December 2011

Christmas is coming! Here is a photo of our wonderful huge storage shed - our third building and a vital addition to the Airstream and the portakabin.  This shed (put up last year) makes life possible for us here. It has greenhouse tube heaters fitted inside to keep the moisture level down and contains all our 'stuff'. Two big racks of second hand industrial shelving hold our stores. A big chiller unit serves as a rat-proof store for food, together with metal filing cabinets which hold flour, pasta, rice etc - again to prevent rodent infestation! This Christmas we decided to increase the contents considerably as we had guests coming for a week - we bought a second hand range cooker and a chest freezer on ebay to make a good sized kitchen inside - after all we had to cook a goose and the caravan cooker could not cope!

Come on in!

Our goose prepared for the oven, stuffed and pricked and ready to go...

Inside the kabin. The woodburner is lit......Happy  Christmas!

I have started a pottery class and this is one of my first creations - this year Christmas had a nordic theme...lots of reindeers and snowflakes!

A magical Christmas! We were comfortable, warm and delighted with our beautiful home. Over the week of festivities we ate potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, brussel sprouts, kale, purple sprouting broccoli, spinach, leeks, pak choi and loads of salad from the Patch. We ate broad beans, peas, fennel, courgettes and tomato sauce from the freezer. We celebrated a year of abundant produce and look forward to the next one - after all, this next year should see some fruit from the six little trees standing like sentries in the frosty ground.

Happy New Year! 

November 2011

Its November and there is still no sign of winter. We were expecting a very cold entry into winter at the end of October but it continues to be mild and windy and we have hardly had a frost. Here is the Patch with its greenhouse seen from the top of an incline round an old slurry in front of our barns. We moved this big oak tree which had fallen behind the buildings to make a seat - a look out point over the fields to the oak woods and hills to the East. There is also a good view of the greenhouse from there! We put up the windbreak netting a while back to protect young plants from the harsh winds which come from the South West much of the time due to us being up on the crest of a hill. It works!

These are the Aquadulce Claudia broad beans that I sowed in September in trays in the greenhouse. They are a wonderful autumn sowing variety and should fruit quite early next year having withstood winter frosts. I have staked them against the wind and hung CD's over them to stop the pigeons from eating them. Behind them you can the onions, shallots and garlic shooting up and the leeks in the distance.

 Radar onions on the left and then shallots with their clumps of green shoots and you can just see the garlic to the right of them beginning to shoot. Somehow its even more exciting to see the bright green shoots of new plants in the winter months....they seem so brave!

 White Lisbon spring onions shoot up too in the mild autumn sunshine. They take up so little room and will be lovely salad onions from spring onwards. You don't need to thin them...as you lift them small for salads the ones remaining get bigger. Brilliant for a small garden. 

I decided to dig up the parnsips instead of leaving them in the ground. Mainly because even with the ground still soft it was a hard dig - they were so deep in the ground it was a struggle. I could imagine the struggle if the ground had been frozen, and the frustration at not being able to get at the tender roots on Christmas Day! Here they are scrubbed and ready for their box of damp sand in the shed.

Faboulous roots! 

Three of our new baby fruit trees,  a Merryweather Damson, a Ouillins Gage greengage and a Comice pear, safely in with their stakes to protect them from the wind.  At the back to the right of the trailer are three more trees - a James Grieve apple, a Fiesta apple and a Bramley cooking apple and a young Beech tree. Together they all make a circle of trees around the barn. 

This is the Red Maple (Acer Rubrum) that we have planted above the Patch. We will be able to see it from the windows in the barn as it frames the view across the farmland. It looks a little strange in this photo as the manure pile is in front of it  -  dumped by the kind farmer who knows I need it for the Patch! The secret of so much veg is the way I have been able to dig in so much well rotted cow poo. Last year we had cows and their calves in the barn beside us all winter. I loved it - there is something so comforting about them.

New Hedging. We took the plunge and planted agricultural hedging behind the barn to give us a good boundary with the rest of the farm. Ordered a few months ago, two hundred plants arrived plus stakes and rabbit guards.  A mixture of hawthorn, hazel, guelder, dog rose, crabapple and field acer. We dug a trench with the digger, forked it all over and just before the heavy rain we managed to get all two hundred planted. Stiff with cold and sitting on my bottom in the mud I put the last rabbit guards on in the dark by torchlight to get it finished and this photo was taken the next morning triumphantly after a night of hard rain. It would have been too wet to get them in the following day.....

Still harvesting every day - leeks, spinach, kale, sprouts, purple sprouting, salad and pak choi.....

A sinkful of perpetual spinach being washed to be blanched for the freezer

Spent a day planting up the pots on the deck with new bulbs - tulips, crocuses and miniature daffodils - and transplanting pansies and violas grown from seed in the greenhouse. I moved some of the tender plants, agapanthus and alstroemeria in their tubs, into the greenhouse and put straw on top of them to keep them from the frosts. 

The kittens are nearly nine months now. I love their company and their antics when I am doing jobs outside. This log is a favourite view point! 

October 2011

October - a heat wave, an Indian Summer. It is warm and the dawns have been spectacular with eerie mists hanging in the valley like cobwebs as the sun rises. I can't resist being out in the Patch watching it all come to life and feasting my eyes on the abundance of it all. My camera at the ready!

My new greenhouse! We were given this and brought it home from a bungalow where we had to lift it clear over a garage to get it onto the trailer. Every pane of glass was removed, washed and left to dry against the fence. It took me nearly a week to fit it all together having built a sturdy base with railway sleepers and cement. New panes replaced broken ones and eventually it was ready. Now I can grow so many more varieties....can't wait for the aubergines, peppers and sweeter tomatoes.

Everything is still growing like crazy..we can hardly keep up. I have planted sets of the overwintering onions Radar, the shallot Jermor and Cristo garlic for the spring and White Lisbon salad onion. All of these are happy to go through the winter and will give us an early crop of onions and garlic next year. 

Look at the mangetout! We managed to foil the mice and had hundreds of these crunchy green pods - I sowed them in July and was so pleased to have them in October when the beans and peas were over. We ate them for at least three weeks.

How beautiful is this Red Bor Kale? With the autumn early morning sun shining through its leaves it is a work of art. Not only does it look wonderful but it tastes delicious. I grew three types of Kale - Red Russian, Red Bor and Cavallo Nero, sewing them in late August and they have been standing and resprouting all winter. I pick the leaves from the outside and tear off the flesh from the thick spines. Sweated in garlic and sometimes in chilli and ginger they are an interesting winter brassica with a superb irony flavour. Well worth growing and so easy!

Dew in the early morning on the leaf of the statuesque Cavallo Nero. Below you can see the three types of kale - three plants of each has given us a wonderful harvest.

One October morning harvest - kale, mangetout, courgettes, small cabbage hearts, leek and french beans.....ummmm....a stir fry I think! 

Add noodles, ginger, chillie and soy and some fresh coriander from the greenhouse..and then a dollop of sweet chilli sauce.

Oh and I popped in a  baby head of pak choi as well!

In the greenhouse preparations for spring are underway. Sweet peas are sown in terracotta pots to be potted on into their own pots and kept under glass until March when they will cover the portakabin from large urns on the deck.  I saved last years seed and added Old Spice and Singing the Blues.

I put these photos in just to share with you the atmosphere of morning sun streaming into the Patch, filtering through leaves that I have grown from seed. I want to eat this fabulous salad! Crouching down with my camera I was able to get wonderful perspectives of red leaves through green, purpling brussels swelling on their stems, a heart of Cavallo Nero and the blueberry bush still red and glowing in the sun. I hope you enjoy them. I have loved October in the Patch, pulling in the harvest with one hand and sowing for the next one with the other. 

Next year's perpetual spinach, sown in July and ready to stand through winter to be picked in the spring.

Beetroot Leaves under the Summer Purple sprouting broccoli

The wondrously beautiful Cavallo Nero

The Blueberry Bush still in flower in October