9 March 2008
Back in the Garden
Posted by Richard under: Fruit & Vegetables; Sheep; Smallholding .
It’s been a busy week - so no-one has had chance to update the blog. (note to self: must find time to keep NPF updated).
The week started with work taking me down south for a couple of days on business - this sort of knocked everything off kilter for the rest of the week.
First off - all the Southdown ewes and lambs are doing fine. The three cade lambs are taking their milk well and starting on creep feed. The other lambs are out in the field with the ewes, and seem to be gaining weight as expected. We are pretty low on pasture at the moment, but have come to an agreement with some friends to allow us to graze their fields in return for help with sorting out the fencing. So a big part of this weekend has been taken up straining up the stock netting - our friends got the neighbouring farmer to come and put in the seven strainers and multitude of intermediate posts with his mechanical post knocker….which saved a massive amount of work. He managed in five hours what would have taken us about five days. Anyway, the plan is to move the Southdowns onto this new field once the lambs are big enough to travel (and we have tagged them properly).
In the spare time (haha), we have managed to get the potatoes (Kestrel, Accent, and another one I can’t remember) starting to chit, the tomatoes (Big Boy and Gardeners Delight) have already germinated and are in the propogator, and we have sown some early carrots, parsnips, garlic (doing well), onions, spring onions, leeks, sprouts, celeriac, basil, parsley, peppers, aubergines, and artichokes. The rhubarb crowns arrived yesterday, so I have thrown them in behind the raised beds where we stored some old manure - so hopefully they will come on well ready for next year.
Anyway - I do promise to make a few more regular updates in the coming weeks…at least twice a week.
5 Comments so far...
colour it green Says:
9 March 2008 at 9:20 pm.
have you succeeded with celeriac before? Mine were useless last year.. and I love the veg.
Richard Says:
9 March 2008 at 10:10 pm.
Never tried growing celeriac before….it’s worth a shot as its so tasty. We’ll see what happens. Our carrots were completely rubbish last year…but never downheartened, we’re trying again.
colour it green Says:
10 March 2008 at 12:17 am.
yup - one try is not enough.. besides.. last year was a pants year for growing things. Will have to give celeriac another go.
Sam Says:
10 March 2008 at 2:04 pm.
I had a good, but small crop of Celeriac one year, but it was on a lovely south facing slope! Have put my carrots in half sand/half soil again this year as it worked really well last year and am doing the same for the parsnips and beets, fingers crossed as they are also in giant trugs (finally found a use for all the ones the horses destroy!) as we have not made the proper veg garden yet, window sills are full of seedlings and the new greenhouse which we spent most of last weekend putting up is just waiting to be filled, is it wrong to get excited about growing veg??
Richard Says:
10 March 2008 at 10:38 pm.
Not wrong at all - I think it is amazing that anything germinates. The fact we have tomato seedlings coming out of our ears is a mnior miracle to me.
I may try the sand/soil mix on some carrots in an old trug as well…got to be worth an experiment.