A Smallholder's Diary, Week 5 (20th-26th July 2021)

20^th July 2021
On the evening checkup, I take a close look at the broad beans. We knew we had one or two broken stems, and so a bit of bruised flesh was natural – but looking at the plants tonight, brown and black spots and patches are rife on several plants, even affecting some of the pods.
 
I research this – probably something called “chocolate spot”, which sounds tasty but isn’t. I harvest a number of pods – those on badly affected plants, chiefly. I suspect the plants have ended up growing too closely, which will have exacerbated fungal spread, but it’s probably more than that.
 
When we shell the beans later, aside from a few weirdly half-empty pods, there are also some spotted and unhealthy beans, which have to be discarded. I’m disappointed.
 
Last year we lost perhaps half of our small tomato crop to late blight. Adrian Bell speaks about the gritty desperation of the smallholder, because the smallholder forges independence in incredibly precarious circumstances. That makes every loss all the more painful. Every lost bean is a step away from resilience.
 
8 eggs, 10oz Aquadulce broad beans (1.6oz shelled)
 
21^st July 2021
The boys taste the first few ripe tomatoes off our most successful planter. Some of our tomatoes are struggling for nitrogen (shallow pots), and the collection in the mini-greenhouse have definitely struggled simultaneously with being too vigorous (and therefore growing a lot but not flowering) and being intermittently dry (leading to scorching of some of the flowers that do come through). My own fault, of course; my design, my systems. Tomatoes are a bother, it has to be said. Maybe fewer next year?
 
Short evening checkup with a friend. Multiple courgettes now ready, of various colours and varieties. The repeated bird attacks have definitely killed a few strawberry and Brussels plants – but I have spares, so no despair yet.
 
6 eggs, 2 Garden Pearl cherry tomatoes (1.51oz)
 
22^nd July 2021
I work in the twilight again. Though cooler the chickens are still preferring to sleep out – I’ll probably have to work on that soon, once the weather turns.
 
Aside from watering and tidying, I fill a harvest basket. More onions, peas, beans, radishes, lettuce, and our first courgette (a black variety; we have 4 varieties out there). The corollary to the pain of losing the broad beans – and the food reserves they represent – is that true resilience spreads its bets. Last year our tomatoes were blighted; this year they’re coping much better. This year the beans have chocolate spot, but we can learn from that – in the meantime we have plenty of other things.
 
Having spotted potatoes peeking above the ground yesterday, I glimpse some more today, and head into the potato enclosure. The Earlies are beginning to die back, slowly – yellowing leaves for now, from nitrogen withdrawal – and some of them have a half dozen potatoes on the trunk above ground, as well as whatever is beneath. This may be due to the density of the clay soils here, but just as likely is just the potatoes being vigorous and cropping heavily. Good news, though bears watching.
 
6 eggs, 2.1oz Aquadulce broad beans (0.32oz shelled), 1.1oz Meteor peas (0.42oz shelled), 5 heads Beauregard lettuce, 7 French Breakfast radishes, 1 small Black Beauty courgette, 1 Garden Pearl cherry tomato/0.75oz, 2.54oz onion greens, misc onions
 
23^rd July 2021
Brief visit today with a friend. I move the cold frame from the rapidly overgrowing courgettes to cover the vulnerable strawberries that birds have been attacking (even through the netting, which they have torn!).

5 eggs, 2 Garden Pearl cherry tomatoes/1.51oz
 
24^th July 2021
No visit today, due to feeling under the weather.
 
7 eggs.

25^th July 2021
No visit today either. Helen mentions on her return that where the potato plants are withering some exposed potatoes are turning green. This is from producing chlorophyll to maximise sunlight intake, but it causes the tuber to become utterly inedible. They’ll need harvesting and then processing – either cutting out edible parts, or composting, or turning to seed potato for next year.
 
7 eggs
 
26^th July 2021
A long evening block working at the allotment and then processing. The light is falling away much more quickly than I expected – a month on from midsummer and, with any cloud at all in the sky, it’s gloomy by 10pm. There is a circadian rhythm here, though – there is something fitting about the harvest gradually fading into black.
 
Now, with the cold frame in its new place, I discard dead plants from under it and plant out a couple more strawberries. I also put a few small, quite eaten spare chards in with their brethren – given how regularly we can crop them, the more the better. Space shouldn’t be an issue.
 
I also water everything, before commencing the harvest.
 
More radishes come up – enormous ones, now, bigger than any so far this year, as big as a fingerling courgette. Another handful of bean pods, several heads of lettuce, and then finally a very respectable haul of potatoes – but many half-green.
 
I do remove one plant altogether as it is shallow and has nothing left, and crop off its neighbours heavily. However, it is only a few Early plants in the centre of the Early ridge that are growing tubers above ground; aside from slight exposure, nothing else is. After finishing harvesting these, I dig from the partner ditch and cover a few of the plants more thoroughly so that as their tubers grow, they stay covered.
 
At home, I process everything – shelling peas and the like. The potatoes go in a thick brown paper bag and under the cupboard, the darkest place in the house. The beans, alas, are all rotten – the pods themselves are intact, but the fertilised beans have shrivelled and turned black, and the pod has often grown into that space, like a tumour. I struggle to find an explanation online – they seem to have been pollinated (surely), but perhaps something went wrong there; perhaps it is the effect of the chocolate spot, but this affected even healthy-looking beans. A mystery, for now. Agriculture is a detective story.
 
5 eggs, 0.5oz Meteor peas (0.125oz shelled), 4 heads Beauregard lettuce, 10 French Breakfast radishes, 1.25oz Aquadulce beans (0oz shelled; rotten), 6lbs6.75oz early potatoes (green material inclusive)

A Smallholder's Diary, Week 4 (13th-19th July 2021)

13^th July 2021
I resow carrot seeds – another area damaged by the chickens on Sunday. I then cover them with a low tunnel, to dissuade other birds from investigating the disturbed soil. There is a constant battle against entropy in the garden – the weeding, the slug-hunting, the seed-covering. Somehow, through handpower, sun, and water, with no real expertise, this leads to abundance.
 
6 eggs
 
14^th July 2021
Allotment Club. Hot but successful. The harvest is beginning to mount as we take the first few Welsh onions (only a very few now, though). These are a small form of onion akin to spring onions or chives, and can be grown and used in the manner of either, and can also be used as small green onions.
 
We have beans, peas, and lettuce with dinner, which involves chicken in a tomato sauce. We will have tomatoes later in the year – in fact, the first few are starting to ripen now! – but we’d need more scale to make any amount of tomato sauce. Possible, though. Even a bit of land, however, would let us keep our own meat chickens.
 
7 eggs, 4 heads Beauregard lettuce, 0.3oz Welsh onions, 10oz Aquadulce broad beans (3oz shelled), 1.5oz Meteor peas (0.65 oz shelled)
 
15^th July 2021
Twilight working, which avoids the heat. I water the plants – we watered with liquid compost yesterday, but this time it’s more for hydration. Especially as stuff is fruiting or podding, we need to keep the plants satiated.
 
7 eggs
 
16^th July 2021
The hottest day of the year so far, with tomorrow predicted hotter. We have allotment radishes in our chicken pasanda dinner – with land, we could also add the chicken and the garlic, and perhaps other things.
 
I visit briefly in the earlier evening to pick up eggs and drop off scraps to the chickens (illegally!). I don’t have the time to water now, but did water yesterday, and forcing the plants to push deeper is no bad thing. Sometimes fruiting plants suffer for that – you can’t risk too much drought – but a day should be fine.
 
I return later, after dark, to lock up. Most of the chickens have gone on top of the coop, led by the cockerel. The door is still open; this is voluntary. Why? Well, it’s still 16c – they’ve made a judgement about staying cool. I weigh up the minuscule risk of a fox getting into our secure yard, and – contrary to any advice you’ll get – leave the chickens out. They will ordinarily judge much better than I can what is good for them. I deal with the edge cases, or where our needs clash.
 
The sky is clear, and light pollution isn’t overbearing. The heavens really do look like a vault studded with jewels.
 
I lie down on the stone path which I laid myself, feeling the comforting cool on my shoulders. I look up, as Venus rises in the east, a glowing pale yellow, herald of the sun. In the west, stars seem to swim down into the haze beyond the horizon, the brightest still shining but their dimmer brethren swallowed up.
 
Above, the spheres whose music I cannot hear but know by every intuition and by revelation is everpresent and perfectly harmonic. The perfect order of a Divine universe, fully on display and available for free, every night under cloudless skies. What troubles have we wrought by turning on the lights and shutting the curtains?
 
7 eggs
 
17^th July 2021
Quick trip to collect eggs and check on plants. I do a bit of watering. The difficulty accessing the potato bed – which is in an enclosure beside the chickens, in half of their old yard – reminds me that we need to finish the internal fence and add a gate. The potatoes are growing mightily, however, including the main croppers. I suppose in a month or so the earlies will die back, after which we’ll leave them in the ground for a few weeks to dry and settle before harvesting.
 
6 eggs
 
18^th July 2021
Sunday School at the allotment. The sun pounds down but the children are watered and enjoy themselves. I give out some lettuce at the end. The first courgettes are now visible, too – we’ll probably harvest a couple this week!
 
We pick a few wild raspberries on the way home, and share them out amongst the family.
 
Some plants have been kicked out by foraging birds – probably feral chickens, perhaps pigeons. It’s more chicken-like behaviour, though, with the plants often uneaten. We have netting and mesh spare, so we’ll cover them. In the morning I simply replant the victims.
 
By the evening the plants are grubbed up again – so I net some uncovered strawberries, and also the raspberries, though in their case more to protect the fruit. The canes are quite well-set there.
 
8 eggs, 2 heads of Beauregard lettuce, 6 raspberries
 
19^th July 2021
In the evening I water the plants with a friend, after checking on the chickens. The orange Sapphire has something like a cold, sneezing repeatedly, but is otherwise vigorous and happy. One thing with chickens is that if they get seriously ill there’s no point treating them, and if they’re mildly ill the curatives are usually food, water, and perhaps cider vinegar.
 
7 eggs

A Smallholder's Diary, Week 3 (6th-12th July 2021)

6^th July 2021
I get down with sunlight still bleeding on the western horizon. The same Copper Black as has been out the last two nights is on top of the coop; I shoo her off. Odd.
 
8 eggs
 
7^th July 2021
Allotment Club, with two families as well as ours. Sunny, humid. Buckets of harvest, and as a side to our lunch I pick onion greens. Joe loves them; they’re spicy but luscious, fresh, ripe. The onions are nearly ready themselves – we should get enough for most of the next year. The first courgette flowers are out.
 
A couple of weak bean tillers are snapped off as the children harvest; this is somewhat inevitable, but the grubby-handed smallholder in me is really frustrated by the loss of, perhaps, 30 pods. That’s maybe a half-pound. On the other hand, I should consider it an education cost – the kids have to learn how to pick beans, and there were always going to be casualties en route to their expertise.
 
Later, we host friends for dinner. We use up all the home-grown lettuce left in the fridge, both Gem and Beauregard – and I think: this stuff is just toxic roadside nonsense. We took it and tamed it, like you break a colt, and turned it into something edible and useful...and so varied! The Gem is crunchy, juicy, with pine-dark green leaves; the Beauregard is more delicate, an almost papery leaf in duck-egg green, peppery to taste. The ancient farmer was as close to a wonderworker as any modern geneticist.
 
I sow carrot seed in the evening (late, should have done it last month, but the weather early in the year has knocked everything back). I also check on the potatoes; as well as the 25 Early plants, there are now 19 or so Maincrop plants showing above ground. We may recover the potato harvest yet!
 
The Copper Black goes inside normally; weird streak broken.
 
I hear the progress of the England-Denmark game by listening to the village; the shouts as England score their second goal rise from different points and join, forming a victorious chorus, like a roaring sea. There’s a timeless element here, somehow – of course people are watching on TV, but I am not, and hear news travel by acclamation across the silent land.
 
But that piece of news is trumped as I walk to get some water: a hedgehog! First I’ve seen in years. One of our many declining animal populations, suffering as so many from busier roads, more heavily broken up by human development, the rest of it.
 
The hog watches me pass, and is gone by the time I return. A snuffling mascot for a land-healing ministry.
 
6 eggs, 3oz Meteor peas, 3.75lbs Aquadulce beans (1lb shelled), 3 rhubarb stalks (other stalks were brought home but had withered by the time they were processed)
 
8^th July 2021
Only briefly at the allotment, but later, when walking home from a friend’s birthday BBQ, I see another hedgehog. Is this the reverse of the ravens leaving the tower?
 
7 eggs
 
9^th July 2021
I enjoy a therapeutic hour in the evening working at the allotment. I spread wood shaving over the chicken yard to help with the mud; by next winter I want to have it woodchipped. This will produces us good compost, help with absorbency, and the chickens will enjoy hunting for bugs amongst the chips.
 
I top up their bedding – we basically “deep bed” them until there’s not room and then clear some of the rubbish out. This is perfectly hygienic – the new bedding covers the old waste and helps the composting process, which also produces a little ambient heat for the chickens. Especially good in winter.
 
I feed and water them. We use layers pellets, plus a little corn and grit. Not organic – I’d rather be grazing them on grass and topping up with minerals, but organic feed is twice the price and so as they’re static we compromise.
 
There is something cleansing about being here; it is not that one is mindless in working. Indeed, doing manual labour allows the mind to wander and reflect more than clerical work. But there is something grounding, reality-setting – yes, I have many worries; yes, there are burdens and obstacles; but here, now, “at the still point of the turning world”, I am present, and able to achieve something, no matter how small.
 
The chickens are fed. The young rhubarb and the cabbages are flourishing. The bean harvest continues apace. If I die tomorrow, I will have served my day.
 
7 eggs
 
10^th July 2021
I don’t go down today, having too much other work to do; I miss it.
 
7 eggs, 1 head of Beauregard lettuce, 1 Meteor peapod (0.2oz)
 
11^th July 2021
We see a sparrowhawk take out a pigeon on the way down for Sunday School. It watches the whole crowd of us gawking. Another pigeon watches, too, seemingly more confused than distressed.
 
In the evening I come down and discover the chicken yard door had been left open, and the little monsters had gone out on to the allotment in style. The chard and cauliflowers have been thoroughly gobbled (but hopefully can still recover), and other plants have been unearthed. Somehow worst of all, the chickens had all then gone back in to their yard! I spend time replanting plants and covering vulnerable specimens.
 
6 eggs, 1 head of Beauregard lettuce
 
12^th July 2021
We have tomato pasta with our own broad beans and lettuce. This is satisfying, of course – but also nutritious! The broad beans are stuffed with easy calories, protein, and minerals, whilst the lettuce is very good for both vitamins and minerals. And this is all very easy to grow – both have basically grown themselves with just a bit of weeding, a single string round the beans, and slug-hunting for the lettuce. Scores of bean seeds, hundreds of lettuce seeds – they cost a pound or two each. Virtually free, easy to grow, nutritious.
 
7 eggs

A Smallholder's Diary, Week 2 (29th June-5th July 2021)

June 29^th 2021
I go down briefly in the evening to do some extra watering and put the chickens to bed.  Peaceful, pleasantly cool.
 
6 eggs
 
June 30^th 2021
Allotment Club with Libby and her kids as well as our lot. Harvest Meteor peas, broad beans, and rhubarb stalks. The high summer becomes less a time of planting – though that continues apace, if you want a winter or spring crop – and more a time of harvest, as every pod and fruit wells up like an active volcanic mount, ready to burst. Even a week ago, virtually no pea pods were visible; now we have the first dozen, of many more to come.
 
I rake and hoe out a small section between the raspberries and asparagus in the “Perennial Bed” and put down a couple of inches of compost. Our own compost! The product of our weeding and chicken-mucking, along with millions of co-workers in this land-healing ministry – bacteria and beetles and worms and many others.
 
The six sweet potato plants go in – Beauregard, a semi-hardy cultivar. I still cover it with a cloche, as they won’t grow otherwise. It seems a worthwhile experiment, but I am not hopeful. I bought the slips because Helen loves sweet potatoes.
 
Our (uncovered) tomatoes are growing in bunches in the yard, and the strawberry plants in “half-pipe” guttering on the wall have set a decent amount of fruit. The tomatoes in the mini greenhouse in the garden are bigger but only just starting to flower; they are racing the sun, now, for setting fruit and ripening. Nonetheless, not bad for the North-East of England, especially after the miseries of the preceding winter and spring!
 
7 eggs, 2lbs Aquadulce broad beans (1/2lb shelled), 1/5lb Meteor peas, 7 rhubarb stalks
 
July 1^st 2021
I receive some 5-gallon buckets today. I have one already, in use for liquid compost (of which more shortly); these will do for water-carrying duties, weed collection, feed mixing, and whatever else I can come up with involving a 5-gallon bucket.
 
I lump a couple of them back from the nearest standpipe. Ten gallons of water is heavy. There is something quite primeval about carrying water to irrigate the crops in the falling dusk, though.
 
A liquid compost is easy, if smelly: fill a bucket with useful green matter (comfrey leaves, nettles, dock, creeping buttercup – anything with deep tap roots or wide root networks, really), then fill with water, and if you want, crush the leaves in for good measure. Seal or cover. Dilute at 1:10 with water, and use as organic fertiliser. All those trace elements, all that nitrogen, sucked up from the soil by your helpful plant workers, and then redistributed to your food crop.
 
7 eggs
 
July 2^nd 2021
Forage season has begun. The blackberries started blossoming today; the raspberries beat them to it, but only just. I cut down sprays of elderflower from a tree overhanging our allotment so that Helen could make cordial. We made elderberry cordial last year; we will again this year, and jam too, perhaps. Dog roses grow in abundance here, too, and we gathered and dried some rosehips last year. Get some more this year, and we could make plenty of rose syrup. (Funny thing, of course, that wild blackberries and raspberries are easy enough, but the elder and rose forage both require technological intervention; human ingenuity finding new foods.)
 
I also do the “farm” accounts for June. I assign a nominal value to the food we harvest for consumption based on the equivalent “main range” product at Tesco. Now, if we could sell our allotment produce (we can’t, by contract), it would command a higher price; the vegetables are organic, though the eggs aren’t strictly. The reality, though, is that if we didn’t have allotment produce we’d be buying the same from Tesco or Sainsbury’s, and so the money we’re “making” is those savings. (Of course, we get higher secondary use out of this food due to having the allotment; bean pods go to the chickens, egg shells go to the compost, etc. But that is reflected in a negative sense – it becomes unbought compost and chicken feed, thereby saving future money.)
 
INCOME: £58 (£32 from 191 eggs, £6.75 broad beans, £5.50 rhubarb stalks, £5.50 Gem lettuce, £3.75 Perpetual Spinach, £3.40 Beauregard lettuce, 80p French Breakfast radishes, 30p Meteor peas)
 
EXPENDITURE: £94.83 (£34.97 5 x 5-gal buckets, £23.99 4 x harvest baskets, £8.50 1 x bag corn, £7.99 1 x bag grit, £7.99 1 x bag wood bedding, £6 4 x preservation jars, £5.39 farm ledger)
 
A loss of nearly £37, but that’s less bad than it may sound. June is not high harvest by any means, and the vast majority of the expenditure was on injection-moulded plastic that, whilst ungreen, is important infrastructure at the level we’re farming. I also got Spear & Jackson to send me a brand new hoe when my hoe’s haft shivered and snapped, which leaves me, when you think about it, with a perfectly good hoe head and some usable pieces of wood.
 
Nonetheless, this augurs a quiet few months over the summer in terms of expenditure – focus on the harvest, and make “profit” to justify future investment.
 
8 eggs, 12 sprays of elderflowers
 
3^rd July 2021
Only a quick trip to the allotment in the evening to collect eggs and check on the chickens, but relieved to see some of our battered courgette seedlings re-establishing after pigeon and child attacks. (Many are very well-established, which is promising; they’ve gone out late because of the problems with weather early in the season, but should still, God willing, give us abundant bounty.) The sweet potatoes are also very happy under their cloche, though thereby their compost was dry despite the day-long rain.
 
6 eggs
 
4^th July 2021
Sunday School at the allotment. We picked a head of Beauregard lettuce and shared it, and I spoke on the theme “Taste and see that the Lord is good”. Then afterwards some of the children helped with the chickens, and we ate pea pods! I’ve never enjoyed doing children’s spiritual education at church so much; there is something so connected and grounded and joyful in being outside and on the land.
 
In the evening I head down to the chickens in the rain to lock them up. All but one are already in bed; the other (a Copper Black) is roosting on the top, in the rain. The door is open, which puzzles me. I irritate her enough for her to jump off and run around. Her alarm calls – she is very annoyed at me – alert the cockerel, who begins to call back from inside the coop, doing his patriarchal duty of providing a homing signal. Of course, being a literal chicken, he does not come out to check on the predator threat.
 
6 eggs, 1 head Beauregard lettuce, 1.75oz Meteor peas
 
5^th July 2021
I again head down late to lock the chickens up, and this time the rooster, the Bantam, and a Copper Black are roosting on the top – though the door is open. Stranger and stranger. I wonder if they have become somewhat used to me coming down in the evening when they are awake, and have partially synchronised their bedtimes with that? I actually switch on my heavy duty lamp and disturb the other chickens (in an attempt to "reset" their bedtime), who are happy to come out for food – probably hungry as they were fairly hastily let out earlier in the midst of other jobs.
 
I then, in the humid, damp, but pleasant night, do a tiny bit of work – again replant one of the battered courgettes, tossed up by a probing bird (the stronger plants can withstand it; there's an argument for letting weak plants die, of course); find slugs out in the dark and wet and throw them into the chicken yard, including some who have snuck under the cloche to bother the sweet potatoes; and a tiny bit of simple weeding. Nature is overfecund, in her way, and the thorns of Eden are real – the land does not abide neglect, even for a day or two.
 
5 eggs