the accidental smallholder :: diary archives

New article and links

Added a new article, 'Why grow vegetables?', and a few links to animal welfare sites. Plans for the weekend include fixing sheep netting to the new pigpens and building the gates for them. There is some outstanding sowing to be down but the spell of cold, frosty weather we've been experiencing is set to remain with us for a few days yet, so the parsnips and spring onions will have to wait awhile.

I should also mention the kind gift we got from a friend - thanks Graham, that's a fine scoop!

GM doubts

While the UK government prepares to take a decision which very few of its citizens support and which could have far-reaching implications for the environment, the man who is effectively Ethiopia's Environment Minister had this to say on the issue of GM crops:

"A single technology does not constitute development. There is no evidence that GM varieties produce better or more than their non-GM counterparts. They only bring in new vulnerabilities." (BBC News)

Mr Blair, Mr Morley, are you listening (to anyone other than Monsanto)?

Out and about

It's been a lovely weekend here, so Copper had her first outing on Saturday. She had a lovely time exploring the garden, particularly Cassius's cat mint, sizing up the hens and chasing the dogs. We're pleased that she seems to be quite settled and happy. She's been out again today (Sunday) and, after a sardine tea, she's been lying in front of the open fire toasting her toes. She is an absolute sweetheart and we're really glad to have her.

However, we've discovered Copper's weakness - chimneys! We have an open fire in the living room. The fire has a little hatch at the back, presumably to stop draughts when the fire isn't lit. This hatch had been left open last night and Dan spotted Copper's tail disappearing up through the hatch this morning. Fortunately, she couldn't go far but she was pretty dirty and was very smokey smelling when she reappeared. The hatch is now firmly shut when the fire isn't lit.

Homer's doing well - becoming much more relaxed and proactive. I think he likes Copper. He is, at least, fascinated by her. She's very vocal and the two of them seem to "talk" to each other.

Cassius is still top cat, without a doubt. We've hardly seen him this weekend, as the sap rises and new, baby bunnies make an appearance. He'll barely eat at home for the next few months.

Tess and Meg have had a great weekend - out and about all day, each day. Both have been very busy digging today. No idea what for, but it certainly tires them out...

Gallery now open

The gallery is now open, and almost finished. It's based on Photostack, a nice little PHP package written by Noel Jackson.

I say 'almost' because there are a lot more images to be added, and because there's something wrong with the PHP which detects the current page, so the left menu isn't working properly (although it seems to be across the site, so I've obviously broken something). I not quite happy with the layout yet either...

Legumes and fencing

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

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

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

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

Rick Stein's Food Heroes

Last night saw the start of the latest series of the excellent Rick Stein's Food Heroes on BBC2. It's a must-see programme for anyone interested in real food, and Stein's enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. In the first programme he tackled (no pun intended) Clovelly Herring, organic Guernsey beef, an organic veg grower and a Cornish producer of sparkling wine.

The highlight for me was when 14 butchers from Smithfiled market assembled in a local hostelry to participate in a beef taste test. To a man they were dismissive of the concept of organic beef before the tasting, but lo and behold 11 of the 14 selected the organic Guernsey over supermarket 'finest' and high-street 'cheapest'. The guernsey was grass-fed, hung for a good couple of weeks and the difference obviously shone through.

If you don't get beeb 2 where you are the series website is pretty good too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/foodheroes/

Clackmannanshire Horticultural Society Annual Open Show

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

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

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

Settling in

Well, Copper seems to be settling in OK. She's a wee bit anxious but she's eating and all her bodily functions seem to be operating just fine.

Meg is officially freaked by the new arrival so she had an extra scoop of "Calm-a-Pet" on her dinner tonight. By next week, she'll be worrying about something else. Tess, I'm pleased to say, still loves Cass best.

I've only really noticed how big Cass is, now we've got Copper. He's quite stocky and weighed in at 5.75kg at his last visit to the vet, although he's certainly not overweight. He seems fine with Copper, although Meg barked at both of them tonight - the cats shot under our bed and obviously found themselves too close for comfort, then sorted themselves out in a flurry of spitting. They seem to have patched up their differences, now, though. Watching them, it looks like Cass is dominant - she won't try to stare him down, but it all seems pretty non-aggressive.

It's a bit like musical beds though. Copper has adopted Cass's old bed in the front hall, while Homer seems to have taken a liking to Copper's wee sheepskin bed. As befits the top cat, Cassius sleeps right in front of the fire and on our bed!

I'll be glad when Copper can go out, because Cass's comings and goings are a bit restricted. And those rabbits need to be kept under control!

Meet Copper

This afternoon the latest (and last for the time being) addition to our domestic menagerie arrived. Copper is a 13 year-old female tortoiseshell cat who until today lived with a work colleague. Unfortunately the arrival of a new baby has turned out to be too much for said colleague, and we heard about Copper via an advert on the work intranet.

We're delighted to have her. She's only been here a few hours but we already have no doubt that she will get on just fine with our two existing cats, Cassius and Homer - she's met both without incident - and the dogs. She'll spend a week or so confined to the house, and next weekend we'll open the cat flaps and let her explore the garden and surrounding countryside. We know we may not have her long, but we'll do our best to make sure what time she does have here is as happy as possible.

On the subject of cats, we had Cas at the vet yesterday for a routine booster. We mentioned to the vet that we had taken Homer from the CPL just before Xmas, and that we hadn't been able to get him into a cat carrier to see the vet (he makes himself about 4 feet wide at the sight of his carrier). The vet suggested we try a plug-in pheromone diffuser, which creates a so-called 'Happy Cat' environment which cats find calming. Well, we got one (a Feliway) and it works! Within an hour Homer could be approached without hm moving away or exhibiting any of his usual nervousness. It's a shame we didn't know about it before, but we're glad we do now.

On the palm of my hand there's a blister

What a glorious day it was today in Central Scotland. The sun shone, warming the greenhouse to over 22 degrees, Rosemary and I spent the morning walking the dogs, taking Cas to the vet for a booster, and visiting the Farmers Market in Stirling where we bought:

• Veggies - carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, butternut squash
• Kippers
• Steak pies
• Soft cheese with smoked garlic, and smoked mature Scottish Cheddar
• A rabbit and some venison

This last will go nicely with the pheasant breasts and legs we have in the freezer, which we swapped for some pork chops. What we actually got were 4 entire pheasants, and the nice chap we bartered with kindly showed me how to extract the breasts and remove the legs quickly and easily.

In the late morning and all afternoon we worked outside, R clearing and tidying flower beds, pruning shrubs and potting up some flowers. I hired a rotavator and got last year's pig pen turned over ready for the sowing of seeds starting next month. Despite breaking the reverse cable and ending up with a large, painful blister on the palm of my right hand from the handle it proved very effective. One last trip round tomorrow (without reverse gear!) and a couple of weeks of the chooks roaming over it should see it in ideal condition for the growing season.

All in all a productive St. Valentines Day, and tomorrow promises more labour and hopefully a victory over Arsenal in the FA Cup!

Oh, and just for Armin here's tonight's fantastic sunset over the Campsie Hills:

New hens

Yesterday evening we made the short trip to Drum to collect our new hens - 8 Rhode Island Reds in fabulous condition, just coming into lay. Due to Forsham's abysmal customer service (I won't say more) we didn't have the fixings for constructing the new ark, so they spent their first night here in the shed before being moved into the old ark this morning once it was vacated by the old hens (keeping up?).

This afternoon we got the new ark built, just in time for one of our old Rhodies who was clearly needing some private time and liked the look of the new nest boxes - she went straight in as soon as the last screw was affixed and did her stuff. The new hens are a little freaked by Tess, who treats the arks like Hen TV, and who is mesmerised by the new arrivals, but they'll soon treat her with the same disdain as every other animal we own. We'll tackle the integration of the old and new in a week or so, but for now everyone has a safe, comfortable home and somewhere private to lay.

The Meatrix

I've just stumbled across a great site called 'The Meatrix' (from the You Grow Girl forums). It needs Flash and sound to get the full effect, but underneath the excellent animation is a great site concerned with factory farming and local food production.

Soil blocks

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

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

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

Thoughts of Cows

We don't have any cattle and don't have room for any. But that doesn't stop me musing over what might be, if the six numbers come up tonight. What started me musing about cows was an advertisement in this month's "Country Smallholding" selling two Jersey heifers. If we had more land and I had more time (two big "ifs", I grant you), I'd like to have a house cow. I like cows.

In my gap year, some twenty blah years, I worked on a commercial dairy farm near Glasgow. I'll not bore you with details, but the cows there were Holstein Friesians, which are black and white and pretty big. These are very specialised dairy cows. I was fortunate in that the people I worked for were excellent stockmen and I learned an awful lot. Of course, in the intervening years, I've forgotten some of it but I still remember filling my milk container (perk of the job) with fresh, creamy (skimmed off the top of the tank), unpasteurised milk.

With our own cow, we could make yogurt, butter, cheese, cream, feed whey to the pigs, grow our own beef...

Taking the musings a bit further, I had a look at the website of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Hugh F-W has Dexters, John Seymour recommends the Jersey, but I have to say the Kerry appeals to me. I like the idea of helping to conserve a rare breed and I like black cows. The Kerry's not too big either, yields well and produces decent beef. So, the Kerry it is!

Although, I did read an article tonight about South Devons. They sound pretty good too...

Poultry articles

This afternoon the snow stopped me doing much more outside after finishing the fence posts for the new pig pens so I spent a couple of hours completing the poultry articles. This will at least be good news to David, who will now be able to demonstrate to Hilary that keeping hens means a little effort, a great deal of enjoyment and some fantastic products.

Sunrise on the Forth

We are blessed with a wonderful location here at TAS, on the northern bank of the River Forth just west of Alloa. To the west we can see the Campsie hills, Stirling Castle, the Wallace Monument and Ben Ledi (this view features on the Archives banner). To the north the Ochil Hills, to the south Alloa Inch and across to South Alloa, and to the east the sometimes uninspiring view of Kincardine and beyond to Grangemouth. When the sun comes up this view can be anything but uninspiring though, and this morning was a case in point.

I'm getting the hang of my new digital camera and starting to understand the concepts of aperture, shutter speed and exposure. The camera is fairly forgiving though, and I'm not kidding myself I'm anywhere near becoming a competent photographer yet.

It's not a 6ft hutch, is it?

It was so disappointing. We had arranged to pick up our new hens, 8 Rhode Island Reds, this coming Sunday. The new ark was sitting in shrink-wrapped glory waiting to be assembled. We were all set.

So imagine our disappointment on opening said ark this afternoon (we'd both finished at 4pm specially to tackle the task) to find that the instructions and fixings were not for our Boughton 904 but instead a 6ft Proper Hutch. A phone call to Forsham secured an assurance that the correct instructions and fixings will be with us on Monday, but it leaves us with the imminent arrival of 8 hens and nowhere for them to live.

We have formulated a contingency plan involving the shed, but hopefully the kind chap we're buying the hens from will be happy for us to pick them up a few days later than originally planned.

Site progress

Slowly but surely the site is now coming together and we're starting to feel less embarassed by visitors finding their way here from the few seeds we've sown so far in cyberspace. The About Us page is complete, the Links database is up and running and just needs populating and some work on the styling, and Rosemary assures me she has more text for articles to come this weekend. The search engine is also completed, with the index being updated each night.

Once all this is done it will be time to start adding the wee features which add a bit more value and hopefully make your visit more enjoyable - things like email this page to a friend, links to books and online resources from each article, virtual postcards (once I get the gallery sorted). If you've got any suggestions for features or functions you'd like to see please tell us - but you'll need to wait until Rosemary has written the contact page....

Home grown tea

Tonight we're indulging in another home-grown tea - a potato, leek and bacon bake accompanied by some sweetcorn. Everything except the bacon is our own, and next year we hope to cure some pork for bacon so we'll be able to do it all ourselves. It's meals like this that make the effort of growing vegetables worthwhile - there's a deep sense of satisfaction in knowing that not only are all the ingredients organic, produced without a trace of chemical or hormone, but they all come with not a single food mile between them (okay the bacon is from Ayrshire, so about 50 food miles then).

Even if you're not growing your own, I'd urge you to be an attentive consumer and to look carefully at where the vegetables you buy in the supermarket are sourced. There's a fair chance they will have been air-freighted in from Africa or South America, at an unsustainable cost to the environment. Ordinary consumers like you and I have the power to change this - the supermarkets will stop stocking these items if we stop buying them, it's that simple. As an added bonus you might buy some British vegetables and rediscover the wonderful seasonal variations that our climate produces. After all who wants to eat Kenyan green beans every week for a year?

Early morning spuds

Yesterday morning I managed to get an hour outside from 7am before getting ready for work. I love that time of day and am so happy that with every passing day we're getting extra minutes of light in the morning. It's strange that I seem to achieve more around the smallholding in the early hours than at any other time, yet at work I get my best results after about 4pm.

Anyway, I used the time productively and apart from getting the worms successfully into their new home I also moved the potatoes from their dark resting place into the light of our potting shed. In previous years during the months of February and March I've taken over the front hall of our cottage with egg boxes full of sprouting spuds, but this autumn we had the hall redecorated and I think Rosemary would flip if I filled it with spuds now.

The solution was an old, empty chest of drawers in our garage. The seed potatoes had been resting in the drawers in egg boxes for a couple of weeks, and on investigation yesterday were seen to have wee shoots emerging. That's the sign that they need to be moved from the dark to the light, and it was an easy task to remove the drawers from the chest and carry them into the shed where they'll be in the perfect environment to develop the strong shoots needed to give us a bumper crop.

1,000 new charges

Today we became responsible for another 1,000 or so lives. Yes, our worms arrived from Worms Direct, in a big white bucket with 'Live Worms' pasted on the side. The bucket contains worms and some established bedding - mostly made up of worm casings - which should ensure a quick and stress-free move into their new home. I checked over our home-made worm bins, and made a few preparations for tomorrow's relocation - drilled some ventilation holes in the side of what will be the started bin; made a carpet cover for the top bin; soaked some newspapers to act as a barrier over the mesh on the bottom of the starter bin.

The worms won't be moved until morning. If moved at night there is a chance they will become disoriented and rather than making new beds in the bottom of the bin they might go upwards and escape the bin altogether almost certainly resulting in death. So the morning light will let them know which way is up, and hopefully they will settle quickly.

Once established we can expect them to eat nearly double their weight in scraps every day, so the compost bins may suffer. I have a plan though...

A satisfactory weekend

There have been times on a winter's Sunday evening when I've looked back at the weekend past and reflected on how little I've achieved in the smallholding. There were some good reasons - inclement weather, family commitments, work commitments - but there were also bad excuses, and plain laziness. Since we both work full-time I tell myself that it's important to get some rest at the weekend, and I'm sure that's true, but it's always disappointing when you achieve less than you feel you should have, in whatever field.

No such worries this weekend. Yesterday as planned we hired a van, drove to Perth through the blizzards and found our way to McCash's Country Store. We'd never been before and I can highly recommend it to anyone in the area looking for anything for the outdoors, horses or pets. We collected our new hen ark, 4 bales of Hemcore to try as bedding for the hens and Smokey, and various other bits and pieces of clothing, horse treats and confectionary (they sell it all!). Drove home through the blizzards and found that Beatsons had delivered the sand, cement and gravel I'd ordered on Friday.

Today I got tore into the concrete mixing and got all but 3 of the fence posts for the new pig pen cemented in. Then it was inside to watch Chelsea beat Blackburn 3-2, the Arsenal beat Man City 2-1, a bath, some tea and an hour with Homer planning the vegetable beds for this coming year (he's improving quickly and when relaxed is a lovely cat). So tonight I have a sense of quiet satisfaction. Hopefully I can pull it off again next weekend - would another Chelsea win be too much to ask for too?

Snowdrops

I've no idea if they're early or not, but today I noticed the first snowdrops starting to emerge in one of the small corner beds in the garden. At the very least it's a sure sign that despite the recent cold spell here, the dark mornings and nights are starting to fade and the amazing (to me) cycle of growth and decay is about to start all over again.

Looking more closeley there are all sorts of things starting to grow now - I have absolutely no idea what most of them are, but then the flower and shrub garden is Rosemary's domain and I still struggle to identify even the most common shrubs and flowers. Last year I made some effort to introduce beneficial flowers to the vegetable garden, such as marigolds and poached egg plant, and this year will strive to do the same. Companion planting is something I don't have enough knowledge of to do confidently, so some research is definitely needed.