THE LAST DAY of January is not the best time of year to write about a smallholding, especially as we are being buffeted by gales and snow today. Even so, there is still a lot happening.
From last year’s crops we have just about finished our stock of eating apples – they have kept us going for a good five months. We still have a few pounds of Bramley cookers; the way they ‘keep’ is great, and should see us through to Easter – in apple pies.
We should also have enough onions in store to see us right through to the summer; there are plenty of leeks still to pick and some perpetual spinach growing quietly away. Also, I’ve just put some covers over a few rhubarb roots to force an early crop which should be ready within a month or so. There are some bottles of plums in the cellar from a couple of years ago, and loads of raspberries in the freezer.
There were the usual failures last year – we’ve never been very successful with cabbages, cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts, and the runner beans weren’t that good, which was unusual. For the first time for several years the plum tree let us down. More successfully, we had a glut of strawberries, the sweetcorn was more productive than ever and we have high hopes that a young cherry tree will start producing this year. Our prowess with carrots is highly variable and the potatoes are usually prone to keel slugs unless we pick them early, or the weather is exceptionally dry. On the positive side, most of our soft fruit, including strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries, is productive year after year, and our broad beans never let us down.
WE’VE GARDENED THE same piece of land now for nearly forty years and kept Anglo-Nubian dairy goats for more than half that time when our children were young. The goats, which are highly intelligent and with a wicked sense of their own value, provided us with just about all the milk we needed – sometimes to such an excess that we even tried rice pudding and custard!
When the boys left home, we pensioned the goats off, as twice-daily milking was becoming a tie. A couple of them lived to around sixteen or seventeen, which is a fine age for a goat. Since we have a patch of really steep hillside to manage, we now have a few sheep, but they are pets, not for meat. They may not be as intelligent as goats but they still have clear personalities.
Apart from the obvious impact of climate change – we have a small vineyard now, which would have been unthinkable for the fringe of the Yorkshire Pennines thirty years ago – our biggest change in gardening has been a much greater attempt to grow crops in succession to get more fresh produce.
We have a large greenhouse (24ft x 10ft) which used to be devoted entirely to tomatoes, the excess being sold to people at work, but it meant that the greenhouse was only ‘occupied’ for six months of the year. We now use it in a very different way and even though it is unheated there is real all-year-round potential.
As of now, every bit of space is in use. On one of the two main beds are a couple of dozen strawberry plants, taken from runners from the outdoor crop four months ago. They are already starting to grow and should be fruiting in April or early May, by the time you read this. On the other main bed I have just planted some first early potatoes (‘Rocket’). Once they start sprouting and the weather warms up they will grow remarkably rapidly so it should be possible to lift the first root or two of delicious early potatoes in ten weeks’ time.
At the far end of the greenhouse is a row of broad beans that were planted in October. They are now fifteen inches high and should start flowering soon. We’ll need to keep the greenhouse door open on sunny days in February to persuade the odd bumblebee to come in and pollinate them, but that isn’t usually a problem.
Then, in the rest of the space we have small rows of lettuce, various other salad greens, carrots and salad onions. Some of these are already germinating but will, like the potatoes, need protection on frosty nights. We will squeeze in some space for some early peas and when the strawberries come out they will be replaced straight away by tomato plants and a few cucumbers and peppers. Last year we had fresh tomatoes from August through to early December.
Finally, the early potatoes will all get lifted and will be replaced by sweetcorn (again for an early crop), with lettuce interplanted. The overall result is that three-quarters of the soil area of the greenhouse now has things growing in it for twelve months of the year, with just a couple of months of a mid-winter gap in one bed between the last of the tomatoes and the early potatoes.
With this intensity, we use a lot of compost, but we have plenty of our own and it also feeds the outdoor vegetable beds. There are only two of us at home most of the time, though we do get frequent visits from the ‘boys’, and the changes in the vegetable growing do mean much more in the way of fresh produce all the year round.
We are still far worse at getting outdoor successional cropping right and we’re determined to do much better over the next year or two. We’ll also plant some new fruit trees, being careful to get a mix between early croppers and good keepers. That, though, is more about ambition than immediate action, but it is good to keep in mind in the middle of the winter storms.
Mid-winter can also have its unexpected bonuses. Claire started beekeeping again last year after quite a long break, and she had two hives nicely established by the autumn. Last Sunday we had several hours of pleasant winter sunshine and it was a delight to see a few bees from each hive having a good look round. They have at least survived the winter so far, which is no small relief – roll on the spring, with the prospect of honey to add to our produce later in the year.
GARDENING TAKES QUITE a lot of time but is a huge relaxation from ordinary work. My own specialism is in the area of international
security, mostly about political violence and the dangers of the war on terror. It is tough to deal with at times, and my ‘other’ life at home is a real antidote. Whatever my worries about terrorism, if the tomatoes don’t get watered at the right time, they can be wilted in a few hours – that really does concentrate the mind!
