Winter 2010

Brrrrr

We've had snow for a week now.....and we're beginning to get pretty annoyed with it.

I've not posted much on here this year for a couple of reasons.

Firstly - we had a huge pile of manure delivered in Jan - and spent weeks shovelling and spreading it across the plot. Then put the potatoes in. We had late frosts so I thought that was the reason we had dodgy looking haulms growing.

Unfortunately not. It was aminopyralid.

Wild? I was livid.

Still angry [we discovered it in May, and it's now December] and we lost lots of crops. Most of the spuds [a few were left to grow just because we couldn't be bothered to do anything with them] loads of onions that had to be moved, loads of beans [not happy], pumpkins and to be honest, we just thought we'd do what we could and write off 2010 as a bad job. The bad stuff was shovelled back off the plot, raked out, and it took us a month to get it into 3 stockpiles and a farmer was paid £300 to take it away and dispose of it. We of course lost at least £300 in crops and got nothing. As per usual - Dow look after the farmers and screw the rest of them.

So, on the 21st Dec starts a new year.

The few pumpkins we had - were left at the lottie until we could use them and lo and behold - the snow got them....



So - onward and upward. We are never having manure on our plot again....even though we've been offered some horse manure - the same farmer that supplier ours also supplies most of the village with the same straw his cows ate....so I am guessing that other people will still have a problem in the coming years.....but I've done my bit telling everyone and arranging for 3 people to have theirs removed.

The other reason of course is that I started a new job - working with 5 charity SEN schools to get them building and growing in their own organic veggie gardens on school sites. So the anger above was tempered with the ability to still grow veg around the southern half of the country. So I've been busy busy busy and having a great time!

So, on the 21st starts the new season proper. We currently have onion sets, potato onions and some garlic in the ground - but I will be sowing my main onions and a large amount of garlic and shallots in modules so that I can get started.

*I'm also writing a week-by-week guide for schools to use throughout the growing season telling them what they can do, what they should be doing, what they sow/grow and harvest each week/month. I'll be looking for school gardeners to have a look at this once it is written so any volunteers - please comment here and I'll get in touch.

I've also collected a few more beans for the project - and hopefully didn't lose an actual variety after the manure problem......more photos to follow soon.

Thanks for reading....and don't forget to collect those loo roll innerds for next year's beans!!!