June 29th 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 30th 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 1st 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 2nd 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
3rd 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
4th 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
5th 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
I go down briefly in the evening to do some extra watering and put the chickens to bed. Peaceful, pleasantly cool.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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