Rural Life

Nearly Broad Bean time!

Late April and the broad beans are in full flower.  In fact they are even starting to set, so provided the baby beans don't get too badly attacked by a cat pretending to be a Raptor from Jurassic Park, it shouldn't be too long before some are ready to eat.

Conditions are ideal currently for swelling the pods - not too hot and nice and damp (brilliant for growing lawns but other things are suffering).  While the cats are doing their best to keep bees away from the beans, as they are only outdoors for a couple of hours a day, it is not too much of a problem.

The potential problem with broad beans, and also why we sow so early, are black fly.  We don't spray - partly due to vague organic principles, but mainly due to feeding the chickens with any garden scraps that are doing the rounds, particularly if there is a chance of a bit of extra protein.  Instead, once the beans start to set, we pinch out the growing tips of the plants.  It is recommended to do this after the fourth group of flowers, we do it where it feels right.  The chickens get the growing tips and regard them as a treat, and as there are no new succulent growing tips, the ants that farm the black fly aren't that interested.  Well, it works for us anyway!

Broad bean recipes to follow once we start harvesting!

See these entries to compare the growth - November and February.

Update on tree planting

Earlier in the spring, we tried to offset our carbon footprint by planting a tree.

Actually that is overly pretentious - we were in a garden centre with a bit of spare cash and saw a medlar tree for sale and I had to have it.  That is much more the truth!!

Anyway, in a previous post I showed the large leaf buds on the medlar tree - it has been so cold since then that they have only opened slowly and we are still waiting to see if we will get any blossom this year, however in the photo below you can see the tantalisingly slow progress of our new tree. 

Hopefully the roots are spreading out nicely underground, as it is wet as well as cold here, and the root system will be more important for the future health and development of the tree than any pretty leaves or flowers that I can see!

Tree planting

Back in February we bought and planted another tree.  To keep the aim of a productive garden going, it is a fruit tree.  Because the theory is that we spend most of the summer in the garden, we have also stuck with the philosophy that the tree should be attractive, as we will have to look at it a lot.

To that end, we have bought and planted a Neflier (french) or Medlar Tree.  Currently it is only about 3 foot high and without branches - technically called a whip.  It is planted between two chestnut stakes, commensurate with its size, and is in a smalled boxed bed in the lawn in line with the young quince we planted 3 years ago to celebrate our arrival as permanent residents here.

We are assured that it has handsome leaves and lovely large blossom, while the fruits themselves are brown.  It should provide an attractive companion to the quince.

We do have wild medlars growing in the One Acre Wood, and last year were able to taste this rather odd fruit as it softened.  However the fruits on the wild version are so small that it makes it difficult to share them with friends or use them in recipes.

The photo shows the leaf buds on the young tree - I will update with photos of the developing tree as it grows.

Broad Bean progress

Last year I showed a photo of a rather nice but empty raised bed that allegedly had broad beans sown in it.  Today I update the world on the progress of my broad beans!

These were sown in October last year, in a raised bed that had played host to our failed tomato crop, plus the rather better sweet peppers and hugely successful aubergines.  I added a bit of compost, but the thinking behind sowing the beans in this bed was that their roots would put back some much needed nitrogen into the soil.  The seed was second generation saved Aquadulce Claudia - ideal for over-wintering.

Most of the beans were up by early December, but we lost a couple of plants during the very cold snaps we had in December and January (overnight temperatures of about -10 degrees).  However as I sowed 2 beans per station, it seems the gaps have been filled and the double rows look very full and healthy, though no sign of flowers yet.  I mention that, as I was checking my diary for this time last year, and this month has not been as exceptional as I thought.  Last year we had temperatures up around 16 degrees in February and the apricot is out at about the same time, so the bean flowers are a bit later than last year.

The beans are still covered to protect them from the dangers of cat bottoms, but another spurt of growth and they will have to come off.  Anyway, this is what my October sown broad beans look like now!

The Cold Greenhouse

It is a funny time between Christmas and New Year, when you start thinking about the detox and diet, but don't do anything about it, as you still have one more lot of festivities to get through.

One of the nicest things is to go through the seed catalogues and plan the planting for the new season and my Jardiniers de France seed catalogue turned up yesterday to draw me to my armchair.

The unheated greenhouse is providing a refuge for mice (not seen but suspected) and the plants that need a bit of shelter from the cold or the rain or both.  The double geraniums that grace the window sills in the summer are in there, along with the aloe vera, the prickly pear scrumped from a derelict garden at Collias, the distinctly ropey Brugmantia and the agave - not to mention the feral pumpkin.  I haven't dared go up the garden and open the greenhouse for a few days however as I am not sure everything will have survived the glacial temperatures we had up until Christmas.

Perhaps another slice of Christmas cake and another look at that seed catalogue instead!!

Mistletoe time

In the UK, a small sprig of mistletoe, ideally with a few berries on it, is hung over doorways to encourage people to kiss - or so it seems to me.  The Tenbury Wells mistletoe fair used to be the main market for wholesalers to flood the market with this parasitic plant.  Much has been made in the past few years of how little home grown mistletoe there is and how this is due to the dearth of mistle thrushes and the clearance of old orchards.

However it is thought awful to use french mistletoe, as that lacks berries.

Hmmm.  We have 3 clumps of mistletoe in our wood (it doesn't need to grow in orchards).  The one high in the Rowan tree is covered with berries but is a good 35 foot above the ground in a very spindly tree.  The other two clumps are on hazel coppice and therefore close to the ground, but not old enough yet to produce berries (I gather 5 years of growth is required).  The better one is shown here.

The poplar plantations that you see in the area are often covered with huge balls of mistletoe.  In part this is a sign of poor management of the plantation as the mistletoe "roots" damage the wood.  We were commenting to a friend about all the mistletoe around but that it was so high in the trees, and she said that the way to get a good big ball of mistletoe, was to get a hunter, early in the hunting day, to shoot a ball out of the tree for you!

A seasonal thought that!

Next year's broad beans

I really don't like black fly, so I tend to sow my broad beans in the autumn, put up with a few losses to bad weather, and then I am generally picking my first broad beans in May or (in a bad year) early June.  This year we had lots of lovely warm salads of baby broad beans, asparagus and wilted spinach - all from the potager - and the memory of these delicious lunches goaded me into getting to work.

I had designated the raised bed that had the (failed) tomatoes, aubergines and peppers as the right bed in the rotation for the broad beans.  The bed had lost a bit of soil and some fertility to the last crops, so I topped it up with a broken bag of terreau universel (grow bag to British readers) and about half the contents of the dust bin full of sieved home made compost.  I raked it all in and firmed the bed down a bit.

I then made two six inch wide trenches the length of the bed and within that dibbed a double row of holes for beans.  The seed I used was home grown saved seed, but the original strain is Aquadulce Claudia from Marshalls.  These are good robust plants, ideal for overwintering, and producing long pods with up to 9 beans (well 9 was the record this year, but it was an exceptionally good year).  I dibbed 76 holes and sowed 2 beans per hole, then watered, then covered the trenches with soil/compost mix.  The seeds are quite deep but that should protect them from frost and mice.

Finally I covered the bed with wire cloche frames - they don't do anything to protect from the weather, certainly not while the seeds are germinating.  Their more important function is to keep the bed free of cat bottoms, as the raised bed looks like the biggest and most luxurious cat litter tray invented!!  The frames will come off when the bean plants are about 8 inches high and are strong enough to resist cat bottoms and free ranging chickens. 

However by the time we restock with chickens and have them well enough trained to be free range, I should actually be picking beans!  Now that is a lovely thought!

Autumn jobs

Today was quiet for office work, so we took advantage of the clear blue skies and a need for exercise to undertake a few of those autumn jobs we haven't got round to up until now.

The saddest was that today was D-day for the two remaining 'beige chickens'.  They have done awfully well and saw off a few more slugs and the last of the bolted lettuces, but we hadn't had an egg from Gutbucket in weeks and Madeye was not coming out of her moult.  Both were having the odd problem getting into the wooden compost box to get their daily worm fix, so it was time to go.  The Humane Dispatch Society's piece of kit lived up to its promise, and they had a quick, clean end.

The most remarkable job for the day?  Dead-heading the roses outside the house by the road, as there are still new buds coming through.  Both the yellow and the red rose have buds to come, have blooms at their peak and were smelling beautifully fragrant.  The rose experts at Doue la Fontaine told us that the sun would bring out the perfume and they were right.

We also put a compost mulch on one of the borders which seems to have soil that is practically dead (though up until this year it had been very productive).  We have added a pound or so of matured wood ash (in its raw state, it is far too caustic and needs to weather for about 3 months before application) and two wheel barrows of prime compost from the bin, well turned by the chickens and full of worms.  That should improve things for next year.

I dug through a bed that had root crops in, but seemed to be full of weeds, to find a surprise pound of rather nice looking carrots - guess what we are having for supper!!

Finally John marked off the worst section of "lawn" and applied weed and feed, so that we will be in a position to reseed in February.  As John will be selling himself as a lawn expert, we really could do without a patch of lawn that is white with plantain flowers!

It has been a useful afternoon's work.

Autumn Strikes!

No - not the unlimited number of public sector strikes across Europe, but weather and seasons!  Autumn is here and the first frosts have struck.  The wayward Sucrette pumpkin plant that decided in the middle of September that it actually quite liked the soil it was planted in and started to try to colonise the whole of the border is now shrivelled and black.  The big Vif d'Etampes feral pumpkin plant has had all its extremities nipped back, though the old leaves around the vast fruit are still OK.  We hope there is enough left in the root stock to ripen this mammoth of the potager.

Tonight I will have to pick the last (5) aubergines, the last (6) green peppers and the final courgette for a final blow out of roasted home grown vegetables before the parsnips come right in another month or so.

We fear this period of frost will have also put paid to the wild mushrooms - not that we have found many this year.  Talking to a friend who's husband can normally bring back a couple of kilos when he goes out foraging, she said he had been out for a whole morning and came back with one slightly chewed bolet.

This year I think we will have to be content with the nut harvest!