Nearly GAMCOD on the Isle of Skye (2024)

I'm excited to take part, so even though my winter is too warm, I'm looking where I can have a practise garden this year. General background: Skye has a short cool growing season. No real chance of growing tomatoes outside for example, the temperature maximum average is 13 degrees in July (about 55 Fahrenheit). The upside is that I rarely have to worry about watering. We get a drier spell in spring, but the rains (and midges) come back by the middle of June. The soil is shallow, silty and acidic (probably about pH 4.5-5.0), over solid rock. It is pretty compacted from ploughing in the first part of the last century, and sheep grazing in the second part. It has rested whilst I have planted trees in thelast 15 years, but it would take another 50 years for nature to rectify the abuse.

I am preparing some beds in my tree field, which certainly comes under the heading of 'dirt' rather than soil. I'm intending to grow berries there longer term, but having a go at growing some food this year seems like a worthy ambition. I've been reading a bit about syntropic agriculture too, so I may try and combine the two ideas. Since I'm not taking part really I can bend the rules a bit (I'll try and highlight any discrepancies though) The new beds will be mini hugels using trimmings from my coppice trees and spruce branches.

I have a couple of areas that are about the right size.

The Shell Garden.

shell garden under construction

This is a semicircular bed that I am preparing around a newish walnut tree. It's far enough away there won't be any allelepathic effects, and this is an English walnut anyway ,which I gather are less of a problem than black walnuts in that respect.
I've measured and calculated the bed as 200.9 square feet, which seems close enough. The 'cheat' here is that I am borrowing some soil from outside the 4 ft bed to mound up the soil over the branches.
Advantages of this spot is that the soil is already fairly deep. I know it is a pretty good growing spot by the way the trees here have grown pretty well. They were ash trees that have had dieback, thus leaving a space for me to grow other things. The other good thing is that it is a sheltered area. The trees to the left shelter from the prevailing SW winds and it was noticably sheltered during the gales we had today, even before the trees leaf out. A disadvantage is that it is likely to be a bit shady.

The Sunny Strip

sunny strip under construction

This is a long bed adjacent to the main trackway. It is oriented approximately E-W and is fully exposed to the wind and sun. The soil here is much shallower. There is not much space between the trees. I lost a couple of birch here, and I think it was just because they struggled in the shallow soil to compete with the fleecy grass that grows in this area. I calculated the area as about 195 square feet. That includes the area where the soil will be dug from to mound up the bed, so no cheat there! This I think will be a much more challenging area to do well in. It should get the sun (such as it is!)

So at the moment I'm preparing both areas anyway. I will try to measure inputs and outputs on each area separately.

I'm starting to think about what crops I might be planting. Since I hadn't planned these extra spots they will probably be seeds I have left over from my growing experiments over the last couple of years.
There will be Swede (rutabaga)! Those grew amazingly for me last year, and I'm pretty sure will be a good calorific crop (and I have seed!). I have radish seed left over from my polyculture experiments the previous year, and this will be a good use for it. I have plenty of saved carrot grex (yay!). Oh! legumes - saved and surplus fava beans - I've just put my proto-landrace seeds onto soak: a mix of saved from last year, the same starting seeds and a few new ones (including some from the gone to seed UK seed train). I have put some of my saved seed aside for next year, but the rest of the seed I won't need next year can go towards a fava bean crop. The same goes for peas - some saved, and some older peas seed. I also will take the opportunity to have another go at growing scarlet runner beans. I've not really succeeded with them here, it's a bit windy for good pod set. However the shell garden is as close as I get to a sheltered spot, and I have lots of old seed and some new grex from a couple of different places. (Its a long shot, but it might just work!).
I wasn't planning on growing more potato, so I haven't spare seed potatoes, however last week I scrapped off some unsold 'baby potatoes' in my shop as they were starting to sprout. After the weekend in a bag in my kitchen, many of them were too green for me to be happy eating them, so I'm going to plant those - Technically disallowed, since not organically grown as far as I know. I suspect they are new potatoes of some variety, so should crop fairly quickly and avoid blight. I may even be able to sow a later crop of radishes to follow on after these are harvested.......

So I think the shell garden would not qualify as a gamcod area - the shape is just too long and thin. I'll carry on logging about it here though, since it illustrates the principals I could use. I haven't done much more on that area yet - just loosened some of the compacted soil under the removed turf and piled up a bit of the coppice prunings in the strip.

I've got on pretty well with the sunny strip though, and it is almost all fully dug over. Having removed a 4 spade wide strip of turf, I loosened the soil underneath and covered it with a thick layer of spruce and alder branches. This will give the centre of the bed a good amount of drainage, and longer term will rot down and feed the soil. None of the branches are very thick, but I'm still expecting them to last a pretty long time. I think the land here would be peat bog if left to it's own devices long enough, certainly if the trees didn't survive.
The turf either side was then removed too and piled up on the bed. So I've taken 12 spade widths in total up, but left a small trench either side. It works out about 7 feet wide. At the moment I have left the turf in the middle so that the area is two beds divided by a turf path. I may invert the turf there still, but it is principally going to be a path, since I can't always be bothered to walk round, and the hump makes it awkward to walk over.
I did have a little go and took a video of me digging. Maybe not quite as boring as R's paint drying video, but pretty close. I mainly took it to have a go with my new camera and a tripod to see how it would work. The answer is not very well with dirty hands and rain! I think the camera survived OK, though I'm going to have to be more careful. I don't think it is really worht sharing....
So it took me about 15 minutes to dig a strip down half one bed. so with 6 strips and 2 beds that means that digging the beds took about three hours. Say another hour to sort the branches in the middle (I didn't include cutting the trees and moving the branches, since I would be doing that anyway) means the preparation took a total of 4 hours. If you said 5, since I haven't actually quite finished, that would be fair.

I'm wanting to start planting this weekend - time to get potatoes and fava beans in at least.....

(edit - added picture of bed construction)

I notice no clamour for my crap videos, so I'll not rush to get those done!

Having got the beds prepared, I managed to get a few things planted at the start of the week. I had a few white potatoes, which I believe are earlies, so hopefully will be ready to harvest at the start of July. That means I ought to be able to follow with some winter radish. That will be a first for me - getting two crops in one season! Wish me luck! I put the potatoes in on the sunny side of one half - I didn't have enough to do the whole bed.
On the shady side I put in some Jerusalem artichokes. These are a nice red one that is a fairly dwarf variety - growing to about three feet here. Some of the tubers came from my front garden, and some from my perennial polycultures area. The ones from the polyculture area were a bit bigger, but it maybe that they are a different variety, I can't now remember.
I also sowed some fava beans - a mix of saved and spare seed along the top of the North side. Hopefully they'll escape the predations of birds and mice to grow away well.

Growing bed looking East

Since this bed is rather exposed, I decided to make a bit of a 'dead hedge' behind it to try and shelter it a bit. I have lots more coppice prunings, so I may be able to build it a bit taller than this. I still have the other side to build up yet...

The "spare acre" is anywhere within 500 feet of the GAMCOD plot. 500 feet is about 150m. My holding is about 75m wide and the strip is about half way up and to one side, so I believe anywhere on my property would be within the 500 feet (at least in spirit). Technically a fair amount of next door either side would be as well, although the management regime of these is 'sheep' so not absolutely organic. Although the land isn't sprayed, the sheep are not organically raised, just free ranging! The land owners are absentee, but I think I'll try and manage just on my own land. I've also identified a couple of possible future GAMCOD plots in case I get to play take part for real.

I could have sworn I'd done another post about my plantings, but I guess I got distracted - there is just so much going on in May! So to update:
I sowed lots of my spare pea seeds which are all getting a little bit old. I pushed them in pretty deeply to try and protect them from the birds and mice. One bed seems to have got much better germination than the other. Of course I can't remember now whether there was any difference in the seeds I sowed that might explain the difference!

wheelbarrow full of cut comfrey leaves

The Potatoes have grown away quite well, and I have mulched them with some comfrey cut from my 'ghost acre' - I have plenty up by my orchard area. Most of the artichokes have come up. They have suffered a little bit from slug damage, but should be OK now the plants are bigger.

View of North side of beds with artichoke shoots and not many fava

Unfortunately it looks like the fava beans won't some to much - I guess the voles had most of them. There are still a few growing, but not that impressive. I might see if I have some radish seed I can back sow with slightly later in the year.

seed packets for root crops

I managed to sow the south side of the beds with spare seed - parsnip, neeps (rutabaga) leeks and carrots. These are all seeds that are getting a bit old, so I sowed them pretty thickly, the leeks protected from slugs by a cut off plant pot collar. Seedlings of all of these are now showing along with loads of 'weeds'! I have pignut, vetch, sneezewort, sorrel and yarrow all growing back from the original turf, as well as grass, buttercups and bluebells! There are some new seedlings coming up which I didn't plant too. All of these can be chopped in situ to mulch and feed.

Beds showing green growth at end of May

When the root seedlings are a little bigger, I can think about whether they may need thinning out, and maybe transplanting the leeks. At the moment I'm just glad to have something else growing.

I'd like to thank Paul for prompting me to make this extra growing bed. I had thought I didn't need it, but it has turned out that it has complemented my 'real' growing area rather nicely. My peas and beans in my growing area have done well, but in the gamcod strip they hardly grew. My roots in the gamcod strip are doing well, but I've lost the lot in my growing area!
I think my mistake was to add some raw compost not long after sowing the seeds. I thought it would give them a nice boost, but there were so many nice things in there that the birds liked that they raked over the whole bed, and I've got hardly a seedling left! Next year I need to try and add compost a couple of weeks before seed sowing, and the birds will be likely to prepare the bed for me!

I've done virtually nothing to the beds since the last update. The only major work was to mulch the potatoes thickly with cut grass from the mown pathways in the tree field in the hopes of keeping the light off the tubers a bit. It turned out that the neeps were a bit close to the potatoes to be able to earth them up well. Hopefully the hay will do the trick though.

hay mulched potatoes

It ought to be fairly soon that I can harvest these potatoes. I believe them to be an early variety. I'll probably take a peek toward the end of the month unless the foliage starts dying back before then. It will be fun to actually harvest something! I'm hoping to get a double crop and sow some daikon or other winter radish in the space left by the potatoes. I've also been chopping and dropping the weeds that are coming up around the seedling root crops.

I'm starting to get pods set on the peas and beans - those that are left. The jerusalem artichokes aren't very big, but I think these are a dwarf form so that is to be expected. One or two are missing - I suspect slugs....

peas and beans and artichokes

I've got some seedling leeks from my main growing area and I'm going to stick as many of these in the ground as I can if the weather is not too horrid over the next day or so, and try and do a bit more mulching to deter the weeds. It is rather more cold than usual and 'misty isle' wet at the moment which doesn't inspire me to get down and dirty just at the moment!

Once again, thank you for posting your updates with pics.  I do so enjoy the posts of your hard work.

Peace

I'll do a proper update in a bit, but I thought I would mention that I'm still a few weeks away from my harvest. I expect killing frosts at the end of this month usually - so still have most of the root crops to dig.
The peas and beans were a wash out - either didn't germinate or got eaten. I did eat a hand full of pea pods, but only one bean survived and that didn't set!
I didn't have a great year weather wise - rather cooler and wetter than normal, so the slugs may well have spoilt the swede (rutabaga) harvest. I don't think the carrots look very promising either, but I should get some parsnip I think and sunroots. I got almost exactly 1 lb of potatoes (which were delicious!) I think the slugs got more than I did - that's the trouble with these nice earlies. I think if I were doing it again I'd use my own saved Skye potatoes, which seem to crop better here.

Well my results were pretty pathetic if I say so myself....I'll post the actual calories below.

end of the season

The weather finally finished off the sunchokes, and since it is really too dark to expect the parsnips to do more than survive I dug those too. Many of the sunchokes had no tubers, even though they had grown some stalks. I did find evidence of nibbling, so I think the voles had a bit of winter cheer there. I got a fair harvest from a couple of the dwarf plants, but nothing at all from the taller plants, which presumably the mice/voles found more tasty. The dwarf ones are purple skinned, which maybe made a difference to the taste.

weighing the sunchokes

There were no swede at all, I guess the mice or slugs had them. I found one tiny carrot which was too small to count! I did dig up another nice potato, which I obviously missed the first time, as well as a tiny green one.
The parsnip were all rather thin. I only weighed those which were thicker than my thumb as being fit to eat, although there were lots smaller than that. I will actually replant these in the hope that they may flower next year. I did cut the long tails off the bigger ones and also cut up a couple that had bad patches on them to eat, and despite the stringy appearance they cooked up to be nice and tender.

weighing the parsnips

If Paul extends the rules so I can participate for real I will have to up my game a bit. I never took proper account of how many hours I spent, or bothered much with the video since I wasn't really part of the project, although my effective spend was zero unless you count the old seeds. As I said above the weather this year has been not great - cool and damp even for Skye - with only a little warmer weather in May and September. Slugs and voles had more of the harvest than I did - the peas, beans, swede and carrots effectively disappeared.
When I was digging the parsnip, I did encounter the core of twiggy bits under the bed, which makes me wonder whether I didn't get a good enough coverage of soil over the twigs. This was a particularly shallow bit of the tree field as it turns out, which probably didn't help. I'd really like to do a proper 'lazy bed', but importing seaweed would be disallowed as I'm about 1 1/4 miles from the beach. I could try it with more grass cuttings as mulch perhaps. If I did this I would need to sow in rows, so as to mulch in between the seedlings. it is too difficult to mulch when the seed is broadcast. I will have more of my own saved seeds to sow, which may improve the germination and yield. If I use my 'Skye Blue' potatoes, they seem to yield much better for me too.

I did have fun, it was interesting, and I have now got a couple of little beds ready to plant my berry bushes on.

Final harvest 2024:

White new potatoes harvest 1 lb = 453g
93 calories/100g (112cal/120g) https://www.nutritionix.com/food/new-potato so total for potatoes: 453/100 x 93
= 421 calories

Parsnips harvest 11 Oz =  311g
75 calories/100g (https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170417/nutrients): 311/100 x 75
= 233 calories

Sunchokes harvest 1lb 6oz = 1.376lb
330 calories per pound (https://permies.com/t/241168/GAMCOD-square-feet-degrees-colder#2657242): 1.375 x 330
= 123 calories

Peas: I did get a pod or two but not worth the calculation

Fava beans: big fat zero!

Pignuts: not deliberately planted but I ate some along with the parsnips :)

Also a fair amount of sorrel and yarrow weeds which could make an edible harvest, albeit not many calories.

total calories: 421+233+123 = 777 on 200 sq ft

x 217 gives 168609 calories on an acre

Actually that's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be!

Nice GAMCODdish plot Nancy!  What's the coldest it's gotten at your place in the last 10 years?

The coldest we've got in the last 16 years is about -12 Celsius in the winter. My trouble is that it is also cool in the summer.
I'll try and link a chart here to illustrate (and one for Missoula for comparison both from  weatherspark) . It's never really hot, although the humidity can make it pleasantly warm sometimes. It's just as well when my soil is so shallow - it would dry out in no time if it weren't for the frequent rain :)
Because it is so cool it takes longer for the roots to grow - I suspect that the soil biome is rather different because of this too. I'm still learning (as are we all of course) but am hoping that developing landrace crops that tolerate it here better is part of the solution. Windy, acidic soil....we all have different advantages and challenges.

Darn...  I knew Paul loosened up the definition of cold this year but it didn't help your situation :(

Nancy Reading wrote:The coldest we've got in the last 16 years is about -12 Celsius in the winter. My trouble is that it is also cool in the summer.
I'll try and link a chart here to illustrate (and one for Missoula for comparison both from  weatherspark) . It's never really hot, although the humidity can make it pleasantly warm sometimes. It's just as well when my soil is so shallow - it would dry out in no time if it weren't for the frequent rain :)
Because it is so cool it takes longer for the roots to grow - I suspect that the soil biome is rather different because of this too. I'm still learning (as are we all of course) but am hoping that developing landrace crops that tolerate it here better is part of the solution. Windy, acidic soil....we all have different advantages and challenges.

I read in the Westin Price book that they used to used the thatch from the rooves as a mulch and fertilizer for the oats on the islands over there. There were no chimneys so the smoke perforated throughout the thatch and added fertility. He stated that when chimneys came into fashion they directed peat smoke into outbuildings so they would still have smoked thatch to use. It made a difference in the growth rate of the oats. I wonder if there is some way for you to construct some sort of recreation of this and if that can make your land more productive. The thatch was made from oat straw I believe and that would have been the old kind that grew taller than the norm of today.

Nice project and a beautiful island there. I wish I'd spent more time there the only time I went through it.

Jason Learned wrote:I read in the Westin Price book that they used to used the thatch from the rooves as a mulch and fertilizer for the oats on the islands over there. There were no chimneys so the smoke perforated throughout the thatch and added fertility. He stated that when chimneys came into fashion they directed peat smoke into outbuildings so they would still have smoked thatch to use. It made a difference in the growth rate of the oats. I wonder if there is some way for you to construct some sort of recreation of this and if that can make your land more productive. The thatch was made from oat straw I believe and that would have been the old kind that grew taller than the norm of today.

Interesting idea, not one I've come across to be honest. I'm sure they would have put any soil improvement material they had to hand on the fields, but going to the trouble of smoking the outbuildings seems more trouble than you'd think it was worth. Our silty soil continually washed with rain, does not hold on to nutrients well. I'm pretty sure that adding bulky organic material, ready to feed the soil and the plants will help a lot. Probably the acidity of my soil is a major factor as well in the plants not doing well - wood ash might help with that.
I've found my oats have done pretty well this year on my main plot (simple farming). I'm growing black oats and bere barley on a small scale. The barley didn't do so well though this year,

Nice project and a beautiful island there. I wish I'd spent more time there the only time I went through it.

Thank you. I pinch myself every now and then to check this is real life!