An Early Spring Smallholding Week

What I love about working on the smallholding is the rich variety of jobs. So, by way of a bit of a catch up, here's a quick overview of a week here on Swallow Farm.

Thursday 15th February 2018
I started the day by jointing the ducks I recently dispatched and plucked - I am getting better and better at getting all the meat off the bone, which is great as I hate to waste anything when it is an animal's life we are talking about.
Hazel Coppicing
A trip to the vets for standard pet supplies hurt the wallet as usual, but we stopped off at a fellow smallholder's place on the way back to help coppice some hazel. Just one tree for this year but it gave us a fair haul of useable poles. They are a bit rustic but should be ok for what I have in mind, which is to make some hazel and willow hurdles. I had forgotten that the willow needs to be cut for a couple of weeks before it can be sufficiently bent without snapping, so that job has gone on the list.

I would normally cut all the growth at ground level, leaving sloped edges to shed water,

but the owner wanted this year's growth left - which made cutting a lot, lot trickier.

Friday 16th February 2018

The large water butt (an IBC - Intermediate Bulk Container) has been working well as a reservoir from the gutter to the wildlife pond. But the best laid plans... today I just needed to move it about 4 feet to make room for something else.
Willow harvesting

The job went more smoothly than I imagined, so I got straight on with harvesting the remaining willows. For the moment they can lay in neat piles until they have weathered enough to use for hurdle making.

Let there be light in the polytunnel
With jobs falling thick and fast, I made hay while the sun shone and cleaned the polytunnel. I have bought a new long-handled squeegee and soft broom for this and all was going well until a small plastic protrusion went straight through the polytunnel plastic. Fortunately I had a couple of foot of repair tape left over. More has been ordered as this is one thing you want in stock on the rare occasions when it is needed.

The monster chicks foraging in the rhubarb bed.

The upturned bins are for forcing pink rhubarb.

Saturday 17th February 2018

Rhubarb forcing

Not much done today, though I did place a couple of plastic dustbins over two of my rhubarb crowns in the hope that I can get a small crop of forced rhubarb this year. We'll see how it goes.

Sunday 18th February 2018

Grow-Your-Own Motivation

A day spent with the Grow-Your-Own group. I have handed over the reins of this group as I have taken on being Chair of the Smallholders Club and that is taking up quite enough of my time.

Our subject for the day was succession planting and we had a very informative discussion. I showed off my seed organisation system, which I can't show you as it is patent pending (actually it's not, but it should be).

More importantly we enjoyed a high quality bring and share meal. Then there was more club business. Four of the Grow-Your-Own group are now committee members of the Fenland Smallholders Club and we informed the others that the group had volunteered to organise the April club meeting. As this would be the first I had been in charge of as Chair, I want to make it a good one.

Lots of ideas flew about and I think we will put on quite a show.

I always come back from the Grow-our-Own group feeling inspired and reinvigorated.

Monday 19th February

Early Crops

Finally the polytunnel is ready for me to start planting. (I discovered that the old soft broom head fitted the new gubbins I've bought, making for the perfect polytunnel cleaning set up).

In went ten Arran Pilot seed potatoes for a super early crop of new potatoes. I sowed carrots, beetroots, turnips and lettuce too. The polytunnel is great for squeezing an extra crop in before anything is possible in the unprotected beds outside.

Turkeys not just for Christmas

I managed to catch and dispatch the superfluous male turkey - important to do this while I could still tell it from the older stag.

I got it all plucked too while it was still warm. I find turkeys the easiest of all poultry to pluck.

Primocane Raspberries

With these jobs done before lunch, I continued on to cutting back the stems of my autumn fruiting raspberries. It is amazing that from nothing new stems will shoot up, flower and fruit all before winter comes round again.

These are my new raspberries, one called Joan J which gets rave reviews from everyone and one called All Gold (though it doesn't produce chocolate raspberries and they're not Terry's!)

Another Re-organisation

With drizzle coming down all day, I was by now getting pretty damp. The water table is high which means that any rain makes the soil unworkable and things churn up pretty quickly. So I continued the day reorganising the stables. I have made some room in there and want to make good use of the space. It is amazing how every space I create seems to fill up with 'stuff', hence the endless reorganisations.

And finally, despite the weather forecast for the coming week, there are more definite signs of spring. Here's a photo of some catkins I took today.

Wonderful Willow

After my dip into the world of fedging, I still had quite a lot of willow left over. In fact, enough to contemplate another project.

Not the willow on the left. No that's my little post Christmas present to myself - more on this lower down on the page. But this willow underneath. It doesn't look so neat, but it's perfect for rustic, living willow structures in the garden.

This 1000 litre water butt has been adapted

so I can easily dip a watering can into it

when my carrots get thirsty later in the year.

But for now it makes for a very good place

to store my willow cuttings with their butt ends in water.

I fancy making an archway, or even a dome, or a living chair!
So I took to the world of Amazon and typed in Living Willow. In less than two days, this landed on my doorstep.

And while I was browsing, I came across this one too.



Just before Christmas I went on a willow weaving day at one of my favourite places, the Green Back Yard in Peterborough. We were just making Christmas decorations and I had a fairly frustrating experience. On my third effort I started to get the hang of it and then it was time to go.

Third time lucky!

The willow used for this type of project is not so easily grown at home. To be precise, it's pretty easy to grow most willows - you just stick a stick in the ground and wait. When you and the trees are ready, you chop them right back (to ground level is known as coppicing, to about waist or shoulder level is pollarding - to prevent livestock from grazing on the new shoots). The result is that all the tree's energies go into throwing up long, straight shoots perfect for weaving with.
The most common variety for basket-making willow is Black Maul. Once you are ready to take a harvest, you simply boil the shoots for about 9 hours and then strip the bark. Precisely how you process it and which variety of willow you use gives you different colours and qualities. Of course, it's not simple at all! For 8 foot long bundles of willow don't easily fit into my largest stock pot and I don't have a machine for stripping the bark, which could take quite a while by hand.

I decided I'd like to try some of the projects in the book I'd just purchased, as well as having another go at what I'd attempted at the Green Back Yard. So I ordered myself some willow. All the willow companies seem to be down in Somerset and I managed to find one which sold the various types and lengths of willow in 1kg bundles. Of course, I had to purchase enough to warrant paying the postage!

So next weekend (weather depending) Sue and I will hopefully be constructing a living willow chair somewhere in the garden. I just need to work out where to put it.
And there'll be a fair few evenings in front of the fire mastering the art of making willow dragonflies, birdfeeders, stars, hearts and fish.

Fedging, not sledging

Before I write anything else, I have just been down to let the chickens out and had the great pleasure to watch two barn owls perched and flying around the sheep field. One is the most ghostly one I think I've ever seen. The owls are becoming active at the moment. Last night a pair of Little Owls were duet calling from over near the veg patch somewhere. I mimicked their call and managed to get both birds to fly into the Ash Tree just outside the patio doors. Amazing!
But there was a reason for the pair of barn owls being quite so conspicuous this morning, for a fortunate forgetful moment meant that I had to nip back to the chicken pen to close one of the doors. Without this slight senior moment I wouldn't have seen the Short-eared Owl which was flopping about over the field. So three owl species in two days. That can't be bad!

It's been a bit wet and windy this last week, but ridiculously mild. The soil is too wet to work for a while, so I've turned my efforts to other jobs. I pollarded some willows which I planted about four years ago and was left with an assortment of logs, sticks, twigs and whips. Only one thing to do... build a fedge!
Last year I experimented with this, but I really just stuck a few sticks into the ground in a pattern and hoped they'd grow. I took the chance to inspect them the other day and only about half have taken. Some weren't pushed into the ground far enough, some I think were just too thin and some were older wood with less chance of rooting.

But this year's fedge was going to be done properly. Firstly, I would use only the freshest wood. Secondly, I would use a strip of ground cover material to protect the young fedge from grass competition. Thirdly, I would keep to a neat, criss-cross weave pattern. And finally, I would make proper deep holes so I could get the sticks as deep into the soil as possible.

While Sue got busy with the loppers to give each stick a neat, pointed end, I searched out something to make the holes with. I eventually settled for an old polytunnel crop bar, which actually made for the perfect tool.

If I could go back to my youth and choose a career, I would probably become a woodsman, living in a shack, coppicing, making charcoal, green woodworking... it's probably a bit late for that now (especially as some tree species go on a twenty year cycle!) But to have planted my own willow, to be starting to coppice and pollard it and to be using the product to construct my own fedge, outside on a fine winter's day with Sue and the dogs, that comes pretty close to perfick!

Another aside. When I was cutting back the edible hedgerow, which is now into it's fifth year and thickening up nicely, I spotted a nest. My guess is that it belonged to the gang of house sparrows which spent so much of their time in the hedge during the summer months.

My hedge's first nest!
Note the fresh green leaves... at the end of December!

Anyway, here's the almost finished fedge. It just needs some long whips weaving in across the top.

It would have been finished by now but I needed to harvest the long whips. These came from a different patch of willows which I had cut back for the first time in their lives just last year. Being slightly older trees, the year's growth they had put on was amazing, with some shoots almost two inches thick at the base and many whips up to about 10 feet long.

My willow harvest, all bundled up

Any older wood I cut back gets thrown to the sheep who instantly get to work debarking it. I can then use it for any stakes which I don't want to take root. The smaller twigs get devoured and turned into fertiliser, lamb meat and wool! Nothing goes to waste.

An Egyptian mummy points out the offending branch!

But then I had to stop. For whilst cutting another willow down to head height, one of the branches somehow fell down onto my saw hand such that the bow saw teeth bit into my other hand, the one holding onto the tree as I was precariously standing in a V about three feet above the top of the step ladder. I stayed in the tree, but that bow saw had a good chew on my hand!
Not too much damage was done, but I had some quite nasty scratches and it stung.
All is fixed up now and the bandage makes it look more dramatic than it was. It's just on to hold the dressing and to give protection so the wounds don't open up again.

For today, I'll be taking it easy, though I should be able to weave in those whips.

I've just ordered a book on living willow structures, so there'll be more to come next year. Archways, benches, domes...

ed... Update

The fedge is finished!

And the hand is on the mend. The bandages are off and the cuts are healing fast.