I researched the docken leaves and found they were nutritious for the soil ,so I harvest the leaves, leaving them as mulch on the soil.
The roots continue growing, bringing nutrients up from down below and aeriating the soil.
Yes Sandy,
I'm trying to learn to love Docken, but I know they can take over an area quite effectively here and I'd like to shift the balance a bit. I guess the fact that they are growing at all means I have a reservoir of seeds in this area, so I'm probably going to have a battle to keep it clear for annual seeds in the future. I'm not good at keeping on top of my chop and dropping - I like Comfrey because it doesn't spread around, whereas Docken produces lots of viable seeds.
Docken make a bid for world domination starting in my Orchard
I suppose the 'do nothing' approach would be to let the Docken take over and improve the soil, but I really don't want them in my growing area long term and there would be more disturbance to clear them. I know this can be done more easily when they are bigger (they crowd each other out in time), cutting the growing top off gets rid of 90% in my experience, but the seed bank will still be there. If I could trust myself to behead them before they set their seed it might just work....
First, it is starting to get a bit late in the season, the temperatures are falling closer to 10 degrees C than 15, and the evenings are drawing in. I feel like I've achieved a great deal this year, if not in produce then in intellectual knowledge. I've grown several annual veg for the first time in several years and learnt a lot about how the soil down the hill behaves, and one of the reasons why the trees weren't doing so well there.
Potato greenery showing signs of blight
I decided to cut back the potato greenery. You can't really see it in the above photo (the yellow is just one of the varieties natually dying back I think), but I'm pretty sure I saw signs of blight on several of the plants, so decided to cut the foliage back to avoid the disease spreading into the tubers. I gather if you then leave them for a couple of weeks before digging the tubers, there's a good chance they will escape the disease. I had been clearing the potatoes from part of the bed that had already died back - I have at least 4, maybe 5 different varieties from different sources, and some of them obviouisly were early varieties. There were hardly any tubers however - either that, or they were really well buried. Anyhow, I accidently dug up some of the 'Skye Blue' potatoes that my neighbour had given me. Wow! what beauties!
Skye Blue potato tubers
I thought I'd written about them earlier, but apparently not. Gareth gave me two potato varieties - Charlotte and a variety he called Skye Blue. He said these had been given him by someone who had been growing them on Skye for about 40 years. As far as I can tell these are not on any official list of varieties. I thought they maight be Shetland Black, but those are much smoother skinned, and are supposed to be second early whereas these appear to be maincrop. According to Alan Romans in The Potato Book there is a variant of Shetland Black that does sound quite like mine. What is also interesting is the story behind the Shetland Black. According to Alan the legend is that the Shetland Black originated from a shipwreck from the Spanish Armada, but he says this is unlikely since the tubers are quite smooth skinned. However my potatoes have fairly deep eyes (although still seem to scrub my light soil out pretty easily) so could have a more ancient ancestry. To add to the story, we also have a local legend - the Glendale Cabbage with massive cabbages (I forget whether they were supposed to be two or three feet across - unfortunately now disappeared...) that grew from seed from an Armada wreck. Quite why the Spanish would be carrying cabbage and potato seed with them is unclear, and I suspect both stories have little truth, but great romance. Anyway our Skye Blue is a lovely floury potato (is that a "Russet" in American English?) the tubers seem to cluster quite close together and it crops pretty well in relatively unimproved soil like mine. I've yet to dig the rest of the potatoes to get a better assessment of yield. Hopefully I can keep some of them to grow next year. They have also set a great deal of berries.
Skye Blue potato fruit
This gives me yet another project possibility: growing out TPS (True Potato Seed) from Skye Blue pototoes to give a Glendale landrace of potatoes, oh what fun is yet to be had! It seems pretty straightforwards according to Cultivariable, although it sounds like growing under lights gives the new plants a good start. If I've got a lot of seed (and there certainly is a fair amount of fruit) I could try sowing direct and get a really good thinning out of less robust seedlings: those that slugs like more, those that need longer time to tuber, etc. Growing from seed means that the potatoes grown will be less likely to harbour disease as well.
(Edited spelling, picture caption and to clarify TPS)
I'm doing a little landscaping around the solar aspect beds and am wondering if this is the annual rye grass finally showing some good growth on the first sown bed:
Rye grass seeding
The question is whether I should cut this back now before it sets seed. Theoretically the grass is mostly annual, so will die back after flowering, however I guess I don't want the seeds of this now, when I'm hoping to start planting these beds 'for real' next spring. Should I try trampling the beds to break the grass stems, or would cutting them back be better? If I get a dry day or two I'd like to try and save some of the radish and mustard seeds anyhow. None of the beds really grew much phacelia, or clover. It would be nice to transplant some local white clover into the beds over the winter as well. I'm proposing making two beds into one, which will involve a bit more earth moving. I gather that buried green manures can inhibit seed germination until they have rotted down a bit, so it's probably best to do the landscaping a month or so before sowing, so anytime in Jan or Feb next year I guess would be best.
The mulched areas in the North area look a little bleak at a distance, however there is some weed growth, and I still need to top the mulch up a bit. I'm assuming that the hay will eventually break down and not need mixing with more "greens" to balance it. I'm actually pretty happy to have it there providing soil coverage over the winter, it ought to help with nutrient leaching. I have plenty more hay to collect up for mulch, weather permitting; we're starting to get shorter days and feel quite autumnal now. I've also been a bit poorly with a cold, so not much outdoor activity recently.
Hay mulched North areas
I'm not sure when to try digging the carrots. I suppose they need leaving as long as possible to get the best growth. This will mean they will be more liable to get damaged by pests, but I'm hoping to leave the 'seed' carrots in over winter anyhow in future. Our first penetrating frosts usually aren't until late November (making it difficult to dig), so I think will aim for early November to select seed roots.
Tiny Runner bean pods in September
I've decided not to try and include Runner or French (common) beans in the rotation after all. I have had a few runner bean flowers, and now have the tiniest runner bean pods, but with cold weather drawing close they don't stand much chance of setting seeds. I think if I work at it over a few years I may get Runners to crop, but that will involve starting out early under cover and transplanting at least initially, which isn't the point really of this area. Maybe I might get quicker cropping cold tolerant beans, in future and can reconsider. I'm working on version 2 of my rotation plan revised due to my expriences this year, and will discuss that in a future post
Prolific Pea Pods
The heroes of the year have really been the peas. I haven't picked them at all (except for one or two pods as a snack admitted to before) and I am hopeful that I will get a reasonable amount of ripe enough seeds. They are mostly very green still. That is going to be the difficulty - getting the seeds to a ripe stage to dry without someone else eating them, or them sprouting or going mouldy. I'm pretty sure i'll need to bring the peas in to dry out for storage, although I can try seeing if they will overwinter and grow direct, I suspect the mice may dine well this winter....
Comfrey establishing in grass adjacent to Not-very-lazy-bed
The comfrey has established well in the grass adjacent to the beds. I really need a few more rows of it to act as grass barrier and possibly as handy "chop and drop" nutrient provider. Only a few of the kale cuttings appear to have escaped the slugs. I admit I am a bit surprised at that. I was expecting better survival rates. I have plenty of kale however....
Nancy Reading wrote:I'm doing a little landscaping around the solar aspect beds and am wondering if this is the annual rye grass finally showing some good growth on the first sown bed:
Rye grass seeding
The question is whether I should cut this back now before it sets seed. Theoretically the grass is mostly annual, so will die back after flowering, however I guess I don't want the seeds of this now, when I'm hoping to start planting these beds 'for real' next spring. Should I try trampling the beds to break the grass stems, or would cutting them back be better?
What did you end up doing with your ryegrass? I had ryegrass this year also and was wondering like you what I should do. I had three beds with it, so I guess I will see next spring what happens. My first bed went into seed before I cut it down for the first time the second and third beds also went into seed but I took it down earlier so the seeds were not ripe. I cut all the beds a second time some weeks ago with a scythe, but when I was about to cover the beds for winter, I regret that I didn't cut it back with the tractor mower instead, as I hadn't cut the grass short enough. I guess I'm not so good with the scythe yet.
Nancy Reading
steward and tree herder
Posts: 8385
Location: Isle of Skye, Scotland. Nearly 70 inches rain a year
Hege Fossum wrote:What did you end up doing with your ryegrass? I had ryegrass this year also and was wondering like you what I should do. I had three beds with it, so I guess I will see next spring what happens. My first bed went into seed before I cut it down for the first time the second and third beds also went into seed but I took it down earlier so the seeds were not ripe. I cut all the beds a second time some weeks ago with a scythe, but when I was about to cover the beds for winter, I regret that I didn't cut it back with the tractor mower instead, as I hadn't cut the grass short enough. I guess I'm not so good with the scythe yet.
Hi Hege, As yet I'm still 'observing'. I think since I'm bound to have loads of weed seeds in the soil anyhow, I'm not too worried about the rye grass seeds as well. I've decided to combine six solar beds into three as discussed above. The first and last beds are adjacent to one another, so I'll probably leave these till spring to get as much growth as possible on the last bed. The centre two beds (the second and third) both have good growth on, so I will probably cut just those two down and replant the selected carrots into that bed to go to seed.
Memo to self - never count your peas until they are podded.
What a difference a week makes. Last week I noticed that there was a pea pod that appeared to have been nibbled by rodents. This week there were virtually no peas left! I managed to salvage four pea pods and one rather slug eaten pea. Two of the pea pods were more like mange-tout than ripe peas, so I didn't bother collecting the seeds from them. The other peas I have podded and left out to dry, but they look a bit small to be ripe enough to be viable. If I'd been picking the peas green, or even more regularly as they developed I might have had a chance, but I'm afraid I have effectively no new seed for next year. I think I've got enough seed left to have another go next year. I need to try and get the peas sown a little earlier, so that I'm not waiting in the dull wet autumn for the seeds to mature and ripen. I cut the pea haulms above the soil and put them and the tops of the radishes onto the mulched circle areas to add to the biomass. Hopefully some of the radish seeds will grow there next year.
In a fright I also harvested all the broad bean pods. I'm not sure really whether I lost some to rodents, there was no evidence either way. It was not a great yield either, but I did at least get some seed! Again losing the first sowing and being smothered by the neighbouring radish didn't help. I wasn't sure whether to try and dry in the pods or not, but decided that the beans were more likely to go mouldy in the pods (they were almost all still very spongy) so I podded the lot.
I've been pulling the grass around the currant cuttings in the circles. A fair few of them have taken OK, but a number have been damaged by dogs or me, since they are so tiny still it's easy to step on them accidentally. I may try and fill in the gaps over winter. The last of the hay cut in the field trackways has started to regrow in the autumn damp, so I don't want to put it on my growing areas. I have been using it around the currant bushes however.
Some of the carrots are showing signs of going to seed. They don't have any excuse for this! We haven't had a particularly hot or dry summer unlike further South. However most of them look fine. I suppose premature bolting is a trait that will naturally get selected out over time....
Snakes are pretty rare I believe, I've never seen any sign. There are adders on Skye, but I don't know of any sighted around here. Birds of prey are a better bet and we get a lot of buzzards hovering about as well as (less often) smaller bird of prey and eagles. I suspect that my dogs are responsible for a bit of predation, although unfortunately they seem to get more shrews than voles! Also dogs digging up imaginary mice causes a lot of garden damage as well!
The creation of raised beds is immediately a rodent preferred habitat - better drained and well provisioned! I have certainly made them a lovely habitat, with plenty of cover. I gather the vole population tends to go in cycles, so maybe this is a good year for voles. It certainly was a good year for some voles!
I believe I have stoats here, which also will feed on small rodents. They live in the remains of the field boundary walls I think....maybe I need to make them a pile of stones closer to my growing areas. Certainly food for thought, thank you L.
In early October the Scottish schools have a couple of weeks holiday known as the tattie holiday. This is the time that the children would have been needed to help bring the potatoes in before winter. So it is appropriate that I've now managed to harvest the last of the potatoes. I had left them for a couple of weeks after cutting off the haulms due to suspected blight.
I didn't get as many more of the Skye Blue potatoes as I had hoped. There were a few more substantial ones, plus several small ones and some slug damaged ones. The white potatoes that I suspect were Maris Piper had some very big tubers, but were very badly slug damaged so nowhere near the yield there should have been. Pink Fir Apple were the clear winner for yield. Some lovely big tubers, some weird shapes and probably the biggest yield over all. These are salad potatoes, even though they are main crop for harvest, and I remember them having a really nice flavour and texture when I grew them before at our previous house (not yet tried this harvest).
Potato Harvest
It was quite interesting to see how the soil affected the potato growth and vice versa. The soil had physically lifted over the potato tubers, even though around them it was still very compacted. There were quite a few weeds. I had mulched the area pretty heavily with comfrey and hay, but had not done any additional weeding. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the potatoes grew better where there was sorrel growing - they seem to hug each other. Anyhow, all that area has now had a bit of a forking over, so is less compacted to about 9 inches down, and the composted mulch is now distributed through the soil layer a bit, as well as many more roots. The downside is that the well fed slugs have deposited a load of eggs into the soil too - so I am expecting a good population of those in the future....maybe another reason to encourage some slug eating reptiles and amphibians with piles of rocks.
Slug eggs and fine roots in soil
The weather was pretty wet last week, so I brought the tuber in and spread them on the back of my project Mini Jiffy truck to dry. I'm hoping to use that for collecting seaweed when it's back on the road again, but just now the flatbed does service as a useful table undercover! I'll use up the damaged tubers first, and put the rest in thick paper sacks to keep them in the dark. I think they can stay in the workshop with the Jiffy over winter as long as I can keep the mice away from them. I will try and select some of the nicest tubers of the Skye blue and Pink fir apple as seed potatoes to plant again next year.
Mini Jiffy truck - drying potatoes undercover
I gather that the true potato seed is likely to germinate better if I leave it a year, so I won't bother trying with it next year - I'll just clean the seed and try and keep it safe.
I had decided that the slope of the solar beds was going to be too great to enable easy cultivation. They do seem to be pretty stable, and from the valley I could reach all parts, but I just felt that the northward slope would never be useful and took up too much of the space. So I started combining the centre two of my six beds together. These had good growth of green manures. One was quite a bit more mature that the other; the seeds on the radish and mustard were mostly mature, whereas the northward bed was still blooming. I’m going to have seedlings of these coming up for a few years I can tell! Having cut back the top growth with hand shears and pushed it to one side, it was interesting to see what the surface of the soil was like. I was happy that there seems to be very little weed growth. Other than the turf growing in a bit from the edges there is virtually none. The mix of green manure seeds obviously was wasted on my plot though. The Clover and grass were very sparse and the Buckwheat and Phacelia were nowhere to be seen. The radish and mustard did a very good job of swamping them all out! The brassica had also sent out lots of surface roots from their stems. It looks like mycelium, but is actually fine roots. In terms of fauna, I really didn’t notice much but a few rather large slugs (which took a short aerial journey away down the hill).
Roots at surface under green manure
Combining the soil of the two beds was a bit more difficult than I had thought it might be. It is a bit damp so the soil was heavy, and the tap roots of the radishes, although not really long, were long enough to knit the soil together. I found that a rather strange tool I inherited from a neighbour was the best tool for the job. A cross between a rake and a garden fork it has the fork tines bent at 90 degrees. Using it like a mattock to chop and drag the soil worked reasonably well. I’ve made the bed very slightly taller than before and have dug out the low point just a bit. I will use the ‘ditch’ as a path I think. At the moment my idea is to cover it’s surface with twigs and then rake it across once the twigs break down. I’ll see how well I can get daisy and clover to establish there in the first few years though. Again I wasn’t blown away by the soil life. There certainly were some worms – small ones like I was finding before. I couldn’t say whether there were more of them, but of course the green manures haven’t been incorporated into the soil yet. I didn’t really add very much organic matter to these beds (I probably would have done better if I could have added more). I was hoping that the roots of the radish would really add a lot more than they seem to have done.
solar beds combined
The final step was spreading the green manure top growth back over the beds. If I hadn’t been changing the soil surface, I could have just stomped this down, using a blunt blade to break the plant stems. It shouldn’t really matter though. There is a good covering on the top now, which will give protection over winter and hopefully be incorporated naturally by whatever soil organisms I do have (including those slugs!).
Green manure plants surface mulch to protect soil over winter
I noted from one of my books (either The Earth Care Manual by Patrick Whitefield or How to make a Forest Garden by Martin Crawford) that a five percent increase in a South facing slope is equivalent to a fifty kilometre move towards the equator. So if I had a 40 degree slope before, that would be like 400 km further south. Now it’s about a 25 degree slope; that is still 250km (156 miles) South equivalent, which should give me a few days more at the start of my growing season, being equivalent to well to the South of Glasgow - approximately to the Border with England.
Making the most of a fine autumn day I've made a start at introducing some features to encourage predators to help with the vole/mouse issue I have had.
First: Raptor perches. John Daley gave some information on Kestrel perches on this thread. I mostly see Buzzards here, so I'm aiming to encourage them to linger for a meal by giving them a nice perch. From what I can gather the buzzards use low perches or hover to find their prey. I often see them perched just on normal fence posts, so I don't think their perches need to be particularly high. I do have some long bits of reasonable section wood that are about 12 foot long tucked away in the Byre, but they're a bit inaccessible at the moment, so I only got as far as deciding on locations for the perches and setting as tall a fence post stake as I could find in place. I decided on two perches locations (arrowed below), one to cover each area, but both located between the growing areas, so that between them they will cover the grass area in between. When I can get to the long wood, I'll set them up with a cross bit of wood for a perch.
Location of Predator encouragement features
Second: Stoat house What's the difference between a Stoat "des res" and a pile of stones? I know the stoats have had a nest in the remains of our boundary wall to the South. I'm not sure whether they are still there, but on the basis that it won't harm to provide a house should they still be around, I've done my best to make them a nice house. Again I decided on a location in between the two growing areas (circled above). It is still pretty exposed, and I expect that the Buzzards would happily take a stoat just as much as a mouse, but stoats are mainly nocturnal, so should be asleep in their new nest when the Buzzards are on duty.
I collected together all the large stones that I had dug up from the solar beds and the not very lazy bed and piled them up. I made a cavity in the middle, which would be rather big for a mouse house, but hopefully nice and spacious for a stoat family. I put a stone floor in it too, which may be a mistake, since it means they can't easily make it bigger by digging, but it seemed to me that having a home away from the damp soil would be a good thing. I think I still need more rocks to provide a bit more wind and rain insulation, but have tried to maintain fairly large cavities between the stones, so there are a couple of routes to the central cavity. I can only hope that the voles and mice that will inevitably move in will be displaced by the stoats in time. It should be a nice place for toads, frogs and other amphibians to shelter as well as beetles and other invertebrates.
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