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Text of the page (random words):
to cold water in a trug and popped the leaves in to soak for a few hours this keeps them fresh until we are ready to use them and the salt draws out some of the bitterness then the cook of our household not me i m the gardener boiled them for a few minutes until they were tender and wilted he then sautéed them in butter which also adds some sweetness to counteract the residual bitterness i think they could also be dressed with olive oil and lemon and we may try this next time they have a slight bitter flavour which very quickly fades away as mineral accumulator chicory is full of nutrients and therefore a valuable winter green when you are running out of other crops as i am now having harvested something green practically every day for the whole year but the best thing about all this was that deadheading became dinner waste not want not posted in permaculture tagged forest gardening grow your own wild chicory 3 replies leaves aplenty posted on november 21 2020 by carole 1 last chance to collect leaves for next year s leaf mould this is the new leaf mould bin on the plot made from some wire grids that were wombled and passed onto me by the previous boatman on the adjacent canal side mooring leaf mould bin the garlic leaves are well on their way up now and the sea beet is finally growing leafy it clearly appreciates the deeper soil that it gets here compared with the shallow bed it was in at home in the garden garlic and sea beet the salad leaves are growing well underneath their simple protection of a fleecy blanket held down with stones there is also chickweed growing in the gaps between the planks which i love because it adds visual interest and it is also edible horticultural fleece and chickweed growing in edges posted in veg growing tagged grow your own leaf mould sea beet 1 reply trust and the forest gardener gardens of delight posted on november 17 2020 by carole reply to trust is to feel confident and able to depend on someone or something my definition and control is a clear marker of the loss of trust forest gardening hinges on the forest gardener learning to trust and giving up control the forest garden needs to have the forest gardener s trust to give some idea trust and the forest gardener gardens of delight this post from anni explains a principle of forest gardening that i am patiently trying to cultivate trust don t panic but watch wait observe and learn posted in permaculture tagged forest gardening leave a reply first harvest from the plot posted on november 8 2020 by carole reply yesterday i picked the first leafy harvest for our dinner the lettuce seedlings which were given to me by the neighbouring narrowboat resident when he left the mooring had grown enough to take a few leaves for eating they are crisp and firm and likely to overwinter well i think i also harvested several leaves of the wonderful fast growing giant red mustard those are the red veined leaves that you can see in the picture they are also winter hardy it is good to come full circle from building the plot to taking the first harvest salad leaves posted in veg growing tagged allotment grow your own leave a reply mindfulness on the plot posted on november 1 2020 by carole 2 at its heart forest gardening is about creating an edible productive ecosystem which encourages wildlife this principle requires a change of mindset from traditional gardening as anni kelsey puts it in the garden of equal delights a forest garden is a different type of garden and it requires a different type of gardener she describes how it requires patient watching and waiting to learn about the garden as an ecosystem to see who and what arrives there and to notice what parts each plant or creature are playing i am learning to pay attention developing a mindful awareness of the space and a willingness to learn from it rather than quickly moving to control it grass and chickweed with kale seedlings this week i ve been sitting beside the boxes patiently weeding out grass as jake says on his forest gardening course grass will take over everything if you let it the soil that we filled the boxes with clearly had a lot of grass seed in it while the plot is in its infancy i need to intervene and remove the grass to protect the edible plants while they get established once they are big enough i can protect bare soil with mulch but for now i m sitting there pulling out tiny grass seedlings it is a pleasant task with the robin twittering at me a fellow plot holder passed by and said that it looked like i was practising mindfulness and indeed he had a point it is a quiet absorbing mindful activity which is strangely soothing weeded the badgers are still visiting regularly evidenced by the digging that is visible on the paths i ve been thinking of these creatures wondering if they will dig in the raised beds apprehensive of how destructive they might be mindfulness as i understand it is about paying attention noticing things without judging them and learning to accept things just as they are for now noticing my thoughts i realise i m fighting the badgers yet i want to welcome and accept them just as they are in the rainy days that have followed my bout of weeding my thoughts have been morphing my plans have been changing i have come to a decision which is simply not to grow things that badgers like to eat since i made that decision i ve realised that it frees me up to grow more of the things that we like to eat the leafy greens that i never seem to have enough of it might be boring to grow spinach and its perennial substitutes but we eat a lot of it and as far as i know badgers don t go wild for spinach they probably won t raid the boxes simply for worms unless they are very hungry the boxes will take energy to climb or jump this would be worth their while if they can smell sweet roots but not if it s just more boring old leaves by growing leafy vegetables at the plot i can free up space in my home garden to grow some roots this would increase diversity in my garden the plans have now fallen nicely into place and i am no longer badgered by doubts for more information see forest garden wales posted in permaculture tagged allotment badgers forest gardening 2 replies sowing the seeds posted on october 14 2020 by carole 1 this week i ve been making my final sowings of the year i ve sown two rows of broad beans in each of these two beds below the furthest bed will be for harvesting and i will sow more rows in the spring for successional crops the nearer bed will probably be cut down before harvest as a green manure i didn t have field beans which are traditionally used for cover crops but i do have plenty broad beans i can get a small harvest from the plants before i chop them down by nipping off the growing shoots and stir frying them the cloches were inherited from the adjacent canal boat mooring and are shop fittings rescued from a skip by the boat owner they make a handy cloche nursery to protect the bean seeds until they have emerged otherwise they may be dug up and eaten as unlike my garden the plot is not visited every day by humans this makes it easy pickings for wildlife beds with cloches new planting tub you can also see in this photo a large tub planter which i ve moved from my garden to the end of the plot it should be deep enough to grow one oca and some sweet peas and i can still get around the sides to access the back of the beds in the foreground one of the sea beet plants is looking encouragingly leafy so i have some hope that the plants may produce more leaves from these deep beds i have also sown some bulbils of babington s leek to keep the skirret wild carrot company when they arrive so for now everything is sown and planted the next job is to painstakingly weed out the hundreds of little grass seedlings i ve been hoeing but of course they just root back into the soil but to protect the plants that i want i must remove them as grass is a hungry and invasive crop i want to grow vegetables not graze sheep wish me plenty of patience posted in veg growing tagged allotment forest gardening vegetable gardening 1 reply protecting the plot or not posted on october 6 2020 by carole 2 as you ll know if you ve been reading this blog i ve been following forest garden wales course on designing a backyard forest garden the latest section that i ve been working through looks at protection for example from wind cold and predators jake who takes an ecosystems view points out that this includes protecting the wildlife that are interdependent with the garden a simple log pile and a bee house are now on my wish list our plot is already well sheltered from wind by natural hedgerows and trees during a recent cold snap i protected the beds using the simple expedient of draping horticultural fleece loosely over the top i m delighted that underneath this blanket seedlings have germinated and are now standing proudly in their rows seedlings various mustard and cress thinking about protection from predators i had already spotted a squirrel digging in someone else s raised beds and i took the precaution of protecting the young pignut plant with a couple of pieces of firm mesh not netting as wildlife get tangled up in it pignut protected by wire mesh then last week when we went to visit the plot we saw this somebody has been digging pretty substantial digging detail of holes made by something digging what immediately sprang to mind was badgers warning sign if it is indeed badgers who did the digging do they like root crops of course they do says google i did a bit more research and read about chain link fences sunk several feet into the ground before i remembered that there is no point getting into a fight i love wildlife and if we have badgers then that is a privilege and the plot needs to be designed with them in mind as anni kelsey says in her beautiful book the garden of equal delights it is time that we learned to welcome the wild into our gardens if we give up persecuting fighting and controlling them they become welcome participants in our forest garden system playing useful roles that we might not immediately recognise so instead of fighting them i m going to learn as much as i can about them an immediate piece of useful advice came from an allotment forum where one grower suggested planting onions with root crops to mask the smell so a very simple change that i can make to my plans is to grow the onion crops around the edges and put the roots in the centre i ll give this a go and if we end up with badgers rootling through our boxes then i ll just grow greens on the plot and roots in the garden either way the badgers are welcome they are doing a pretty good job of digging up the bindweed and couch grass roots for a start this may help me to establish more diverse vegetation in my meadow paths so on the whole i m rooting for them posted in permaculture tagged badgers forest gardening wildlife gardening 2 replies plants for the plot posted on september 28 2020 by carole 2 as soon as i knew i may be having an allotment plot i started to dream about what i would grow there initially prompted by fears of food shortages during the covid19 lockdown i planned to grow potatoes and onions i looked up growing instructions and spacing requirements and found that with six one metre raised beds i couldn t grow many of them maybe enough for a week s worth of meals so i started to think differently and instead decided to use the plot to continue my experimentation with growing perennial food crops which are also good for wildlife jake s forest gardening course and the allotment both entered my life in the same week which was a clear shove in that direction jake sums up the forest garden design philosophy as growing edible crops with nature which is certainly singing my song cricket with that in mind here is my wish list of plants a key question that i ve considered in selecting these is what does the plot give me that my garden doesn t another is what is their role in the local ecosystem broad beans because i like them and don t have room for them in my garden they are good for the soil as they fix nitrogen in their roots and the tops will add biomass when they have finished cropping the flowers are good for nectar and smell good too remember those sewerage works i ve chosen the sutton dwarf variety as it is smaller and more suitable for the boxes oca this is something of an experiment given that it isn t frost hardy i don t yet know how sheltered the plot will be in winter i want to try it because it provides a blight free carbohydrate it is something new to eat and can t be bought in the shops it also provides ground cover it is my alternative to growing potatoes it will need protection from frost skirret or wild carrot this will provide flowers for insects and carbohydrate from the sugary root it is a native wild plant it will benefit from the deep beds of loose friable soil and from the aspect in full sun bunching onion a companion for the skirret i plan to grow it as a perennial harvesting only the tops it will provide us with a spring onion replacement scorzonera another root to try and definitely an experiment blackcurrant strawberries calendula blackcurrant i want to see if this will grow better in a deep bed in full sun i have one in my garden which doesn t thrive but it is in shallow soil and part shade i love big juicy blackcurrants insects seem to like the flowers too strawberries to provide ground cover for the blackcurrant and another plant that doesn t do well in my garden pignut welsh onion sea beet and garlic just planted pignut a native wildplant which may provide tubers for us if i can find them and flowers for insects you can also eat the foliage and it provides ground cover welsh onion flowers are good for insects companion for pignut there wasn t room for them in my garden where i have multiple clumps and i want to try harvesting the bulbs sea beet this doesn t grow leafy in my garden so i d like to see if it grows better in the plot it grows tall and will cast shade so i ve put it at the back of the bed garlic which i will grow for the greens rather than the bulbs another experiment other roots on my list are chervil root hamberg parsley and plain old parsnip these would be grown annually wildflowers horseradish redshank chamomile borage i also have a wish list for companion plants for wildlife to be grown in pots or encouraged into the ground i already have i think polygonum persicaria redshank horse radish chamomile and borage i ll add more chamomile and borage to encourage them to proliferate as if they need encouragement other plants to grow include calendula nasturtium which can tumble down the sides of the boxes sweet peas which can grow up them wild thyme which can scramble around their feet and foxglove that concludes my wish list this may need some refinement given the evidence that i ve seen recently of a wild visitor to the plot who may uproot my plans al...