Technopeasant & Quinta

You can tell I have a 2 year old because everthing is baby chicks or baby kittens…but anyway 2 weeks ago we bought 5 chicks at the market to fatten up over 3 or 4 months, to then eat.  Organically reared chickens…tasty dinners for the meat eaters.  However, the chicks came with feed which has something nasty in it as it says you can’t eat the chickens within 6 days of them having eaten the feed…just a reminder of the dodgy practices in the meat industry.  At least we will know what these ones have eaten, their food miles will be low and they will have been treated and killed respectfully.

Welcoming the chicks in to their new home

Baby Chick

Unfortunately something got in to their pen and took one last night so we are down to 4, but Matt is currently securing the enclosure so it won’t get seconds.

Quite a few of our earliest-planted courgettes are starting to grow fruit. We should be eating our first courgettes later this week!

The sun is shining, the rain has stopped and our gardens are starting to get down to the serious business of growth!

Wwoofer Aaron has cleared some of the weeds from beds in ‘the hot end’ of my garden, and yesterday we bought lots of pepper, aubergine and piri-piri plants at market to be transplanted through the thick layer of horse manure.

Lettuces are amazing this year, thanks to the incrfedible amount of rain that has poured into the ground. We grow lettuces all through the winter, outside, but they all tend to reach readiness at the same time, regardless of how much we stagger the plantings! So we have been giving away lettuces and the chickens have to get a taste for them.

I also planted a whole bed of Hopi Indian blue corn with trail of tears cherokee climbing beans and a long thin bed of sunflowers, over the weekend.

The summer glut of food from the garden feels like its about to start – the first courgette flowers are starting to open and some of the redcurrants are ripe, while some tomato plants are also flowering.

A solar drier is on our list of jobs, to be done before we need to start drying for the winter.

Our terraces are absolutely covered in yellow flowers, mainly corn marigolds interspersed with chamomile.

We need to strim all the brambles that have appeared over the winter, and many of the pathways that we use, but we try to wait until after the wildflowers have seeded, guaranteeing the bloom of colour again next year.

The bees have been returning to their hives completely covered in bright orange pollen from the marigolds – another good reason to leave clearing them for a few weeks.

We now have 2 healthy hives of bees, with Matt doing a wonderful job as farm beekeeper, in his space gear.

Our shared philosophy is one of organic, minimal disturbance, natural beekeeping. Bees are an important part of the local ecosystem, and as such we value them and their pollinating activities greatly. Any honey that we might be able to steal from them (after their own needs are more than adequately covered) is a bonus. As is the anti-arthritis effects of the occasional sting.

Matt has replaced the floors of the hives with metal screens, so that evidence of varoa mites is easily seen, and is regularly dusting the bees with icing sugar (ordinary white sugar ground here in a flour mill – as icing sugar in shops often contains unwanted chemicals). This encourages the bees to clean themselves more vigorously, which helps keep the mite numbers down.

We are also working towards eliminating foundation sheets in the hives, presently only giving them starter strips, so that the bees build their own wax from scratch. The theory is that this also helps with varroa mites, as the bees make smaller cells, and hatch before the mites do. And we feel it is generally healthier to do things as naturally as possible, trying to avoid any commercial materials, such as foundation, that might contain unwanted additives that could harm the colony.

They certainly seem healthy.

In the last couple of weeks we have had two swarms turn up on the farm – seemingly attempting to take over one of our hives! This was such an experience, the air completely full of bees, which then settled onto a willow tree (both times). Although Matt did manage to get the bees into a hive, the swarm didnt stay.

Tom, who was visiting took these amazing photos. Cheers Tom.

Where vegetables are concerned, if you are buying it from a shop the nutritional value is but a tiny percentage of what food should be.
There ain’t nothing so healthy and health giving, tasty and nutritious, fresh and flavoursome as home grown vegetables, picked directly from you garden only minutes before you eat it.

And it just makes sense. Lettuces for instance could be grown by almost anybody, anywhere – perhaps even in trays on your windowsill. Supermarket lettuces may have been sprayed 20 times with various poisonous things, grown hydroponically, using massive amounts of water and oil-derived energy, and then transported half way round the world. Farm workers are paid a pittance, water tables are depleted, supermarkets and other corporate chronies are enriched and empowered even more, and traditional old heirloom varieties (specifically suited to place, weather and people) disappear – to mention just a few of the problems caused by the global market in food.

Its all very well campaigning against environmental destruction, or moaning about the power of global corporations, or the poor quality of food these days, or the increasing cost of living but one small thing that we can all do to counter these things is to start on the path of growing food for ourselves. Once you start you may well find that it escalates and you just can’t stop. Gardening is massively addictive!

At a guess, I would say that we produce 50% of our food – which increases substantially in the summer months when the gardens are jam packed full of amazing tasty delights. Each year as the soil in our raised beds improves (with the regular addition of compost, manure and woody matter) we see our work decrease and the results increase. This winter we have been able to pick leeks, lettuce, beetroots, chard, parsley continuously.

And the asparagus, brussels sprouts and broccolli that have recently been adorning our plates are outstanding!

In between the rain showers over the last week, we have been planting lots of seeds and seedlings. Its that time of year again, and it looks like frosts are over.

Some of the first seeds, that we planted in trays, sprouted quickly and have now been transplanted into the straw and horse manure covered beds in the gardens. The courgettes were each planted in a generous bucket of nutritious compost from the heap.

A second set of tomato seedlings have gone in, purchased at Tabua market, after the first lot were killed by a late frost.

Sophie has been saving milk cartons to plant seeds in, and we found some old polystyrene fish boxes last year which make great little home made nursery with an old window.

We have also almost finished pruning and tying-in all the vines, including some that have lived without posts for a few years.