- Little Gem lettuce
- Sugar Loaf chicory
Lamb's lettuce - Baby perpetual spinach leaves
- Lemon Balm
- Marjoram
- Fennel
- Chives
- Parsley
- Mint
Wallflower petals - Pansy flowers
- Young hawthorn leaves
all of which were picked from the garden!
Later on I hope to be including beetroot, young chard leaves (if the family can stand them), other lettuce varieties, nasturtium leaves, flowers and seeds, Lady's Mantle, young oak leaves, rose petals, tomatoes, onions, spring onions, and who knows what else.I recently ordered a book from the library - "The Forest Garden" by Robert Hart, who pioneered forest gardening. It's a very thin little booklet, only about twenty pages or so, but it was really interesting to read about the first forest garden - even though forest gardening has moved on a bit since Hart made his, I think it's still good to get a sense of the evolution of an idea and go back to basics to really understand the underlying philosophy. One of the things that really struck me in the book is what he refers to as "Sallets" (salads to you and me). From what he says in the book is sounds as if Hart lived on a diet of entirely raw foods, which I can't say appeals to me, but as I am the official Provider of Salads I was interested in what he put in his - low maintenance herbs such as Good King Henry, for example, which we don't tend to eat nowadays, but which are highly nutritious and easy to grow.
I also have my eye on some other unusual plants, for this year or subsequent years. One of these is the "strawbini" as they call it on the Victoriana Nursery website (http://www.victoriananursery.co.uk/), Blitum capitatum, Chenepodium capitatum. This is a spinach-like plant that also produces red berries, which are meant to taste pretty good. It contains some odd stuff, that can cause health problems if you eat too much of it, but as this is exactly the same as spinach, comfrey, beans and pretty much any other veg you can think of, I'm not at all put off by this. As we don't have a huge amount of room to grow things in, plants that produce two crops in the space of one appeal to me!
We were meant to do our Spring Inspection today, but it is much too cold. We went down to one of our apiaries however to look at the outside of the hives, and top up the feed we're giving the nuc if necessary. A new beekeeper who Dad is mentoring came with us - a nice bloke, though he seemed a bit daunted! There certainly is a fair bit to get your head round when you start beekeeping, but I think the best thing is to get lots of help from more experienced beekeepers and just get down and do it.
The bees were not coming out at all, except for 5 minutes when the sun came out. Unfortunately what was our strongest hive last year looks barely there - if there are any bees, there are not very many. I doubt this is due to starvation, as we've been feeding them throughout the winter, or because of the weather (it was a pretty good winter this year - cold and rather dry, which the bees can cope with. It's wet weather that's really bad for them). I think varroa may have played a part in it - we treated them towards the end of last year, but when looking at the varroa counting board a while ago, varroa numbers were pretty bad. Oh well. We'll just have to be really vigilant this year, and do some more varroa trapping techniques this year.
Luckily, we've come through the two winters we've had bees pretty well. Dad's mentor had 50% losses this year - we lost one hive to starvation in the summer and perhaps one hive this year. I think ti's because we don't leave them alone in the winter like you're meant to - we can't keep away and we're always topping up their feed and generally being overprotective, although I don't doubt that there's some beginners' luck in there too.
Dad and I recently tried tapping one of the enormous ash trees that grow in our back garden - I carved a funnel type piece of wood, we drilled a hole in the tree and slid the funnel in. Nothing happened! No sap at all! It was supposed to be about the right time of year for tapping - when the sap's rising and the leaves haven't yet come out - but it hasn't worked at all! I suppose ash might have been a bit of an odd choice of tree - birch or a maple would probably have been better - but ash is edible, if bitter, and the trees are the perfect size and strength to withstand a bit of tapping. Oh well, it'll be back to the drawing board next spring! (Though I do plan to make some ash key pickle this year, so the trees won't be completely redundant for the rest of the year!).
Peak oil is an issue that interests me, i.e. how, in the future, am I going to be able to take foreign holidays in an eco-friendly way and totally without oil?! One oil-derived product that I use pretty frequently is acrylic paint, and recently I've been wondering what I'm going to do when there is no acrylic paint left. So today I have been trying out natural paints!
They're really easy to make and as you can see from the photos, make pretty nice colours! I found a page about it here :(http://www.bl.uk/learning/artimages/sacredbook/object/paint/makingpaint.html) which mentions using Gum Arabic - as I don't have any of that however I tried using normal cooking oil. It worked a treat! I just mixed some tiny amounts of turmeric, chilli powder and ash into the oil and this is how they turned out!
The chilli powder paint in particular had little grains all over it, but after leaving it to dry for a bit I was able to just brush these off. The oil did soak through the page a bit, but not nearly as much as I'd thought it would, and dries off in not too long a time. You can also use other pigments such as charcoal, ground up brick, and talcum powder to make other colours. As I do more of this I'll be experimenting with different pigments, mixing colours, using different oils and what effects water, salt and vinegar have, etc. 
I have sown a first succession of beetroot today, directly in the ground, under cover of our polytunnel. The next things to plant, in April, will be sunflowers, beans, sweetcorn, squashes, cucumbers, courgettes, loofas...the autumn-ripening summer things will be going in next! The stuff I've started off already is looking pretty good, though I'm slightly concerned that the celery hasn't germinated yet!
I'm planning to plant a Three Sisters bed this year, in the front garden, as Carol Klein did on her series Grow Your Own Veg a while back. This system was used, apparently, by the Iriquois, and sees corn, beans and squashes growing together in a symbiotic relationship: the corn supports the beans, the beans put nitrogen in the soil, and the squashes block out all the weeds.
My other big project this year is to turn a little corner of garden into a miniature forest garden! It's south-west facing, sunny, and VERY poor soil - in fact it's probably more builder's rubble than soil! We already have a crab apple tree, violets, ox-eye daisies and a lavender bush there, which we don't want to get rid of, but around these I will be planting perennial and self-seeding edible and medicinal plants, on several layers. There isn't very much room, so I'll be omitting the shrub layer for one thing, and choosing plants that are easy to grow but not too vigorous. I'll grow a climbing fruit bush/cane/creeper up the wall, and then I plan to grow beans up the trunk of the crab apple tree - the tree will provide them all the support for two or three plants, but as the beans are annuals they won't be there long enough to strangle the tree.
The first thing I need to work on is improving the soil a bit, without digging up the things we want to keep. This calls for a small amount of digging, and a lot of mulching. Eventually I want to operate a no-dig policy in the garden anyway, so this could be the perfect little corner to experiment on: just how much can I improve the appalling soil with minimal digging?
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