a dense, heavy beauty ..

8 September 2024

This has been a good year for our brassicas.

Purple sprouting brocolli, calabrese and kale have

cropped well, thriving on early-season rains and nourishing no-dig compost mulches. Stored rainwater is only ever used sparingly. Our plants become accustomed to their sandy conditions and are not cosseted.

It is now the time for our red cabbage. We lifted an impressive 2.3kg head (a dense, heavy beauty) and took the discarded outer leaves around to the neighbours hens.

Beetroot is cropping well too which presents the opportunity to combine shredded beet with our red cabbage to produce a deep, rich red sauerkraut.

Spud me like..

Lifting potatoes is one of the principal pleasures of vegetable gardening.

With both hands, pull the mature stems with a twist … and like buried treasure, golden or red tubers spill onto the soil surface. 

Together, you and your tatties have had a journey.

You’ve queued at the Nottingham Organic Gardener's potato day and chosen your varieties…

You’ve mulched your garden vegetable beds with lovingly-made organic compost…

You’ve planted the potatoes with a trowel just below the soil surface - then, as the ground warms, watched the leaves emerge through the composted ground..

When the potato leaves (‘the haulm’) have lengthened, more compost is heaped (‘mulched’) around the stems to keep light away from the developing tubers.

The mulch is part of gardening magic as it..

• conserves water in the soil, 
• encourages worm activity which in turn adds fertility to the soil
• stimulates other beneficial soil invertebrates
• and promotes plant health by fostering soil bacteria and fungi. These connect to the potato roots providing a much-wider range of nutrients to the growing plant.

We don’t water. Even though we store around 7,000 litres of rainwater in tanks and water butts, we leave nature to take its course with our potatoes.

The spring and early summer was wet this year and so we had good growing conditions.

Here’s the results:

Charlotte (6 tubers planted) 8kg

Marfona  (6tubers planted) 13kg

Kestrel  (6 saved tubers planted) 5.6kg

Picasso  (9 tubers planted) 7.85kg

Alouette  (9 tubers planted) 8.35kg

Acoustic (6 tubers planted) 7.6kg

Total 50.4kg

Sarpo Una  (6 saved tubers planted) not yet lifted

We’ll bag or box the potatoes and they will store until spring.

Here’s the thing.

Gardening is great as you’re ’in nature’ with all the benefits that come from this. You’re getting your hands dirty which is great for the all-important gut micro-biome. You’re exercising!

Growing organically in undisturbed soil:

• reduces our exposure to harmful chemicals and plastic pollutants.
• confers health benefits as studies now indicate that food produced this way is more nutritious and contains more flavonoids, polyphenols and antioxidants.

It is also less-impacting as, for instance, every 1 tonne of commercially-grown potatoes will have required a staggering 35 tonnes of water. 

A footnote on reducing our ingestion of plastics to which growing our own organic, no-dig food can make a contribution to our long-term health..

Twenty-four brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight.

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that microplastics are accumulating in critical human organs, including the brain, leading researchers to call for more urgent actions to rein in plastic pollution.

Studies have detected tiny shards and specks of plastics in human lungs, placentas, reproductive organs, livers, kidneys, knee and elbow joints, blood vessels and bone marrow.

Could this be perfect ...?

New hazel path

A friend puzzled me. She said 'Have a happy birthday tomorrow. Don't'. 'Don't'? I wondered. Not the most charitable birthday greeting I'd hoped to receive.
Then the second half of the message came through.... 'work too hard'. Don't work too hard.

And I guess, for lots of people that message could have been just right. It's your day. Relax if you can. Put your feet up.

But I've never been a feet up kinda guy: my idea of perfect is doing something purposeful.

We've been doing that for several days now. As a compulsive list maker, my lists runneth over at the moment:

Begin planting north facing earth mounds
Barrow chippings along new hazel path in Woodland Garden
Begin 'Lasagne gardening' to create Fragrant Garden
Edge, weed and mulch apple and pear corden beds
Begin weeding and rationalising Vegetable Garden beds
Wash and then barrow gravel around patio edging

All of this, and plenty of family and friends coming over.


And while we were working today, I saw 100 golden plovers wheeling and circling above the fields.

Could this be perfect?

hedging roses

One of the special challenges in creating six acres of beautiful, natural gardens at Cordwood is the lack of a landscaping budget.
So, we are busy raising plants from seed and dividing the many gifts of plants we're given to increase their number.
But we do buy plants and have special jewels we've bought as we've travelled the country visiting gardens and nurseries.
And then there are surprises...
The German supermarket chain Aldi has had bundles of hedging plants for sale this week - 10 plants for £3.99 - and I love Aldi bargains.
First I delved in and bought beech (fagus sylvatica) hedging - four bundles for less than £16.00.
Then I spotted individual rosa rugosa (the Ramanus Rose) and some at 99p.
And by then I was caught and stuffed dog rose (rosa canina), burnet rose (rosa pimpinellifolia), rosa glauca rubrifolia and rosa virginiana into my trolley: I'd only gone in for milk!! Each of the roses is blessed with the simple flowers that insects love.

The beech hedge may form a screen through which we will walk into the Cedar Walk. The roses, augmented with holly, may screen the vegetable garden beneath the avenue of birch.

 All have been bought too soon and so have been 'healed in', in a corner of the orchard until we are ready to put them into their permanent position.

Here, our team of gardening assistants check the quality of our work....

vegetable garden ... tick!

It was April 2011 when we began to clear the former orchard of the impenetrable tangle of brambles, nettles, blackthorn, cherry, apple, oak and sycamore that had built up during twenty years of neglect.

Our aim was to create a healthy orchard and a vegetable garden separated by a hedge of cordon apples and pears.

With its pruned trees, cut grass and wandering chickens, the orchard now looks the part.

On the other side of the apple and pear cordons, the slow and grinding slog of clearing the mass of knotted and obstinate roots seems to have taken forever. But last week we dug over our last bed and added the compost and leafmould to complete our vegetable garden. Okay, the work in a garden never ends and I want to define paths with wooden edging and use wood chippings to make the paths easy to use. And there's more work removing the privet hedge and then preparing the surrendered ground to receive plants.

And, of course, followers of this blog will know that for the foreseeable future the 'vegetable garden' will be home to the massed ranks of herbaceous perennials we are bringing on to use in the gardens around our bungalows. It will be some time before the vegetable garden is living up to its name.

But let's focus on the positive now. The vegetable garden is finished!!!!

vegetable garden

The vegetable garden has continued to grow and we have around two thirds set out as raised beds.

Now we have removed the worst roots with the digger, each bed has to be forked over to remove smaller roots and some of the stones. Then three barrows of manure and two barrows of leafmould are forked in before we plant the bed, finally adding calcified seaweed to encourage mycorrhyzal growth which will aid our plants roots.

This area will become a vegetable garden as herbaceous perennials and shrubs are moved from this area into the new gardens around the houses. It is more of a garden nursery at the moment, bringing plants on in readiness for the autumn of when we hope to begin work in the new gardens.

We have, however, planted half a bed of leeks (variety Musselburgh) in the vegetable garden. Leeks are planted now and will be harvested in the autumn and through to April. We would traditionally plant our leeks on our allotment, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the allotment, the six acres of Cordwood and the gardens of our current home and that of our daughter. Something is going to have to give .. and that, sadly, looks like being the allotment...

Here's a photo of leeks studded with pot marigolds (calendula) taken on the allotment three years ago. I'm hoping that our Cordwood leeks will look as happy.

more vegetable garden progress

It is taking so long to convert this old section of the orchard into vegetable garden beds - due to the interlacing tangle of tree roots beneath the meagre soil.



But, 'hey presto', a magic moment came at the weekend when Roger fired up the digger and ripped through those roots as though they were strands of cotton. Work that would have taken, quite literally months, was completed in hours. Oh, the wonders of mechanisation!!

And while Roger pulled levers, we scrambled around the big digger 'bucket' like children of the third world at a landfill site, dragging roots from the soil and barrowing them away. I'd guess we took about three cubic metres of roots out of the soil by the time we had finished the days work.

Then, joy of joys, we arrived to begin building the new raised beds and found that while we had been relaxing at Gardeners' World Live, Judith and Roger had made the first two beds of the next run.

We added three wheelbarrows of well-rotted muck and two of leafmould to each bed before planting deschampsia sespitosa (200!), verbascum phoenicium, echinops retro, panicum vergatum as well as hosta's bagged from Gardeners' World Live and skimmia japonica we had taken as cuttings at 'the back end' (the fall).

A dusting of calcified seaweed and then a good watering and the beds look as though they've always been there....

vegetable garden progress

We have been working to establish raised beds in the vegetable garden for several months.

We began at the Lime trees and worked towards the close boarded fence that marks the boundary with our neighbours.

Each sandy bed has received two wheelbarrows of well-rotted manure and two wheelbarrows of leafmould. We have also dressed each bed with calcified seaweed as plants are put in.
Today, we reached the final bed in the first section of beds and planted with asparagus seedlings and persicaria propagated by root division.

Although we call this area the 'Vegetable Garden', we will use it for bringing on herbaceous perennials and ornamental grasses until 2013.

When our bungalow foundation slabs are cast, I hope to use the spent wooden edging as edging for the paths and beds.

privet hedge - gone

To bring power, water and phone lines onto the site, a metre deep trench has been dug that followed the route of the privet hedge which separated the woodland garden and the orchard and vegetable garden.

Privet is an unlovely thing, so we were pleased to see it removed.

And while the privet was being ripped out, the big digger took a quick sidestep and tore out the two cherry stumps left in the vegetable garden that remained from our earlier ground clearance. These stumps concealed a Medusa's head of dense and thick roots that would have been impossible to remove without a machine. And removing these stumps and their roots will now make the creation of our vegetable garden raised beds much more 'do-able'.

But the empty space left by the removal of the privet hedge created a headache. Thankfully, Steve had got the digger driver (also Steve) to use his big bucket and scoop out clumps of birch in the area we hope to use as our flower meadow.

So, on Wednesday, 'the boys' planted nearly fifty seedling silver birches in an informal row. Thanks to Gary, Jim and dad we got the job done in record time.

In the years ahead we hope to move these birch trees to new homes at cordwood and replace them with shrubs and small trees that will form a permanent boundary between these key sections of the garden.



 

a beautiful weekend

A beautiful, dry weekend.

The hen house Roger is building is shaping up nicely. We only have two little bantams - I just hope they don't suffer from agoraphobia in the interior that rivals the O2: there's enough room in here for a mega-flock! Hmmm - there's an idea!!

Mum, dad and Judith built this informal cordwood wall to further separate the vegetable garden and the orchard. The gaps between the logs are great places for wrens to explore.

The orchard is a fine place for a picnic - as you can see. 

'keeping on top'.....

Wonderful wet rain has continued from April through into May. You can almost hear our sandland guzzling it up.

The fourteen month drought has truly ended and despite the cold, the plants are responding.

So as well as continuing to develop the gardens (whilst elsewhere on site big diggers excavate our foundations), just 'keeping on top' is a challenge.

A great day on Wednesday...

As well as pricking out yet more seedlings, Jill cleared all of our beds by hand with our Punjabi 'dachti' tool and then began edging the border onto the orchard.

I have been clearing nettles from the vegetable garden area but grabbed 35 minutes up in Picnic Wood and scythed 200 square metres before the rain became so steady that I had to give in...

 And throughout, the music of the Mistle Thrush echoing around the woodland: short, evocative, liquid phrases delivered from the tree tops even in the heavy rain.

turning sand into fertile soil (2)

It has poured this month, ending the excessively dry spell we've endured since February 2011.

....... which is ideal for establishing plants and our new raised beds, although the cold temperatures have inhibited new growth and the germination of some seeds.

We've removed the network of roots, incorporated manure and leafmould and planted our growing collection of little plants. All of this will help the new soil to establish.


A healthy soil needs a balance of nutrients and a community of invertebrates. We now understand that mycorhizal fungi too are necessary in the soil to enable plant roots to function properly. So, to further stimulate this fungi I have dusted the beds with calcified seaweed (left). Calcified seaweed is considered to be a 'soil conditioner' and is reputed to stimulate mycorhizal activity.

The final step will be to add a thick mulch of organic matter ... but that must wait until the baby robins have fledged. This torrential rain may cause many early nests to fail.

Perhaps, one day, the soil at Cordwood will be as hearty as it is at our allotment (pictured right), about a mile down the hill.

another of those 'before and after' posts you've learned to love!

When we took over the Cordwood site, there was a buried orchard that had not been seen for around twenty years.

The apple and cherry trees had been engulfed and we began the long road of restoration in April of 2011.

It took us until November 2011 to clear away the majority of nettles, brambles, suckered blackthorn & cherry and vigorous seedling oaks.

We decided to split this section of the site into two - an apple orchard and a vegetable garden separated by lines of cordoned apples.

It had been our hope to bring pigs onto this part of the site to clear out the determined network of tangled roots, but this never happened. So, it's all been manual labour ..... but here's evidence that the good guys are winning.

Today, Roger got the mower working and cut the grass beneath the apple trees that had established itself since the sunshine had reached the soil. It's coarse and thin and the ground resembled The Somme in parts. But it's looking good!

And Jan, mum and dad and Andrea & Poppy were there too, to see the progress we are slowly making in creating a vegetable garden.

Much, much more work to do, but one of those days when all the months of hard work seem to come together like magic.

vegetable garden

Slow progress creating beds in the vegetable garden, as you may have heard me tell already.

Three beds created so far, the line of the path has been marked out and we hope that we can have created two or three shorter beds by the end of tomorrow. There's nothing like putting pressure on your self!!!

But here's an optimistic note; rooted cuttings have now been planted out:

• purple sage
• green sage
• lavender
• rosemary
• euonymous (various)
• phlomis russeliana
• skimmia japonica
• dianthus

And with rain forecast, there's the chance that our little plants will get some moisture!!

turning sand into fertile soil

Nowhere else at Cordwood is the sandy soil more of a problem than in the Vegetable Garden.

Where we need a fertile, moisture retaining, healthy soil we have thin sand and stones over a tangle of tree roots.

How will we turn sand into fertile soil?

We need to create a soil that has the necessary pH balance, organic matter and invertebrate and mychorrizal life that indicates a healthy soil -this will not happen quickly.

The first task is to break up the roots with mattock, azada and fork: heavy physical work. Gary thought that this archaic practice was due to an ethical aversion to using mechanised gardening tools. Not so. No machine available to me could cope with the thick roots or remove the thinner ones from the soil. It's man and muscle I'm afraid. Gary stayed for half an hour!!

The beds I am working on at the moment are 4 feet by 16 feet. Once the roots have been removed, in goes half a trailer of well-rotted manure plus two barrows of leaf mould per bed.

Although this will become our vegetable garden, during this first phase we are using the beds to bring on perennials, and so have planted the first bed with leucanthemum, geum, geranium and sedum divisions.

We completed the second bed today, and so the next part of our strategy comes into play: green manures. We sowed bed 2 with phacelia. The phacelia will germinate and produce bushy green growth that will help give structure to the soil and prevent the loss of fertility. The bushy growth will be incorporated into the soil, adding organic matter and a further source of fertility. The photo on the right shows a range of green manures growing on our allotment in 2008.

A further phase will see thick mulches of organic matter applied to lock in water.

The hottest March temperatures ever recorded in some parts of the country this week. Too hot for hard work!

vegetable garden border

The cordoned apples that separate the orchard and our nascent vegetable garden give an opportunity for more planting.

So, I'm drinking a lukewarm instant coffee and think that the cordons would support a less vigorous thornless rambler rose; perhaps a viticella clematis too...?

And what about a culinary border backed by the cordons that includes asparagus, rhubarb, chives, herbs ......

I've got the picture in my head until cousin Sue suggests I take my trailer down to her house where she has twenty bags of plants for me that have been liberated by her daughter Lucy from her garden. A chance for tea and delicious cake too.

Plan B..

So, there's dad (83) digging over the soil after I've mattocked and azarda-ed it and then me filling the newly created borders with perennials that include geraniums, day lillies, heucheras, hostas, geums and all manner of other beauties. The soil is impoverished so I spaded in compost and then gave each plant a handful of pelleted chicken manure before soaking with water.

There was such an abundance of lovely plants that I ran out of space and had to put the final bags into the polytunnel to await my next visit: epimediums, hostas and cyclamen ...

Great work and big thanks to Sue and husband Mal.