Sallygardens Smallholding

Onion Ropes

After a few sunny days the onion skins were nice and dry (see previous post) so I began making onion ropes. First rub the loose dry soil from the onions with a soft dry cloth or teatowel, but don't peel them, the dry skins help to keep the onion bulbs fresh. Keep any damaged or bruised onions in a basket for immediate use in the kitchen, don't incorporate these in your ropes because as they begin to rot the mould will spread to the good onions too.  Put on some good music and get roping, enjoy the task, even better get a friend to come along and 'learn the ropes', passing on these skills to others is important (and fun). Here's a great link on how to rope onions to get you started. It's really very easy and you'll soon get a rhythm going.

When you've finished there's nothing more beautiful than a few ropes hanging in your scullery and kitchen, it's such a welcoming sight and every time you reach for an onion over the winter you'll feel very happy with your achievement.

Harvesting Onions

When are the onions ready to harvest? That's something I asked the first year we grew onions a few years ago. All the books are full of information on how to plant and care for the onions, but nowhere could I find details on when to pick them. Lots of expert gardeners forget how little we know as total beginners and so I promised myself I'd write a post on the topic.

The harvesting will depend on the variety you are growing, the soil in your plot, the amount of sun and shading on the plants and of course the weather. What I'm saying is that you can't say they'll be ready to harvest after a specific number of weeks after planting. It's more a case of watching and observing your vegetable garden, which is all part of the fun. There are some years onions will do well, and then others when they'll seem to have hardly grown since putting the sets in the ground.

Once the little bulbs are set in the soil they will throw up tall green hollow stalk like leaves. Weeds need to be kept at bay. The onion plants will become quite lush and there's nothing quite so fulfilling as a bed full of healthy onions reaching up towards the sky. Keep visiting your onions and cast an eye over them every few days. If you see any flowering stalks shoot up from the odd onion harvest and use those ones immediately, they won't grow anymore and they don't store either.  It's always nice to leave one or two, as the flowers are beautiful and the kids are interested in what happens if they're left to grow on.

These onions are drying out under a shelter, they will need turning every day to prevent the green shoots rotting,
or even better, space them out further than this.

After roughly three or four months you'll begin to notice a change in the lush miniature green forest. Some of the leafy stalks will begin to lie down, just a couple at first, but after a day or two most of the crop will be lying down and are ready to harvest. If you are lucky enough to have sunny dry weather leave the crop out in the sunshine a day or two for the leafy tops to shrivel and dry. Otherwise spread them out to indoors or under shelter. If you wish to try your hand at onion ropes leave roughly 10cm of stalk length on each onion for weaving it into a rope. Snip off the short roots. Store in net bags or hang the ropes.

If you'd like lots of information like this in one easy ebooklet take a look at the Grow Your Own Veg which is perfect for beginners. Or if you have time to spare, read through the blog for more free information, try clicking on 'Gardening, Fruit & Veg' under the Categories list.

Anyone for Afternoon Tea?

Russian Comfrey tea is a wonderful free fertiliser for your vegetable or flower garden but not for human consumption! A harvest of leaves can be cut from your comfrey plants at least twice during summer, I get three or four harvests from our plants in the polytunnel. Simply bruise the foliage in a bucket and fill with water, preferably rainwater. Leave the broth to fester for a few weeks, this happens quicker if you keep it inside a polytunnel but you may find the smell repulsive! It soon turns to a black liquer which needs to be diluted 15:1 for use on flowering or fruiting plants. 

The comfrey plant has a very deep tap root which brings up many trace elements and minerals from deep below the soil where these nutrients often lie out of reach for mainstream plants. The leaves can also be thrown on the compost heap to boost its value or chopped and dug into vegetable beds.

I like Russian Comfrey as it does not set seed and so is less invasive, spreading via root cuttings instead.

Appreciating Resilience

One of the words that keeps popping up all through any permaculture book or website you'll dip into is 'resilience'. At first I didn't really appreciate the value of this word, and what it might mean for our own family, but as the economic downturn packs some serious punches the term is making a lot more sense. 'Resilience' isn't just a fashionable permaculture buzzword.

 

In a nutshell, whenever you look at your living space (indoors and out) you should always ask yourself the questions 'how can I utilise this space/item/object for more than one use?','if this breaks how will I continue ... is there an alternative source of water/fuel/food/shelter/cooking/travel etc?'. Whenever we add something to our life, our home or our garden I always ask how I'd cope without it, or what alternatives we could use instead. I walk around our house and garden and I look at how we've set things up. I ask all the same questions ... how would I water this polytunnel if the pump and automatic watering system failed, where would I source water if our water supply was to be cut off. Water is one of the first things to ask ourselves about. We are lucky to have a stream at the side of our property and a lake at the back, plus plenty of roof area to collect rainwater if needed. Another main area is fuel ... how would we heat our home if we couldn't afford oil, or travel to buy coal. Again, luckily we have a woodland plantation which provides us with heating fuel and so we rarely buy fuel these days. Cooking of food? What if electricity is cut off or we can no longer afford gas cylinders? One plan for this summer is to build an earth oven in the garden for such occasions. And as for food, what if the supermarket supply chain fails and there's no food on the shelves ... sourcing local markets or growers, and growing your own suddenly becomes much more than just a fulfilling pleasure.

Apart from being fun it also makes sense to build our resilience. With the global economic downturn I've suddenly felt the welcoming cushioning effect of all these little steps of resilience built into our lives, which up until now, I'd have barely acknowledged their presence. But they are there and we planned it that way, thanks to reading up on permaculture. At the very worst case scenario it boils down to survival, at it's current level it helps keep life on a steady and even keel. There is still food on the table and we know we have many of the resources we need on the doorstep in order to continue living the life we've been enjoying.

Of course we are far from self sufficient, but we've never aimed to be that. It's more about living sustainably, and building resilience into life is one little part of that.

Selecting Seeds for Spring

It's that time of year again when the seed catalogues arrive in the post. It's a great lift for the spirits to leaf through the pages and begin selecting whats to be grown this year. After a few months of pretty much nothing happening in the garden you can start to look forward to the beginning of the cycle all over again. It won't be long now until the seeds are placed in compost trays and their small green tips push up through to the light. The miracle of these tiny seeds growing so vigourously in the spring and summer seasons is always a thrill to watch ... and eat!

Sitting in front of a winter fire and discussing what varieties and types of plants to grow is always a pleasure and something to be savoured. This year we have quite a few seeds left over from last year which have kept well, so we don't actually have to buy a lot of stock.

One thing that's always tempting is to buy too many varieties of each thing, but  I've learnt to concentrate on a few items and try to do them really well, rather than become bogged down with tons of seed packets, which I'd never realistically be able to sow and grow!

The vegetables and polytunnel have always been my 'department' but now that I'm on the traditional Irish music course every morning himself will be learning to take the lead in the garden and I'll be his assistant when I get home. It's a good thing that we both learn the logistics of all the various farm areas.

So what are we sowing this year? A sample includes mange tout, sugar snap peas, dwarf purple, golden and green French beans, spinach, chard, courgette, sweet corn, kale, mixed salad leaves, pak choi, stir fry oriental leaves, onions, garlic, pumpkin, parsnip, carrot, potato, kohl rabi, brussel sprout, brocolli to name a few.

If you are starting out growing for the first time I have an eBooklet that gives advice on how to get started. The main points are to choose hardy and reliable plants so ensure success but also to start small with just a few items and add to that each year.

Sallygardens eBooklet Store

At long last I've managed to create a Paypal store which will make it easier for you to purchase our Sallygardens eBooklets. Instead of having to email me first to request a Paypal invoice you can place a direct order via this store front. Of course you can still use the old way, this alternative just provides another easier option . Look to the right hand side bar to find the store. Come on in and have a look around.

Ripening Tomatoes

The polytunnel has well and truly finished it's summer flush. It's with a little regret that I mark the end of summer and the beginning of autumn by snipping off the remaining tomatoes from the plant. I bring them inside and hang them up in the south facing kitchen window, still on their vine. I think of summer time whenever I glance at them. The family just graze on them, picking them off as they ripen up. Delicious.

One way to encourage the green toms to ripen is to hang bananas amongst them, the blacker the better! A gas emitted by the banana speeds up the ripening process.  Another way to use up and green toms is to make a green tomatoe chutney or, as a recent visitor told me, fry them in butter.

Reaping the Harvest

As autumn takes over many of the vegetables have reached the end of their productive season such as the tomatoes, French climbing and dwarf beans. Other crops are still bearing fruit, the last of the cucumbers are still in the tunnel, some runner beans are waiting to be picked as is a good crop of carrots that will last another few months.  Outdoors the pumpkins are at their best. As winter approaches Kale comes into it's own, the cabbages are being used and the leeks stay in the ground until needed.

The garlic and onions have already been saved are hanging in the kitchen.We haven't got a full years supply of these but as each season passes we add another vegetable bed so eventually there will be enough produce to tide us over for a full year, but one step at a time!

Successful Strawberries

At long last I can report that there has finally been a successful crop at of strawberries at Sallygardens! This is our third season trying  and I had sworn that if we didn't get a decent return we would cut our losses and never try again. In year one we bought some plants and eagerly put them outside in a well prepared bed. Anticipation rose as a huge spray of flowers appeared promising us a big bounty. The fruit all set and we watched them daily as the white strawberries began to swell. One day we saw the first blush of pink and the next day ... they had all been demolished by slugs! Lesson learned.

The following year we bought a beautiful terracotta strawberry pot. We positioned the pot by the back door, off grass, on the footpath which did a great job in deterring the slugs. The fruit got a stage further this time, a beautiful rich red colour, but on closer inspection the strawberries were almost hollowed out by ants. We put a thick coating of vaseline around the base and upper lip of the pot and that stopped the ants in their tracks. However waiting in the wings for their opportunity were the birds who swooped in and wiped out most of the remaining fruit. Smeared in vaseline and surrounded by a cage of chicken wire the once attractive terracotta strawberry pot had become quite an eyesore.

Year three and the polytunnel was our final stab at growing our own strawberries. We planted them into a mulched bed along the southern edge of the tunnel. No slugs, ants, birds or other vermin managed to attack the young crop. Indeed we've had three massive helpings so far with full bowls for all the family. It's been such a mouth watering success that I'm going to devote three times the area to the strawberries next year.

My friend Mary has come up with a great way to grow strawberries out of harms way plus it utilises every inch of potential space to grow food. This method would be ideal in urban settings with restricted space. She has used plastic gutters against the wall of her house. The guttering contains a length of seep hose and each section slopes gently downwards to assist drainage.

Hanging Basket Tomatoes

Last year we grew eight tomato plants in the polytunnel and realised that you just can't ever have enough of them. This year we've made space for eighteen plants on the ground and having got the lust for home grown toms I decided to milk every possible available bit of space... including the air!  I'm experimenting with 'tumbling toms', a variety that's perfect for hanging baskets. There are two baskets in the polytunnel, each with three tumbling tom plants. I also have two hanging baskets beside the back door of the farmhouse and they contain sweet pea (for heady aroma), busy lizzy (because they were cheap at Lidl!), pot marigold (petals for salads), nasturium (again, salad leaves & flowers) and of course each basket also contains one 'tumbling tom'. It'll be interesting to see if the ones in the polytunnel do much better than those outdoors.

Last year we also grew several varieties but this year we only have two on the ground; Ailsa Craig and Gardeners Delight both grown from seed. There's a very good reason why these are the favourites of gardeners world wide and that reason is that the flavour is absolutely superb. So even if you live in an urban environment you can grow tomatoes in hanging baskets. They would be especially well on a south facing wall.