again. We all agreed this was a fine business plan, shook hands (ouch) and peace and order returned to Kervéguen… for now!

The joy of … Spring (437)

by Max Akroyd

Spring is definitely in the air at Kervéguen.

The hitherto shy and retiring ducks were engaged in an act of public indecency when I strolled down to feed the pigs this morning. Which is fine: I want ducklings. “Go on my son” etc.

In contrast, and to my dismay, on entering the hangar I noticed the cow stall, which should have contained the last remaining boy piglet, was empty… somehow he’d managed to squeeze himself through the gate which supposedly separates him from his sisters and big pig, and he had been enjoying full use of the harem all night. I can’t get over the contortions he must have gone through to reach the promised land.  He’d already been christened M. P______ (insert worst French swear word I know) for being consistently annoying, but this was a new level of mischief.

I do not want more piglets! Big pig appears to be in season at present, but hopefully the ridiculously vast size differential between them has prevented the nightmare scenario coming to pass. But I won’t know for sure until July. I’ll be pleased to see the back of him tomorrow, little so and so, but I confess he’s earned my grudging respect!

Having evicted Mr P. and added another layer of mesh to the gate, I escaped to the field to plant the last of the raspberry canes. Job done – hopefully for six years or so.

I then planted twenty metres of Jerusalem artichokes in a double row. This should make a formidable windbreak, but as I made my way down the row I increasingly questioned what I was going to do with the potentially huge crop. Sure it’s a good fallback self-sufficiency-wise, but I don’t want 2011 to be my year of flatulence. (Besides, as my wife would slanderously suggest, this would make it just like any other year…).

The distant sight of big pig gave me an idea. And I can confirm that pigs like Jerusalem artichokes – although that might just be her post-coital appetite talking… 

Not according to plan (438)

by Max Akroyd

Some smallholding days are as easy as falling off a log. Today was the other sort.

Nothing startling, just a lot of dead ends: rain started as soon as I got the mower out, the gate I needed wasn’t in stock, a piglet escaped and the guinea fowl disappeared! Everything is now back where it should be , and I didn’t need the gate as it  turned out, but I burned through a lot of that scarce Spring commodity: time. 

I did get the animal houses cleaned out without incident and combined the piglets with the big pig without too much fuss. She finds their mischief a bit puzzling, but just subsides grumbling into her bed when their antics become a bit too silly. I kept them inside today while they got acquainted, tomorrow they will be allowed into the big wide world of their field enclosure.

They live in the hangar, along with most of the other pigs. When we first moved to Kervéguen it was mystery what to do with this church-sized space. In the intervening months its utility has become very apparent and I now sometimes wonder how we managed without one!

 

In the hangar

We’ve already got the daddy pigs occupying one edge of the structure – you can see their ‘bedroom’ in the photo above (not the blue thing, obviously). I’m looking to repeat this set up at the back of the hangar because that could offer an easy exit into the field. All I need is a bit more time…

Non-gardening day (439)

by Max Akroyd

Our gite starts a three week run of guests next Saturday. Whereas I feel everyone who visits this year will be suitably impressed by my wonky but magnificent rows of beetroot sowings, I concede it may also be important to get the farm looking as neat as possible. The coming week then will have more than its fair share of things only slightly related to gardening, and today was no exception.

 

The last post

 

The arrival of a family, who have a little boy with a dog allergy, to stay in our gite later in the season has spurred me on to create an area which effectively seals off the gite garden from our dogs, escapee pigs, guinea fowl and the like. This involved preparing a rough mix using my idiosyncratic two barrow method and setting eight posts. A real change from normal gardening but not, upon reflection, quite as good as a rest. 

Beetroot (440)

by Max Akroyd

The time distance between having an idea about in the garden, preparing the soil, and sowing or planting has diminished: from the three month span in winter to approximately three minutes now. Armed with a packet of seeds and an area of weed-free soil all that stands between you and germination is a bit of wintry dithering. It’s time – I tell myself – to just do it.

Suitably resolved, I’m going to work anti-clockwise around all the beds over the next four weeks and make sure they’re either planted, seeded or ready to receive the seedlings from the greenhouse. The first area under inspection is the Kitchen Garden and the morning’s task was to sow the beetroot bed:

 

Making way for beetroot

 

I had to clear out some docks I’d missed earlier in the year, but then it was ready for a raking out and the forming of drills with a draw hoe. Half a dozen varieties were then sown, making sure the corky seed didn’t fly away in the wind! As with many other crops, this sowing is a bit experimental: some authorities say that beetroot should only be sown at the end of April. I’ll certainly do a main crop sowing then, but I’m interested to see if the earliest possible sowing will prosper…

To continue the complete departure from my kitchen garden bed plan, the next bed is – I’ve decided on a whim – for parsnips. Traditionally, these are regarded with disdain by the French, but you see them more and more in the supermarkets and I had no problem getting some new seed at the garden centre. (Perhaps in a global economy all tastes will converge in time?) Anyway, I’m not inclined to sow parsnip direct. This year I’ve set them out for pre-germination on wet kitchen roll, for transplanting when they’ve sprouted.

***

Cauliflowers - ready for netting

 

With the boars oinking inquisitively at me from their enclosure next door, I set about planting out the October-sown cauliflowers. The varieties are ‘Avalanche’ and ‘All Year Round’. I cut an ‘+’ shape into the plastic mulch and dug a hole deep enough to plant each seedling up to the gunnels. This was the site of last year’s potato bed so I’m hoping the soil will be rich enough and, thanks to the plastic mulch, moist enough for these fussy brassicas. If the row gives us twenty decent cauliflowers the effort will have been worth it.

 

Time for a coffee

 

After rounding up an escapee piglet who, assisted by a mischievous goat, had broken into the hen’s enclosure, I set up camp in the greenhouse. There are lots of kales and sprouts that need potting on, a task that will have to resume this evening. My dreams will be cruciferous!

Nice weather for ducks (441 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

An extra-early start today in order to get the animals fed and the barns mucked out, ready for the arrival of the ducks and the departure of the piglets. Reflecting this watershed moment, the morning had a completely different texture to it: mild and very damp. There’s suddenly no need to brace oneself before stepping out, weather-wise anyhow…

The saga of the piglets, which began as my biggest surprise in years, is finally drawing to a close. Four mini-sows are happily installed in the cow stall next to big pig, getting acquainted with their future sty-mate – mainly by giddying about in front of her if she deigns to stick her snout through the separating gate. Two more await collection by a local farmer as payment for a large bale of hay. Three boars and one sow went this morning in return for the fowl. I felt a pang of regret as I shut the door on their new owner’s van, confusion on their trusting faces, but you do get inured to such things. Mostly.

On a happier note, the ducks are a lovely addition to our live stock. They’re understandably a bit nervous of us at present, but compared to ten rumbustious piglets, they’re a stroll waddle in the park.  Rather embarassingly, I spontaneously started making quacking noises in reply to their gentle calls.

 

Meet M. & Mme. Duck

 

I instantly realised that these svelte creatures could have conceivably squeezed through three of four gaps in their enclosure, so spent much of the morning making good gates and fences. The guinea fowl, who seem immune to electric fences and now roam freely around the place by day, were most put out by these imposters and proceeded to shout at them all morning.  

The duck’s arrival has also caused my assotment of strange tables used for hardening off seedlings to be displaced (stuff like this always happens when anything changes around here) so I set them up elsewhere. This walking to and fro with pots got me conclusively soaked to the skin. I can take a hint, and will spend this afternoon ‘planning’ things like sowing. It may look like I’ve fallen asleep on the settee but I will in fact be meditating. Honest.

Loose ends (442)

by Max Akroyd

And then it was gone...

 

With the vernal equinox approaching (17:32 UTC, 20 March, fact fans) it seems fitting, if not environmentally sound, to burn the uncompostable debris of the autumn and winter. My frazzled eyebrows testify to the intensity of this symbolic act. Goodbye winter, don’t come back too soon.

The necessity to keep an eye on (burning) things, and to stare vacantly into the embers in that strange meditation fire invokes, meant I had to stay in the orbit of the bonfire doing, well, this and that. There was a big bench to move onto the field, which I did, but at what cost to my physiology only time will tell. (Can’t wait for my sons to grow up).

I topped up the goats’ hay – but they were too fascinated by the fire to care – and I moved a final piglet in with the ones we’re keeping. The criteria of selection? She had a big, fat face and long eyelashes. I’m not sure this is in the textbooks but they seemed like good credentials in my eyes.

With the duck area almost sorted, my thoughts are turning to geese. Yesterday I thought we probably had enough diversity in our animal stock. Today I want to put geese on that lawn I salvaged recently and might have mentioned would be for the family… Better get out there quick and create another one before anyone notices…

 

Before ...

 

Whilst researching a new area for the stupid lawn, I noticed some wild garlic in the hedgerow which led me to this… Wild garlic pesto here we come!

 

I love Brittany!

*** 

After a couple of hours’ strimming I was developing incipient vibration white finger – but at least the family now has a lawned area for their exclusive use. No vegetable or animal shall take it from them, except maybe some geese in the second phase of their rotation..!

 

Insert geese here...

 

Covered in grass strimmings, stinking of bonfire and having had a piglet urinate in my glove this morning, even I had to concede it was time for a bath. This also got me to an appropriate level of social acceptability to go and tie up the terms of tomorrow’s piglets for ducks and geese barter. Upshot being I’ll receive a breeding pair of Indian Runner ducks tomorrow, a handsome pair of Brown Chinese Geese at Easter and four Muscovy ducklings in the summer. Fowl-tastic!   

Who’s in charge around here? (443)

by Max Akroyd

 

When the alarm clock went off this morning I found myself instantly thinking about the jobs that need doing today. First to enter my mind are those jobs I’d really like to be doing: leisurely sowing, planting, hoeing – preferably in the sunshine…

Then reality starts to invade my thoughts and I realise it’s Wednesday. No school for young ones in France on Wednesdays (very civilised) so, for part of the day, jobs will have to be adapted to suit them or, failing that, take place somewhere I can keep an eye on them.

I don’t know how they manage it, but the next bossy presence in my head is always the pigs! What are their pressing needs? Oh yes, piglets to relocate – yippee. Fifteen minutes later, I’m out of bed and a piglet tucked under my arm squealing so loudly it must have woken people in neighbouring communes. By the time I’ve got to my third I feared an Animal Farm type uprising as the goats and the other pigs go crazy in response to the piglets’ cries.

Back inside for a late breakfast and pondering the influences over the work I do without the dreary presence of a boss… Some responsibilities – like family and animals – I’d find life dull without and assume them willingly (most of the time!). They enhance freedom rather than detract from it.

There is, however, one over-arching authority in my life. A turbulent and implacable authority who determines exactly what needs doing, and when, and how – even more so than my wife. Who is this godlike influence?

It’s the weather. Like any obedient follower I look for signs of her moods all the time. I pore over her sacred text at least three times a day (the weather forecast). Because it’s now forecast to rain tomorrow instead of Friday, everything changes today, a change that only the most tyrannical boss could impose. The mower will have to do its work this afternoon and the new enclosure for the geese and ducks will have to go up too, while it’s dry…

The rain will be a blessing for the soil. (And if it rains really hard I can stay inside and get on with the sowing at last). 

*** 

With the sun shining and school holidays suddenly in plain view, the pace of things remained frantic this afternoon. I managed a mowing of the two areas of reclaimed meadow which yielded barrow loads of mossy mulch, with which I lined the raspberry beds.  

Then a dash to the hardware store to pick up a new, enormous drill bit essential to construction of the duck house and enclosure. I returned home with “the wrong drill bit” but somehow everything got built and our three year old had great fun playing with said 13€ drill bit, bashing it against the duck house and pretending to drop it in the pond. This photo shows half the area (sorry the image is a bit rubbish, the dwindling light seems to have caught out my camera).

 

Duck house at dusk

 

It’s only now that I realise that I had one last, last-dry-day job: to light the burning pile. Hopefully it won’t start raining too early tomorrow…   

Busy times on the smallholding (444)

by Max Akroyd

The steady stream of jobs which need doing around the farm at the moment has become a river. Thankfully the weather is so glorious that it’s all a pleasure: a cold misty start soon gives way to a warm, sunny day. We really need some rain to make the soil workable again, but when the weather as sweet as this it’s hard to seriously will it to turn sour.

The next stage of the tortuous pig plan was enacted this morning. Big pig did a fine job of turning over her old area:

 

Well done big pig!

 

I spent a few hours setting up her new one. She is is now enjoying a brand new stretch of meadow:

 

You go girl!

This pleasure is tempered somewhat by the company of the guinea-fowl in her new domain. The boss of the guineas is a fine specimen but aggressive and noisy, although a lot less so when faced with 16 stones’ worth of big pig! I’ve yet to decide the fate of these interesting but – frankly – stupid birds. Some will soon be for the stewing pot for sure, but I’ll also be keeping a few for breeding purposes. This fits nicely with the arrival of breeding pairs of geese and ducks – as early as this Friday – in exchange for piglets. Building their enclosure is on the (long) list for this week too. When the sowing of seeds gets done, I’m not sure! Perhaps a night shift…

Before that the four piglets we’re keeping are moving to the barn which the guinea fowl have just left. I’m dreading picking our piglets because I know the ones I don’t pick will not have as nice a life as the ones I do. Oh well, a stint of barn cleaning this afternoon will keep my mind off such weighty decisions. And yes, I also have an appointment with some gooseberry bushes! 

***

The mulching with plastic of a neglected soft fruit bed planted a year earlier is possibly not the greatest way to spend the afternoon. In fact, sweeping out an old cow stall in readiness for the piglets’ transfer tomorrow seemed pretty good fun in comparison… But at least it’s done and by the end of the row I had this obscure skill down to a fine art. Which is just as well because the final bed to be done isn’t a mixture of  currants and gooseberries like today’s: it’s all the latter in all their spiky glory!

 

Just one more to go...

Soft fruit makeover (445 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

"Soak well before planting..."

When planning a year of self-sufficiency, it’s only a matter of time before the ‘fruit question’ arises. It would be a pity to develop scurvy. If your fruit trees are too small to be much help – like ours – an interest in soft fruits soon comes to the fore.

Unfortunately my fledgling soft fruit patch is a disgrace:

 

Even the dog is ashamed...

 

No, those big things are weeds. The plants got devoured by the weed monster during last year’s gardening crash and burn. This week’s mission is to expand and renovate this area in the hopes of salvaging something which will grow a source of vitamin C. It may be too late, and the bushes might not amount to enough in time for next summer, but I have to try. 

After completing the dreaded clear out of the three pig barns, I’ve spent the morning planting up the upper of the three beds with red and black currants and gooseberries through a plastic mulch. Not easy to concentrate on the matter in hand with this view unfolding in the background.

 

Mist clearing the valley

In the end I got thirteen little bushes in the ground.

 

Quite straight planting, for once...

A blatant example of doing the easy bit first: well, it is Monday morning! Tomorrow me has the unenviable task of retrofitting plastic mulch to the other two beds, and somehow getting it over and around a dozen prickly gooseberry bushes. A part of me is hoping for high wind to arrive and get me out of this task! 

***

The afternoon was so warm and sunny that I couldn’t wait to get outside again, propelled by the pleasant contrast with the stark winter months. It’s been a long, dry spell weather-wise and common-sense suggests it might be summer before the field is this dry again.

Last chance, then, to reclaim a bit more of the field which had reverted to rough meadow. It had been my intention to give over the Rough in its entirety to the pigs later in the year. But, instead of running around after pigs all the time, I’ve been taken by the strange notion to create a decent size lawn in one corner of the field. A lawn! Not really in the rural idiocy manual that one, but it provides a bit of foreground for the pretty picture view. And the kids will love it.

Took a lot of strimming though!

 

A lawn is born

    

Wind breaks (446)

by Max Akroyd

I love our field and confer as much importance on to its productive potential as having a roof on the house. But it’s not naturally adapted to growing fruit and vegetables. Yes, it’s on a south-facing slope and the soil isn’t too bad when fortified with muck. The big problem is the wind.

Brittany is very susceptible to weather freshly served from the Atlantic, it’s part of her charm. But the almost constant west wind is not conducive to the production of the more delicate vegetables – which, let’s face it, is most of them. Tellingly, northern Brittany has cornered the market in the other sort: globe artichokes, pink onions and cauliflowers. The sight of a bunch of old men taking a break from the artichoke harvest, with a bottle of wine or two served from the back of an ancient Renault van, was one of my first impressions of Finistère…

But, despite a surrounding barrier of established hedgerow, I’m left with a severe impediment to growing good vegetables: the depredations of the west wind. The knowledge of this nags at every other effort out there in the field. I didn’t come here to be a pig farmer or a goat herd so something has to be done…

The solution I’ve come up with is to establish a tiered system of tree-planting. My first line of defence will be tough, wild fruit trees – things that will laugh in the face of the wind, but will also provide fruit (of sorts). We’re talking rowans, blackthorns, medlars, amelanchiers, dog roses, wild pears, crab apples… a large consignment of these arrived yesterday, and I hope to get most of them in the ground today. Belatedly, these will form the inner boundaries of the productive areas.

The next rank will comprise hazels, which go really well here and make up the core of the ancient hedgerows. I’ve planted a few already, but hope to get more in later this year. Next up are the tree fruits which, until now I’ve planted in the more sheltered areas but, hopefully, can in time be brought into centre-stage.

Finally there are the taller, tougher vegetables. Artichokes spring to mind here, a thicket of the globe sort will provide a bit of cover. But it’s the (unrelated) Jerusalem artichokes which offer the most potential in this regard. They’re a bit of a taboo in this household, my wife despises them and she regarded my recent acquisition of a few tubers in just the same way as Superman would welcome a delivery of kryptonite. I hardly dare tell her that I’ve accidentally double-ordered and I’ve got about 40 of the things to plant.

But at least that error has encouraged me to address my awkward wind problem!

***

After a leisurely debate about where to best locate our new baby trees, we set about planting 18 of them at strategic points around the field. Even though they’re tiny they provoked big ideas about how to develop adjacent areas. Although the majority of these ideas will be forgotten or prove beyond our means financially, what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than dreaming up modest plans? 

 

The boars (447)

by Max Akroyd

For two days running I’ve met the daddy pigs somewhere they shouldn’t be. Yesterday it was the tool shed, the day before they were strolling around in front of the hangar…

I’ve looked and looked for their escape route but their present quarters seem completely pig-proof. Their ability to stage an impossible escape is an example of the mystery at the heart of these two brothers.

They were sold to us as pot-bellies, but look more like a wild pig of some sort. On a recent visit, the local huntsmen were convinced they are half sanglier (wild boar) and greeted them with loud cheers – a mixture of reverance and bloodthirsty excitement! It’s the character of the boars that sets them apart from the other pigs, though. It may be entirely down to their gender, but they’re amiable enough without being enthusiastic about human company. They would never, ever roll over to have their tummy tickled as the sows are wont to do. But it’s more than that. There’s a look in their eyes – a wildness compared to our other elephant-eyed pigs  – which is beyond domestication.

 

A bit wild... one of our boars

 

I’m very pleased to have these brothers on board: their fertility is the stuff of legend and is the key to what I hope will be a succession of piglets. There aren’t many productive forces which come for free and you’ve got to harness the ones that do… 

The other lesson of their recent escape attempts is that they’re bored boars – their present enclosure has been all turned over and they want pastures new. Fortunately, this coincides with my plan to put the piglets we’re keeping in their enclosure and move the boars onto the field. I need to step up this process and get their enclosure finished this morning. Whether a picture appears of the completed works here later will depend if it’s fit to publish: my building skills are best described as quirky. 

***   

As usual the completion of the boars’ new quarters and the relocation of the boars themselves turned into a bit of a saga. Firstly I completed their bedroom (made of junk):

 

 

Then there was their bit of meadow to enclose:

 

 

Next, enter the pigs down a bespoke piggy corridor (made of junk). Oh, for one of those fancy sectional fences that real farmers have!

 

 

Finally, welcome to your new home boys – hope you like it: 

 

Spring is here! (448)

by Max Akroyd

Finally, finally it’s arrived. I don’t care if it’s nine days until the official start, Spring has come to Kervéguen.

First thing this morning the change was obvious: instead of silence, birdsong was everywhere, the pigs were battering down their doors to get out into the field rather than languishing in the straw and, digging in the field, I soon discovered I was wearing too many layers!

 

Warm work, at last

 

It was tempting to just sit and soak up the warmth, the sheer joy of the new season. The big pig, having no other plans for the day and a zen-like approach to living, dug herself a little hollow and did just that:

 

Zen, pig-style

 

Having created another potato trench, I though I’d celebrate the day by planting some potatoes. The annual big wave of growth is coming and it seems sensible to ride it to the best of my ability.

This seems like a good moment to offer new season’s greetings to all readers of this blog. I hope all of your growing plans come to fruition in 2010. Now… let’s surf!

   

by Max Akroyd

“The countrey-man hath a provident and gainfull familie, not one whose necessities must alwaies be furnished out of the shop, nor their table out of the market. His provision is alwaies out of his own store, and agreeable with the season of the yeare.”

Don Antonio de Guevara, 1539

Warming up (449)

by Max Akroyd

It’s an obscure time out there at the moment. No sign of the burgeoning energy of spring – in fact, everything appears at its lowest ebb, like a sprinter inhaling deeply before the big race.

However, for the first time in a while, the five day forecast is for temperatures above zero, night and day. Only just, it has to be said, but there’s probably enough prospective warmth to break the current restraint on growth. At such a moment, it feels necessary to step back and review the gardening production line from seed in the greenhouse, through hardening off, to planting out in the soil: just to make sure there are no bottlenecks forming.

By only planting out the hardiest things so far I’ve kept more or less on schedule in that regard. There’s the possibility of a potato planting backlog if I don’t prepare more ground for them though. After limbering up with Pig Mucking Out Exercise Plan™, I dug another 10 metres of potato trench this morning in the Triangle.

 

Trench time again...

 

It’s a bit rough, but good enough for potatoes; my latest seed acquisition being the sexily named BF15. I’m going to plant a lot of this potato seed in the lazy beds, but I confess that I’m a bit dubious about their potential for success, hence the back up of more familiar beds. Potatoes are the one crop which, by decree of my spouse, shall not fail!

Further back in the growing process things are looking a little messy. The supply of new plants from the greenhouse particularly is stuttering a bit. The unusually cold February and March appears to have caused the peppers and chillies sown thus far to fail and the tomatoes and aubergines which have germinated seem stuck at seed leaf stage. There comes a point that anything not forthcoming in the propagators has to be cleared off and replaced, and anything showing true leaves (a batallion of brassicas) gets potted on. That sounds like this afternoon’s task! 

***

Out of the jaws of that east wind, it was very pleasant in the greenhouse. All the seedlings were very dry thanks to all the sunshine recently so they were given a good soaking, safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t be subject to hard frost or the stale air of winter.

Watering time - at last

Having discarded any no-hopers on the propagators and moved off the trays of emergent seedlings, there was lots of room available around the place for sowings of fun things like cardoons, good king henry, seakale, patience dock, Turkish rocket… all destined for the Perennial Beds. I got so absorbed in the sowing process that I had no time to get changed before the school run. Accordingly, I appeared at the school gate looking like a peasant of yesteryear. Which beats rolling up in a Porsche every time. 

No progress (450)

by Max Akroyd

An unwelcome visit from an old adversary – M. Insomnia – turned last night into a vast, grey nothing and stopped me thinking fast enough to wriggle out of a trip to town later this long morning.

As we traipsed from pillar to post acquiring such diverse ‘necessities’ as supermarket junk, new registration plates and six months’ Ventolin for me, I pondered gloomily that my (non-asthmatic) fifteenth century peasant forbears didn’t have to distract themselves with any of this stuff… Interesting though that the immersion in rural idiocy has already made the stuff of modern life feel like a strange, synthetic add-on. That’s progress!

Sweet pea preparations (451)

by Max Akroyd

I saw a feature on the weather recently which suggested that the jet stream has slipped considerably southwards this winter meaning the Mediterranean is getting a dose of English weather. I deduce  from this – probably quite wrongly – that we’re experiencing a Scottish March. Pleasant enough in the sun but enough to turn your brassicas purple if you’re in the wind. It’s keeping the annual weeds and slugs in abeyance but it’s all a bit samey and sterile by the standards of a normal Breton March.

Although the forecast is the same for days ahead, I’m convinced that things will take off rapidly once we get a bit of rain. So I’m continuing preparations as if the withering wind didn’t have me reaching for a deep-fried Mars bar. Hiding in the shelter of a barn are my ranks of sweet peas sown in October last year. They’ll have to go out soon, not least because I need their pots for sowing cucumbers and courgettes.

The majority of the sweet peas will go in a long row in the area we call the Allotment. But I’ve been wanting to create a small area at the heart of the garden which will be an uncouth riot of insect-attracting flowers. To this end I’ve started digging two new trenches above the perennial beds to accommodate about 30 sweet pea plants:

Setting up for sweet peas...

 

It’s been a pleasant change to get on with something completely unrelated to pigs and only remotely related to becoming self-sufficient.

 

They only love me for my porridge...

 ***

This is the area after my day’s labour:

 

Wonky is just my style

 

I dug over the foreground bit and sowed some phacelia therein to add to the bee attracting prowess of the place. I dug over the area behind the canes in readiness for sowing some wild flower seeds when the wind dies down a bit. There was just time for a bit of strimming before my meeting with a glass of 3€ Côte du Rhône!

Tomorrow will see an end to this floral foray and a return to veggies and pigs.

Easy like Monday morning? (452 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

It never goes you know. That feeling of Monday morning gloom has receded a bit, but it’s still there despite the fact that I have no job. Just as I could happily smoke a cigarette, right now, ten years after giving up if you offered me one (please don’t) – I’m seemingly pre-programmed to dread this morning.

 

The smiling face of Monday morning ... my new boss!

Big, fat, lazy and permanently expecting that I’ll clear up after her… but enough about my old boss. There’s a bunch of porkers in charge now and Monday morning is major clean out time. Because they occupy such large barns I can get away with mucking them out on a three day cycle, but every Monday there’s a deep clean required. Not a delightful prospect, but once you’re in the swing of it, not too bad. And the barrow loads of old litter make splendid compost.

 

Waiting for room service to finish

Now it’s done and the real work can commence!

***

The extra space available in an old farm like ours really brings out that male trait of seeing a ‘that might be useful later’ quality in complete junk. This habit doesn’t sit well with the requirement to squeeze productivity out of every corner of the farm if you’re to escape destitution.

This corner of the hangar has acted as one of many junk repositories around the place, but is now ear-marked for the daddy pigs’ summer quarters. Time to tidy up!

Before...

 

After...

There’s a rudimentary pig-bed area taking shape, formed – it has to be said – completely out of the aforementioned junk. Once they’re installed in this area, the four piglets we’re keeping can have the daddy pigs’ old quarters. The baby pigs are recovering from the indignities of their recent relocation and they’re getting decidedly cheeky…

Come on, where's my food?

Despite an hour spent trying to get rid of double-glazing salesman, there was still time to sow the last of the broad beans:

This is why my back aches!

Sunday

by Max Akroyd

The animals have been fed and the last two piglets transferred to their new quarters.

There’s a bitter east wind adding a rough edge to another beautiful late winter day. I popped out to get this photo which shows Kervéguen left of centre, with our garden/field next to the house, further left.

 

Kervéguen in context

 

Today is a day off. I have to think of something – anything – which doesn’t relate to fruit, vegetables or farm animals! Hmm…

Broad Beans (454)

by Max Akroyd

The beautiful weather continues and it’s just as well because the rigours of this week’s workload has me aching all over… if it was raining I’d probably down tools today. Instead the sunshine inspires and cultivation can recommence.

Before any of that, there’s piglets to shift. Apologies if the pictures of me with piglet are a bit blurry – my wife found this unfolding scene very amusing, for some reason:

Priority on the field is broad bean sowing. This is taking place in the Upper beds (no. 10 here). Alongside the Aquadulce rows, slowly reviving after their winter hammering, I’m sowing Express, Green Wndsor and – a new one to me – Karmazyn. I’m presently expanding the cultivated area to accommodate the last of these.

There’s some thinning out to do among the emerging seedlings and a system of supports to construct. Then that will be it for this crop, apart from a late sowing of Suttons in June. Clearly I love broad beans and I’m hoping to have a good crop this year despite our weak, acidic soil. 

The reward (455 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

There was a moment this morning when I thought “this is it”. After a couple of hours work in the beautiful early morning sun, I was sitting on a bench with my wife. We were drinking coffee in this sheltered spot and Emma was brimming with pride regarding our youngest who has just had a glowing report from his headmistress. After all the ups and downs of the last few years, and little financial benefit from all our labours, I thought this simple time in the spring-like sunshine was my reward. And it was enough.

It’s a shame I spoilt this small but magical moment a bit by reeking of pig poo. Well, panicked piglet poo to be precise, having swooped on three of the bristly little dough-balls while they were scoffing their breakfast, and carried them wriggling and squealing to their new quarters. The rest will follow over the next few days. Mummy pig seemed unperturbed by this theft. The fact that she’s been guarding her nipples like the crown jewels from her offspring in recent days suggests she’s had enough of them.

 The rest of the morning was spent grappling with the bramble patch. This was the final stage in completing Mummy and Aunty pigs’ outdoor enclosure and I’m bearing signs of the struggle!

***

If such things could be arranged, it would be tempting to book this weather in for the rest of the year. Lovely kissy sun, too cold for slugs, cool enough to work for hours… I’m not the only one to appreciate this weather blessing either:

 

There’s an important subtext to the March ‘to do’ list – sorting out my existing fruit stock. Pruning has been done, except the plums, but I had a last-minute requirement to move three baby apple trees. They had got adrift of the main lot somehow and it feels good to have consolidated the row.

Finally, I moved three more piglets. No wonder Mum looks so jiggered; some of her progeny are so fat it was like carrying an armful of porcine ectoplasm. Pot bellies indeed!

Relocation, relocation – again (456)

by Max Akroyd

With one or two obvious exceptions, pigs are very like children. You spend all your time tidying up after them, you feel terrible if they’re poorly and they answer all attempts at conversations with merely a grunt. The other significant similarity is their impact on the world around them.

High maintenance, she is.

  

In comparison, goats and hens generally just are; passive witnesses to life on the farm. Pigs, on the other hand, constantly make stuff happen around them, wearing stuff out and using up resources. Accordingly, the time has come to grant access to each of the three groups of pigs to new land. And then there’s the piglets to wean and move on to their new owners. These pressing demands generate an impressive to do list:

• Clear out hen house to accommodate piglets. Move hens in with goats. Try to stop goats being too grumpy about this.
• Strim outline of new area for Mummy and Aunty pig to distract them while we smuggle away their piglets. Set up electric enclosure.
• Remove piglets without getting bitten by Mummy pig, beaten up by Aunty pig or electrocuted by the electric fence. Or all three.
• Select 4 piglets to keep and remove to Hangar. Wait a minute, Daddy pigs and Big pig are in there…
• Create new home and outdoor area for Daddy pigs. Invent teleporter to get them into it (there ain’t no other way they’ll move).
• Acquaint Big pig with piglets through the fence.
• Create new outdoor area for Big pig and piglets. Unite them.
• Retire on proceeds of piglet sale.

Phew. I’m sure office work was easier.

Another creature on the move today was a little mouse which has been co-habiting with us for the last few weeks. This morning we found him stuck in the toaster. Ignoring my entreaties to just make like a Roman and turn the toaster on, Emma took the strange cargo to the furthest edge of the field where it sat on a bench, glinting in the sun, waiting to release its passenger.

***

By the end of a long morning I’d completed the first item on the list. There was loads of litter in the hens’ and goats’ house which I took out on to the field and mulched yesterday’s potato bed and pea bed. There was even enough left over for the gooseberry bed and the currant bed, and to fill a bean trench too:

Bean feast

 

Nearly finished...

 

Afternoon almost saw completion – at last – of point two. A real pain in the bum job to be honest, battling brambles and tussling with titanic tussocks of meadow grass. Oh well, they’ve definitely earned it.

  

Planting out day (457)

by Max Akroyd

The weather forecast for the next few days is promising. As our three year old has just said: “Daddy, the sun is come back now.” 

For most of the winter doing the round of the animals was as inviting as spending the same hour in a cold bath. Now I approach this task with a spring in my step, not least because the ankle deep mud has dried up a bit.

But with all well again in the piglet barn, today’s priority is simple: get things in the ground. A recent delivery of 30 raspberry canes, the 45 brassicas and 90 sweet peas hardened off and ready to go in, first early potatoes languishing in their egg boxes, 3 packets each of peas and broad beans, 2 packets of red onion sets and 1 packet of white onion sets … I’m going to feel uncomfortable and restless until they’re all out there in the field. So, today is planting out day.

 

 

 

I am just going outside and may be some time…

***

Well, I gave it my best shot but have still got a packet of broad beans, one bag of onion sets, half my brassicas and all of the sweet peas still to plant! I simply ran out of time… oh well, there’s always tomorrow. 

 

Piglet-related headache (458)

by Max Akroyd

You might recall that Mummy pig is assisted with her ten piglets by her sister. Aunty pig has been a magnificent support to her sibling – even acting as a kind of dry wet nurse if you see what I mean. The piglets have come through the bleak midwinter hale and hearty, not least due to their aunty’s efforts.

 But it was clear by this morning that Aunty had had enough. She’s hurt her fore-leg somehow and every time she lies down to rest she gets jumped on by ten nieces and nephews. After much consideration of all the possible permutations – and an abortive attempt to relocate Aunty – it’s apparent that the piglets have to move out. The only question is whether to wean them completely at the same time or to take Mum with them.

As with most things on the smallholding, one decision is contingent on a dozen other things being done. Most pressing of which was to sort out a new enclosure for Mum and Aunty while the piglets are removed. I’ve done a lot of it, but much remains to do. This is me sitting in the sun contemplating the myriad options…

Skiving off

 

 

***

Away from the piglets, but there’s new life on the field too. You’ve got to love this almost Spring…

Skiving off

 

Dream cow and a lazy bed (459)

by Max Akroyd

Only our goats at the end of this rainbow...

 

It was just as well that I was very active today because the weather certainly didn’t contribute warmth-wise. It was steel grey and 3°C almost all day.

Somewhat irrationally, I started about five new mini-projects all at once in a splurge of vernal optimism. Priority was the piglet field though, and reorganisation and expansion of their electrified enclosure. Their meadow came as a neglected and slightly swampy corner of a very big field. I’m hoping that the pigs will complete their rotavation of their area this year. At that point I’ll be asking the help of a local farmer to scarify it and put it down to grass. Hopefully, next year we can get a cow!

Part of this morning’s agenda was to collect some feed from the self-same farmer. In my perfect french (of a two-year old) I tried to explain my scheme. He seemed to approve of the idea and thus self-sufficiency in milk inches closer.

By afternoon, there was just time before the school run to try and knock together the first of my lazy beds. It was an interesting departure from normal trenching and digging.

 

Not for the lazy

 

It took me about forty minutes to assemble this ragged, six metre specimen. There’s a real art to it, which I clearly haven’t acquired yet! But I got the general idea that it’s a good thing to cut the outline of the turves before turning them onto the manure. I will need to repeat this process along the outer edges and to avoid forgetting to add seed potatoes at some point.    

March

by Max Akroyd

According to one authority, the hour change at the end of this month is the harbinger of over two hundred extra hours in the garden. The adjective most associated with the new month is my gardening books is ‘hope’… it’s all a perfect antidote to the grind that was late winter. It may take until the 21st to be Spring proper, but no one told nature about that…

The other day I sorted out my seeds to be sown in March. During most months this process usually involves taking some seed packets out of a big box and sorting them into that month’s little box. For March you take out the seeds you’re not going to sow and put them in the little box. It’s still too early for runner beans and most French beans, sweet corn and winter squash but most other things vegetable and edible take a bow this month.

The big watershed is the proper start of the direct sowing season. Tentatively at first, seeds get sown into soil, not fancy seed compost but outside in the soil as nature intended. Peas, broad beans, beetroot, parsnips, spinach are all worth a shot before the end of the month. Similarly en plein air is the mass potato planting: it doesn’t get more important than that.  I know some people do carrots too, but around here that’s throwing them into an unwinnable battle with the first flush of annual weeds, so I’ll wait until a bit later.

It’s also planting out time for the October-sown stalwarts which have been waiting patiently in pots. Cauliflowers, collards, kales will colonise lots of bed space (albeit looking a bit scrawny at first in the big field). And that, for me, is the big flavour of this month: the occupation of winter’s bare soil before nature has her wicked way and clothes the lot in a thicket of weeds!   

Out on the edges (460)

by Max Akroyd

Last night we were in the margins of the big storm. The island Finistère got a ten hour, incessant soaking. But there’s lots of uncultivated land to soak it up, so flooding isn’t a big issue.

I’ve developed an unusual interest in the periphery of the field, in both senses. It’s the interface of wild and cultivated, nature and human, no less.  It would be simplest to join batttle with the encroaching wilderness, beat it back mechanically and keep it that way. When you’re on the look out for hedgerow food though you don’t want a suburban sterility of mown control in this area. Nor can you sit back and watch tthe pioneer species bully there way into your garden.

I’ve ended up with a tiered approach. If the field was a circle (it isn’t) the outer ring is made up of trees and brambles. The next is a marginal area – only a metre deep – in which a lot of the useful hedgerow plants appear, like nettles and wild garlic. Today’s task was to strim out the invaders from the outer circle to allow the marginal zone to thrive. The next circle is a mown grass path which allows human access and acts as a firewall against unwanted intruders from the outer zones entering the garden proper. 

Paths then radiate inwards (that’s not possible is it?) from the periphery into the heart of the garden. I created two new ones of these today. In a way, I’m glad I hadn’t tried to make all the paths earlier. It’s only with time that I’ve learnt how we use the land and kind of flow with its shape. For instance, when puzzling how to arrange one of the new paths I decided to go with the direction I knew the kids like to head when they’re charging about out there. On reflection, maybe this should have determined that the path went the other way! 

A new path

***

It was the last chance to get ahead on sowing before being merely on time tomorrow! Assisted by two pairs of nimble fingers we worked through a pile of seed packets and modules full of compost. A final list of February sowings is being compiled here.

The greenhouse production line!

Unfinished business (461)

by Max Akroyd

It appears winter isn’t finished with us yet. A big storm is heading our way. It’s precise trajectory is still uncertain, but 9 times out of 10 Finistère attracts anything big and ugly heading west out of the Atlantic.

Much batonning of hatches, then. Most importantly the ranks of seedlings hardening off outside had to be brought into the barn. There’s hardening off and there’s obliteration: the latter outcome would be heartbreaking having coaxed the myriad brassicas and sweet peas from October to the point of planting out… Elsewhere it’s mainly a question of making sure everything that needs to be is nailed down, closed, fastened etc.

The animals are confined to quarters today. Not so much because of the weather but due to the omnipresence of the local hunt. It’s the last weekend of the season and they’re out in force: little white Renault vans and gruff Breton voices policing the local landscape.

All in all not a particularly propitious backdrop for the weekend’s work. But somehow it’s fitting that this pretty fierce winter ends with a proper exclamtion mark! And I can justifiably hide away in the greenhouse and determinedly work my way through the huge box of seeds assembled for next month. Stealing a march on March.

Primroses on the border of the field

***  

Tempête  Xynthia is forecast to arrive in the early hours of tomorrow morning and supposedly spare Finistère her full force. We’ll see. This afternoon turned out to be a cliché of calm and far too good to be spent in the greenhouse.

Instead I prepared a large section of bed for eventual occupation by outdoor tomatoes. As usual this cultivation yielded a barrowful of of perennial weed roots which was gratefully received by mummy pig and co. More delight for them as I proceeded to mow the periphery of the field, thus generating an abundance of fresh grass cuttings.

It’s the last opportunity for my little mower to outpace the growth of the rougher grass so I concentrated on straightening up paths and thereby setting the template for the season ahead. I’m trying to divide all the as-yet-uncultivated areas into easily accessed chunks which can be enclosed by electric fence. Starting in April, the big pig and two piglets will work each area in a clockwise progression, thus hopefully opening up another acre or so for the year of rural idiocy.   

Busyness (39,916,800,000ms to go – thanks Ben!)

by Max Akroyd

Being busy is the smallholder’s lot. You can’t have responsibility for dozens of other animals – and vegetables! – without having your hands full to overflowing.

Given the recent vileness of the weather most activity has been soft stuff like sowing seeds and tidying the toolshed. Key jobs, but not – at the end of the day – worthy of an alcoholic reward. Today was different. This morning the sun came out at last and without its usual icey winter counterpoint.

The nature of work was transformed. Barn doors were flung open and their porcine residents booted out. I shovelled their shit, which had accumulated somewhat during my days away, with renewed vigour. Into the compost area it went replacing the rotted down stuff which I took out onto the field to form ‘lazy beds’ for sowing potatoes next month. Instead of being a steaming heap, the jobs I have in mind are once more a neat and interconnected web…

Amazing what a bit of solar power can do.  And with three clean pig houses all scrubbed up I can look forward to a bit of wine this evening, providing I get that sowing done now.

***

I don’t often get the chance to use bullet points around here; so, for no better reason than that a list of signs of spring I saw today:

• two buzzy things ( I won’t bore you by giving you their scientific names),
• a dandelion in flower,
•  laundry on the line dried in just a few hours,
• the smell of cut grass (I’d cut it), 
• the slight glow of sunburn on my face as I type this. Although that might be windburn.

***

A small seed order arrived this morning, containing some onion seed amongs other things… thus breaking two vows: not to order any more seeds and not to sow onions from seed. Oh well.

Sowing time

 

Five vegetables not worth growing

by Max Akroyd

Growing your own vegetables is, of course, the best way to achieve a nutrtious, gourmet diet. There are, however, some exceptions:

1. Onions from seed: planting onion sets is a less pure and less virtuous form of gardening. Cheating almost. And it works and it’s cheaper.

2. Maincrop potatoes: appearing in this list on behalf of organically-minded Breton and Devonian potato growers who, thanks to blight, will never get to see the final crop after all that effort. 

3. Winter radishes: Truly a Rolls-Royce among vegetables: you don’t see them very often, bigger than you could ever need and completely inedible.

4. Sculpit: Obscure Itallian salad leaf. Looks like grass. Tastes like grass. Wait a minute..!

5. Asparagus peas: Save time. Throw away the seeds and eat the seed packet. Same taste experience as the crop itself. Worth noting, any obscure vegetable that allegedly ‘tastes a bit like asparagus’ doesn’t.

From Cricklewood… to here (464)

by Max Akroyd

Yesterday I started the journey home after one of my regular visits to the UK. Travelling from Alton to Luton Airport by train gave me a number of opportunities I don’t normally have these days. For example, I could observe hundreds of new people. That doesn’t happen much in a field in Brittany. In fact, trying to read all those new faces, to guess at their motives, sets a brain more used to second-guessing pigs into a fizzing overdrive. After a while, though, they just  become a strange parade of humanity unhappily trussed-up in suits for the long, grey day ahead.

Thus dulled, I could manage to do nothing and think a lot. By contrast rural idiocy is, I’ve discovered, perpetually and relentlessly busy. Unlike an office job where there are barren acres of time doing nothing significant, the demands on a smallholder are constant. Rain, illness, meteor strike… nothing shortens the list of must do jobs.  By the time we were passing through Clapham Junction my ‘to do’ list had already filled two sides of A5 paper in my tiny scrawl. The page was entitled: ‘jobs to do in March’. I had writer’s cramp by Cricklewood.

Later, from the wind buffeted vantage point of the aeroplane window, I could see a sunlit Finistère far below through the rushing clouds. It looked like a remote, windswept Atlantic island – which, to all intents and purposes, it is. Growing anything down there must be difficult… 

So here I am. The rain is pounding on the roof. I’m surrounded by seeds that need sowing, animals that need mucking out and our two youngest children have a rain-washed half term holiday to contend with. March – the now or never month – is approaching fast. My welcome home.

 

Onwards and upwards

A trip to the seaside

by Max Akroyd

The holiday is nearly over, but there was a chance to visit the north coast near to St. Pol de Léon and feel a bit envious of the wonderful soil and kinder climate. And the cauliflowers:

 

And the artichokes:

Some other things:

 

Things I saw today…

by Max Akroyd

Hints of Spring (471)

by Max Akroyd

It’s underway. The seasonal pendulum is heading away from the bleak intransigence of winter to a kindness which actively facilitates life. Everything enjoys it: from our sow sunbathing in a hollow she’d created on the side of the hill to the discernible (at last) growth of the crops in the polytunnel. The day easily fought off the morning’s hard frost instead of succumbing to it.

For a few moments this morning I sat down with Emma on a bench. It was a sheltered spot admittedly, but for the first time since October the sun was very pleasantly warm. Each day new light illuminates new areas in new ways. Maybe because I’m over half way through life, this feels like a very poignant gift.

 

Old tree, new light

 

In the bright sunlight, today’s patchwork of jobs felt half as laborious as yesterday’s. Even sweeping out the goat house was ok! I’m using the resulting contents of my bucket to fertilise the onion bed, something their manure seems designed for…

We’re finally fully engaged with sprucing up the appearance of the house and its immediate surroundings in readiness for the next gite guests. Lots of pruning and painting exterior woodwork for Emma and the creation of an enclosure for the gite garden for me. All willingly assisted (every now and again) by our offspring. It’s a great way to spend the holiday.

Waking up (472 days to go)

by Max Akroyd

With all four kids off school for the holiday, family time and the mundane chores around the smallholding take centre stage, and rightly so. When the time comes, I don’t think I’ll lie on my deathbed bemoaning the lack of time I spent with beetroot seeds.

The fragments of time left over for this project are few and far between but there are possible areas of overlap. I’d saved things like planting potatoes and broad beans for just these occasions, really child-friendly jobs. But then the frosts returned, making the soil inaccessible. The scene, then, is slightly different from the one I’d envisaged: me and my daughter doing lots of pruning while the boys swirl around on their bikes… We started work on our new chicken barn but then my pick snapped, testimony to the power of levers rather than my own brute strength!

Maybe it’s just saying I should give in and tread water for a while.

But, despite yet another cold snap, I can feel nature’s force massing beneath the surface. With the lengthening daylight it will brush off the cold and pierce the surface, breaking into the light and into our dreams. Somewhere in the forest the adders are waking up.

 

Winter walks

by Max Akroyd

When confronted with glum weather and a landscape struggling to wake up the only sensible thing to do is sit inside and eat chocolate. No, not really: a bracing walk for all the family is what’s called for, according to my childhood programming anyway!

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone had a very nice time, or improved their moral fibre, and the kids sounded a little less loud when rattling around in the frozen Breton environment. Come on Spring.

by Max Akroyd

Dearly beloved brethren

Isn’t it a sin

To eat roast potatoes

and throw away the skin?

Dearly beloved brethren

Isn’t it true

The skin feeds the pig

And the pig feeds you.

Author unknown – quoted by my mum!

First Harvest!

by Max Akroyd

In the disarray that last year became growing-wise, I left a small row of garlic unharvested. Predictably each clove divided and the mother clove went to seed. Her offspring, though, started to grow in early January this year and provided me with a welcome, if undeserved, harvest which fills the fresh garlic gap before the wild stuff emerges next month.

 

Rogue garlic

If I was to describe the culinary experience kindly it would be “rustic”. But at this time of year I’m enthusiastic about anything that helps fill the yawning hungry gap. 

Another winter offering yesterday came in the form of a massive boar in a trailer, bound and bowed. I misunderstood the injunction in French “to look at the big pig on the road” as a sign that one of our pigs had escaped again. In fact, it was a band of local farmers/hunters offering me this beast for sale, tusks and all.

I explained in my broken French that, by accident, we already had ten piglets  – a tale which is probably doing the rounds of the local bars right now – after they’ve told the story of how they arrived with a boar to sell and left with their names on two of the Englishman’s piglets instead!   

Someone’s been busy!

by Max Akroyd

I may be on enforced garden leave from gardening right now but thankfully someone’s working the soil in my absence…

 

While I was away...

 

Compare this picture from just over three weeks ago to appreciate the value of our sow’s labours.

Last minute preparations (477)

by Max Akroyd

By and large I think I do a pretty good job of holding the ‘real world’ at bay so I can keep peddling away towards the distant goal of self-sufficiency. In the next week or so reality is going to take its revenge and disrupt things good and properly!

Business admin., spring cleaning (note how I did the animals’ abodes first!), medical appointments, trips to the UK and a half-term holiday will all conspire to distract me long enough to get truly off schedule in the garden. At one level this is a good thing: I’m sure it keeps me busier than I would be if I subsided into a profound rural idiocy and, certainly as far as my back is concerned, a change is as good as a rest…

But there is something a bit ironic about the fact that everything that doesn’t involve growing the family’s food would be rationally filed under ‘reality’ and that basic subsistence is considered an odd backwater. I wonder if this general perception will change in the coming months and years..? I’ve always envied our Labrador’s ability to remain unperturbed in her basket as extremely important matters come and go around her…

The only reason I mention any of this now is to explain in advance that postings to the blog may become a little less than daily for a while. In fact, with spring’s assault massing on the horizon it was always inevitable that my unruly acres were going to cut down on waffle time. So, apologies in advance (unless you’re cheering!)

***

With my new role model (a headless chicken) firmly in mind, I rushed around the farm throwing straw in the direction of unwary pigs, weeding onion beds and filling the propagators with newly sown things (there’s a list of this month’s sowings forming here). It’s still a dull and gloomy world out there. But there’s more and more activity among the local fauna; birds particularly are, by their omnipresence, pulling on the drawstrings of the big winter land and sky scapes.

Still Winter (478)

by Max Akroyd

Late into last night a neighbour’s dog was loose in our garden: barking, howling and dragging his broken chain noisily behind him. Eventually he took his eerie, lonely presence off into the valley. However that other wild, unrestrained and unwelcome visitor, winter, is still here. 

This is the time of year when you have to keep a close eye on the forecast and, perhaps more importantly, go with your gut feeling about what the weather might do. The gardener ends up in a strange, tiring dance with frost – adapting working patterns to frozen ground, moving seedlings in and moving seedlings out… Inconveniently the growing season has a different partner, day-length, and an accelerating tempo which is bound to trip up anyone who believes this cold spell puts things on hold.

Sometimes it’s good to have the animals’ needs to distract from this intractable  season. The ground may be frozen solid – again – but I’ve got the cleaning out of their houses to complete and if that’s one thing, it’s definitely warm work!

***

Catkins against a wintry sky

Having finally completed cleaning of the piglet barn and the goat house, I confess it was tempting to give up on the rest of today as a bad job. The weather was a bad bone-achingly cold, turning the day into a zombie-like experience. You could almost taste the impending snow, so I sheltered in the greenhouse and sowed as many potentially bright, warm things as I could find.

Spring cleaning (479)

by Max Akroyd

There’s lots to be getting on with in the vegetable department at the moment, but for the next few days the needs of the animals will be paramount.

Despite daily mucking out, there comes a point where everything has to cleared out of the animals’ lodgings. I’m not sure if it’s down to the increasing illumination provided by the sun but all the animal houses seem in need of a deep clean all at once. The animals are restless. Just like the lengthening day you can pick up on their instinct to be outside more and more… they’re tired of winter slumber and want to get out and graze/scratch/root around all day in the growing light.

I’m going to have to take the plunge soon and let the piglets out into the big wide world. Mum and aunty have done brilliantly but now need some more space. Although only five weeks old, the piglets are about half way to being weaned already: the sight of them all in a row with their heads in the trough is the happiest of the day. Characters are emerging clearly now and there’s one piglet who always rushes forward to greet me and another who likes nothing more than to dive bomb his siblings from the top of the trough while his more sensible brothers and sisters are trying to eat breakfast. Maybe those are the two we should keep…?

 

Mum and Aunty when they were piglets. And a hen.

 

I’ve operated a mum-first system since the piglets arrived, with mummy and the piglets getting all the best scraps and a daily portion of rooty weeds to eat, and today will be no exception. Her barn will be the first to get new straw and the spring clean treatment.

***

My efforts resulted in a bit of a patchy outcome. If anything I’d underestimated the animals’ seasonal cheer and tidying up was abandonned after one too many piglety escape attempts. Switching my attention to the goat house was similarly truncated: when one goat got loose I feared a repeat of the Great Goat Escape but I think she could see I wasn’t going to tolerate a replay of that particular escapade…

So, one almost clean pig barn and a half-clean goat barn: I shall have to resume the struggle tomorrow. At least today’s endeavours yielded a dozen or more big barrow-loads of old bedding and the like which filled my vacant trenches nicely.