The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Vegetables => Topic started by: pgkevet on August 07, 2014, 06:06:46 pm
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I kew I was overboard on growing. As they say - better too much than too little (unless it's C4 and you only want to blow the bloody doors off)
Last year I strained both shoulders polesawing a fallen huge oak that had hung up.. so weeeding didn;t get done well enough nd the crop was just more than enough.. apart from the beans: 30 metres of runner bean pole systems for 2 people was a touch OTT with sme 3/400 plants as well as the french and berlotti.
Frankly i ove runner beans but processing them for the freezer is a royal pain. gadgets exist but reviews are not good and I seriosuly hate it when a bit of bean string gets by and catches in my throad while i'm pigging them down - so I'm anal about de stringing and i like my runners in even diamonds.
French beans are easy. So this year i shoved in 200 dwarf and about 50 climbing beans and same for runners. I didn't really see the point of berlotti after growing them so skipped those.
My review is that french beans are lovely but I don't do well bending and I did get soem weeds I coulnd;t keep up with making a mess of that triple row. Clibing beans I believe have a better flavour, longer, more uniform and way easier to harvest. I aven;t even bothered with the runners...there's bucketfulls on the vines but i have afreezerf ull of french and climbing as well as jars of them pickled (lovely).
I recon next year i might just get sesible and just stick with the cimbing in a sane number (I wish - I'm stupid and by next year the seeds will all go in again)
After shelling out 2 bucketfulls of peas as well as assorted meals I'm glad i only sowed the 20 metres this year. last year i did three rows and ended up leaving a load 'cos it was too much.
At least with carrots one can leave them in the ground - I did last year and was still digging them out in march. 50-60 meters is probably a tad much though..but then we all had trouble with germination and re-sowed. same with parsnips. they were really slower tha even parsnips should be and i did lose 1 row i rotorvated before rememberig I'd sown them so stuck an extra one in. Yeah.. 60 metres of parsnips ight be too much for the two of us but again they can stay in the ground.
As I reported earlier some of my onions bolted.. but suprisingly most didn;t. A few look scanky but there;s a good 300 ace ones.. they'll store.
Sweetcorn has been a nemesis. last 2 years the patch has been attacked by hares or badgers and I;ve been hard pressed to harvest eough for us. This years 200 have been left alone. 50 in the freezer already with plans to double that and try to give the rest away.
My first sowing of red drumhead cabbage is looking super,, but nt quite sure what i;m going to do with 40 of those when i already have second and third more modest swings as well as greyhound and savoy. Yup I beat the cabbage whites so far this year.
Aoart from me and the wife no-one aroudn here seems to eat curly kale..not even my few sheep so not sure what to do with the truckload of that - probably be compost.
You can guess that the other brassicas and turnips are in similar quantity.
Perhaps next year I will hold myself in check (or perhaps not)
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Surely you can find some people who would really benefit from your enthusiasm? Any food banks near you? If not ask local vicar who will know of local families who could benefit from some fresh veg ......
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Surely you can find some people who would really benefit from your enthusiasm? Any food banks near you? If not ask local vicar who will know of local families who could benefit from some fresh veg ......
You'ld think.. but this is a small rural community and looks like most do grow their own. I;ve already put the word out in the pub and forced produce on neighbours and delivery guys that aren't too strapped for time.
Last year i did manage to give away a tractor bucket of spuds but still dumped another and dumped another 2 sacks we never ate our way through this spring that chitted too far.
I'd stick free boxes by the front gate if there was any traffic.
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I understand how you can get so carried away :garden: I find seed sowing irresistable, even planting out and tying in tomatoes etc. Once it gets to the weeding though I'm absolutely hopeless, so we can lose crops that way. Where we are, there can be huge differences between seasons, so I always tell myself I need to sow just a few extra...... Then when I sow in modules I put in 2 or 3 seeds, 'knowing' I'll be strict and thin them to one as early as possible, but of course I can't throw out all those healthy baby seedlings, so I end up with too many.
I used to sell the surplus at the gate (we do get some passing traffic as although it's a tiny road it's a rat run) However, I got annoyed growing stuff for younger and fitter folk who could so easily have grown their own, that now I keep everything for us or our offspring and their offspring, who get some whenever we see them.
I do try to be strict with myself each year, and this year I grew only three bags of spuds - 60 ish plants, but they grow prolifically here so that may well still be too many. You can never have too many tomatoes and beans in my book, so I'm overwhelmed with the freezing too.
It's the amount of work involved I think about now, rather than how many seeds I've got so the amounts I grow are definitely less than in previous years.
Growing is just too exciting and addictive to stop ;D
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weeding is the big issue here too. I have to crawl when doing it by hand and they finally outgrew the hoeing and rotorvating options with weeds too close to the plants. It takes me about an hour to crawl and handweed between 2 rows. I've abandoned the rows of perennial flower seeds I shoved in - not quite sure why I did ..some idea of making flower beds next year but really got enough to do. In those weeds there's a bunch of lupin, delphinium, carnation and hollyhock young plants but probably not more than 30 or 40 of each. it'll probably be careful glyphosate soon on the calabrese and pea rows when they've finally given up o deal with weed residue then the french beans and the flowers.
As to spuds.. i think i shoved 400 odd in .. I didn't count but it's 8.5 x 20 metre rows and we're still eating first earlies that are now rather huge. I bush does us both for three days. I have been hit with blight so they're all blue/green from DIY bordeaux but hanging in there to get as much as possible before forced to lift the lot.
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I have to crawl along on my hands and knees too :roflanim: I wear carpet fitters knee pads, and the toes of my work boots have worn right through ::) It's great for exercising the abdo muscles, but what lengths we go to to grow our veggies and flowers :garden:
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I suspect I would be the same if I had more growing space. As it is I grew thirty climbing French beans and 20 runners which I suspect is a tad too much for two of us. And five courgette plants is excessive when there's only me that eats them. Same with about 20 tomato plants although OH will eat them occasionally. I can't do the crawling along but I have a lad working for me who does the bits I can't hoe.
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Space isn't an issue. If I knew how to sell a crop and manage it on a commercial quantity I'd have a go.. but you can't hand-weed several acres and it'd take a couple of years of weed nuke-ing and soil improving to get the acreage into shape for crops. It's my third year with these veggie patches to get their soil pretty good. I've promised myself a pto rotorvator for next year. Discing doesn't get it fine enough and push rotorvating 1/4 acre takes ages.
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Do you have chickens? How about keeping some and feeding the excess veg to them? And they can be moved onto a spare plot and manure/weed it for you :thumbsup:
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Do you have chickens? How about keeping some and feeding the excess veg to them? And they can be moved onto a spare plot and manure/weed it for you :thumbsup:
You haven't me my OH! yes, we have chickens but to even dare suggest they get confined to a veggie patch... They have 3 acres of gardensm shrubs and woodland to wander in and spend most of the time by the kitchen door (or in the house) pestering for extra treats.. and being indulged. That and messing all over my barn, paths etc. they're all rescues.. some with only one functional leg and some well beyond any laying.
They have been eating the ends on the sweetcorn when prepping for freezer and courgettes, lettcuce etc. I actually have a stand of sunflowers growing for them - a mere hundred as well as pumpkins.... Anything to reduce the rediculous amount of money OH spends on buyng seeds and mealworms to feed hens and the assorted wildlife..which naturally has a moved in and bred up. First thing in the morning you trip over pheasants queuing for their rations too.
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What about a couple of pigs then? They would rotavate for you and eat the excess veg.
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What about a couple of pigs then? They would rotavate for you and eat the excess veg.
OH quiet happy to have pigs..on the understanding they have warm winter quarters, ventilated shady summer arks and live with us until they die of old age......
My lady has a heater in the hen house for frosty nights and has already made provision for our small flock of pet sheep in the event of them outliving us. The cutest pet lamb would have been a house-sheep if dalmatian hadn't kept trying to eat it.....
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I plant EVERYTHING through weed suppressing fabric now. No weeding to speak of.
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It's a great idea suziequeue, and it's what I did for a few years, and still try it every year. My problem is my dogs, terriers whose only aim in life is to dig, preferably getting to the little treats in a vole nest, rip my weed fabric to shreds, so the weeds grow, and they tunnel under it and kill off the plants :rant: I hold it all down with stobs ad so on, with pinned canes lying along the edges, but they shove the stobs aside as if they were twigs, and rip any pinned down bits. I know I need to keep them out of the veggie patch but they would just howl, and we don't have time to enclose the whole thing in such a way they can't climb over or dig underneath.
Having seen Colin (lint mill) 's amazingly neat and tidy, weed free veg garden, I hardly dare let anyone see mine. :garden: I don't know how he does it - perhaps being young and fit helps ;D
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I tried plastic on a bed that was always sprouting grass. The grass just grew under the plastic and pushed it up so light got in and even more grew. :rant:
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I plant EVERYTHING through weed suppressing fabric now. No weeding to speak of.
I've considered this at times but the sheer cost for my oversized plot is one aspect..then I don't quite see how that works for carrots and parsnips and peas unless you start those in modules too? You'ld have to grow between runs and still weed the edges.
It;d also be an issue of lifting and rolling the whole thing up every witer to manage the soil - and pesumably scraping all the beasties off from underneath and finding the window for it to dry.
I can see the attarction on a couple of small raised beds.
I've currently got some 30 x 20metre rows veggies excluding the 9 rows spuds.
Of course sensibly I should be growing less than half that
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I recently put in the rest of a pack of some kind of quick growing late crop brassica, japanese broccoli or something? I'd never heard of it so someone must have given me the pack and it was definitely beyond the sell by so I turfed it all in a seed tray in the greenhouse to see if I could get an odd plant.. The tray is full of seedlings and I've no clue what to do with them as the beds are either full or overrun by chicken dustbaths and probably cat litter trays ::) and my brassicas and beetroots are hiding under the sheep haiks and fleece tents from them which just means harder to weed but gives a chance of survival..
My late beans are in full flower but not a bean yet, so no doubt I need to empty the freezer for what's to come. I've taken up the red onions and shallots as they were dying back and some had bolted, those are still in for the bees but I'm not sure when the seed is ready to collect or I'll have thousands of onion seeds all over the onion bed and no chance of rotation.
Rogue tatties everywhere have flowered but still green. Hens dug one up so the tatties that side are green but the rest are still buried - gave me a snapshot on development underground tho :) I can't eat any more leaves at the mo, spinach, kale etc, leafed out. I usually eat a lot of curly kale over winter in soups with the tatties and whatever, so that's no problem.
I left 2 beds empty due to chook protection issues so there are fewer species but no shortage of what I have. I even got a few calabrese to sprout heads, not big ones like in supermarkets, more like green PSB, but who cares, it's a first tho the cabbage whites are into those now which is a shame.
One of my better years for weeding effort, possibly due to less beds in use, but I think I really need raised beds for next year for my back's sake - and with chook protection. A polytunnel would be ideal but not on my budget sadly, so I'm thinking about those scaffold planks Bloomer mentioned and trying to work out how many I need and whether to do the end to end beds with the current breaks between for access, or as one long bed I can walk around but not across..
Problem here is I'm meant to be selling excess produce, and there isn't much at any one time, so hard to attract customers for maybe something but not exactly a box full or even a soup recipe. I need to think about that and either scale up next year and find a bit of marketing skill somewhere in me, or cut back and withdraw all claim to it being for selling.
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pgkevet re the :chook: :chook: .
I'm so glad there is someone else as mad as me ;D . About 10 :chook: are hiding in the porch from the rain - imagine the state of that by this afternoon. At least they didn't make it into the kitchen or office this morning. And yes, they all live out their old age here feeding on the best food :innocent:
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It might be worth looking at Charles Dowding's methods with no till and deep mulch to keep out the weeds.
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My car had it's mot today - it's only 20yrs old so no issues - but handily loks ike the mechanics will be popping by later for a little spud lifting and free veggie taking - result if it works out!
Otherwise at my rate it's another 4/5 days to get all the spuds up
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That is some digging. Hope you've got a physiotherapist ready to give you a massage.
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Phew.. friend stopped by and we got 2 rows up and 3 sacks bagged before it rained. Ony about 70 plants to go (plus sorting/bagging) and she's stopping by again tomorrow...It must be so nie to be able to bend still!
It's also nice to have a friend who turns up - albeit quite well dressed - and is prepared to step out of her skirt and work in the thick tights she had on and a borrowed pair of wellies...
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That's when you know who your true friends are.
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Read this thread with a smile of my face, I have to ask though, if the chooks have three acres and your veggies have half, how much do the sheep have?! I'm hoping you'll say you have a total of three acres for your free range chooks, else I'll feel REALLY bad ;D
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Read this thread with a smile of my face, I have to ask though, if the chooks have three acres and your veggies have half, how much do the sheep have?! I'm hoping you'll say you have a total of three acres for your free range chooks, else I'll feel REALLY bad ;D
At the moment while the 4 pet lambs are still small then they and the two big sheep are limited to the one field - mostly 'cos it's to keep out my dalmatian who would chase the little 'uns. So they just have the one 10 acre field with stream, thick sheltering hedges and their field shelter. Once they're bigger we'll open up again so they can range through the disused quarry, small 4 acre woodland and additional 5 acres of meadow. :wave:
that's 'cos the dalmatian likes a good run behind the quadbike every day and the other 30-odd acres isn't enough for him.
We've got the best 7 sacks bagged in the barn, a sack of small good ones for next years seed - I've cut that down to only 200. That leaves about one and a half loader buckets of rejects (smaller, too scabby, split with the fork etc) I'll likely have to dump.
French and climbing beans almost finished - as in getting too old. Runners still have new flowers. Carrots getting huge. First caulis curded up well - about a dozen. Red Cabbage heads huge - about 30 good ones in the first batch.. then PSB ready too.
It's been a good year for growth. Many onions larger than the Spanish ones in the shops. Physallis bushes large but not many flowers. Sunflower heads are really big - the chooks and wild birdies will enjoy the 100 heads in due course...
Oh, and the chickens could range further - the gates are open to 30 acres but they tend to stick aroudn the immediate lawns and only go a little way into the other woodland...... :innocent:
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So pretty cramped :chook: :chook: then ;D .
Sounds idyllic, except for lifting all those spuds :-\ .
Can you train the Dallie to guard rather than chase the :sheep: ? Ours was the best guard dog we've ever had, a wonderful girl.
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Dallie is a nutter! He's superb with kiddies and people and OK with other dogs but needs watching when he's over-excited. Times like when he knows I'm getting the quadbike out he'll dash and spook the hens and has grabbed/killed one. He'll also chase the barn cats and anything else on 4 legs. Once he's in that sort of excitable mood he just switches to ignoring any command. I can just about call him off the big sheep who have a decent turn of speed.. but I think he'd catch up to friendly lambs too quick to voice control.
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We had to keep one of our dogs on a lead, except when out for a run, until she was 2 yo and would obey commands reliably. Maybe you need to go back to first principles with your Dalmation when he's near your stock ?
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You'ld think! He'll stay with me all day, walk to heel, keep watch while i work etc.. follows me like a shadow and then sees stock and his brain just switches a gear. (or switches off)
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I think it's known as selective deafness :innocent: or the 'red mist', depending on which circles you mix in.
Seriously, I do understand how frustrating it is to have a seemingly well-trained dog which then switches into nutter mode. We used to be given those to re-handle and it usually went like this - ::) :-\ :o :-[ :'( :'( :'(
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'red mist' is about right.