Author: Carl Mintern

23: Episode 23 – A lockdown garden activity for mental health

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Spending time in our garden is a great way to relieve anxiety and increase our mental health and wellbeing. In this episode I talk about a great garden activity that is beneficial to you and your garden, and will help you to understand your garden space better, using permaculture principles to better assess your garden’s potential.

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Transcript:

A Lockdown Garden Activity For Mental Health

I’m going to be talking about a garden activity that everybody can do and it’s a great lockdown activity if you’re not allowed to leave the house. It’s also a great mental health activity if you’re struggling with anxiety, or you just need to slow down the pace at which your mind is turning over. It’s based on permaculture principles and it’s about learning from nature. What we’re going to do is basically talk about learning from what’s already happening in the space and putting ourselves in a position to make the best decisions for our garden and perhaps come up with some different ideas of how we might use spaces.

Garden Activities in Lockdown Period

There’s no better way of learning about your space and understanding it than spending time in it. So we’re going to talk about an activity that is very useful for food planning and certainly for me. I find it very useful to actually come up with different ways of using spaces and I quite often settle on some ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t have had.

Noting Down The Essentials

The first thing to do is to get a sheet or two of paper and we’re going to write a list of headings that we’re going to fill out as we spend time in our space. Depending on the size of your garden, I did this in eight different distinct areas. You might have a very small urban garden or you might have lots of different areas with different aspects to them. So you might want to consider doing more than one sheet of research paper to really understand how different parts of your garden are working. So I’m going to run through the headlines and then tell you the sort of things I wrote. I’ve got one of the sheets in front of me that I actually filled out a year-and-a-half ago and it’s quite surprising how much it actually did help change my thinking about the area. So towards the northern boundary of my property, we have a large area that is currently on its way to becoming a food forest. But at the time that I did this activity, it was just a piece of grass or at least one side of it was a piece of grass and the other side of this area was the edge of woodland.

Let’s start with just the location, date and the weather. This is useful because there might be things that are happening that you might expect to see more or less of based on the weather at that particular time. The location for me was picnic area/food forest because that’s where we had our picnic bench and the date that I filled this in was the 23rd of May. The weather was dry and bright with no rain for several days. This is important to note these features because of the fact that I know there was no rain for several days means that when we come to look at what’s happening, we can allow that in our thinking and the temperature was 19 degrees and the overnight low was eight degrees. These are all things I noted. Then I went down to list and wrote that the pH level is 7.5 in that area. pH testers are available online very cost-effectively. The one I’ve got is a reusable one. So I think I paid about 8 pounds for it and I just plug it in the ground and it tells me the pH level and I can reuse that forever and ever.

Absorb Nature

The next thing you do once you set down and you’ve made these notes is absolutely nothing.
You just sit for a good 10 minutes. The reason for this is to allow nature to return whenever you go for a walk in the countryside or walk out into your garden. Quite often a lot of the natural environment quickly changes because there’s a human there and a lot of your small birds and small animals will either freeze or actually disappear. Just sitting still for 10 minutes, you can listen and hear the difference in the birdsong as they return to their normal state, as they become more comfortable with you being there.

Soil Humidity

The next section on my list was soil humidity and humus notes. Humus is the amount of organic matter in your soil and it will largely tell you about how fertile it will be. So whenever you look at a piece of land, if you can tell that it’s not been disturbed for a long time and that’s going to tell you that the soil food web and everything below the ground are likely in a very healthy state because it’s been left to grow and do its thing. But whatever you can tell about your soil is what goes here. So if you happen to know what sort of subsoil you’ve got whether it’s clay or chalk or something different goes in here and this can all help you to make judgments to what type of plants you wish to plant or what type of fertility you have in the area. It’s certainly a good idea to make any notes that you’re already aware of as you go through in all these cases.

Sunlight

The next section was sunlight and what I did is I drew a very rudimentary picture sketch of the area and I labelled where north was. Because a large portion of the area I was looking at was trees, it allowed me to judge where exactly was getting the sun. So I drew a very rudimentary sketch with where the trees were and the pond in the area that I’d partially created and then I just labelled different areas as the full sun to partial shade.

Wind Exposure

The next heading title was wind exposure and for this particular area, my notes were fairly exposed to the northeast. So wind exposure can make a difference for lots of reasons, especially if you’re going to be growing annual plants or things that might need to be supported. Whenever you’re planning long-term planting, it’s really important to consider how the wind and sun work because they’ll be certain areas that lend themselves to different plants. Some plants may need support by way of the trellis. If you’re going to implement things like this and that’s going to have an impact on what areas subsequently gets shaded. So it’s certainly worth looking at the wind exposure and the sun area together in my opinion.

Existing Plants

The next heading on my list was existing plants. This should be whatever’s in the area regardless of whether it’s stuff you’ve planted yourself, whether it’s stuff you’ve inherited or weeds. Whatever it is, put all the existing plants down there and this whole system what we’re doing is based on permaculture principles. So what we’re going to do is work in harmony with what’s already happening in the space. That doesn’t mean that we have to have our entire garden running rampant with weeds, but knowing what grows where and what is growing well already will help us to make the sort of changes that require a lot less effort to install but also maintain. Under this heading for this particular area in my garden, I had a large selection of native trees, comfrey around the ponds, various introduced edibles and that was introduced by myself and red clover, buttercups, couch grass etc. The area that I had was largely inherited and I had begun the process of creating a food forest in some of it. The best time to do this is before you start planting an area and I may have changed the exact location of where I planted a lot of my long-term planting in this area had I done this activity first.

Encouraging Systems

The next heading in my list is systems to encourage. So I looked around and saw in front of me and to the north a fence that separated our property from our neighbours. I put here edible climbers to the north fence because that was an obvious area that got lots of suns and that it would be really easy to introduce more edible climbers because we already had some blackberries growing there. It was a great place where we could look at something that was already working as a system and encourage that and add to it by introducing more edible climbers of different varieties.

Something else that was a system working and wanted to encourage was self mulching and leaf litter. This is how the wooded area was working and how it works in every woodland is that the leaves fall and act as a mulch to suppress some of the weeds. That’s why when you walk in a woodland quite often, there’s not much growing beneath a lot of the trees. So I wanted to use that system to self mulch around the base of the fruit trees that I was planting. Another system that I could encourage was due to the nature of the pond that was in the process of
being built. There were duck pest control and manure. Ducks are fantastic for eating your slugs and things like that.

My vegetable garden is just around the corner from this area. So if I were to free-range Indian runner ducks, they could act as pest control for my vegetable garden and some of the area in general. The final thing. I put here was aquaculture, the idea of having the pond system as a way of growing food. So those are the systems that I want to encourage from what I could see on this day. You might have different things growing in your area. You might have a chicken coop in your area. You might have all sorts of things that I didn’t have in this particular area, but there are all sorts of opportunities here for things that you can encourage and we’re trying to look at what’s already working and thinking what can we do rather than cutting and chopping things out or in.

Discouraging Systems

The next thing on my list was systems to discourage. I had a predator and pest Ingress to the property at the northeast boundaries, wasted water overflow from the pond and squirrels stripping nuts from trees. We also could see animal runs so I could see where foxes, badgers were getting in through our fences. We also have lots of rabbits that come in and I don’t necessarily want to stop the rabbits coming in but I do want to stop them from eating certain plants. This area of our property is at the highest point, not on a hill, but it does have a very slight run from the northeast corner to the southwest and this where I had my ponds and wasted water overflow. What I meant by that is water was overflowing from my pond and I thought if I could divert that water towards my vegetable bed, that would be a far better use of it. Because if that water is going to be quite high in nutrients eventually because I’m going to have fish and ducks living in the pond. So I wanted those nutrients to make their way somewhere useful not somewhere I didn’t need them.

Wildlife

The next thing on my list is wildlife. If I was to do this again, I’d put this one higher up because it could influence some things that I’ve already spoken about. But here I wrote squirrels, evidence of rabbit, dear seen in the neighbouring pasture. buzzards, magpies, crows, dragonflies, and miscellaneous water creatures in the pond. This includes things that I saw while I was sat there so this will vary dramatically from area to area in your garden. We don’t see any of these mammals near the house when we get very close to our house. We don’t see any of them because we have a dog running free most of the time outside. It is worth taking the time to allow nature to return to this area and seeing what you see while you’re there.

Resources

The next category we’re talking about is some of the bigger infrastructure things and its resources. By resources, this can mean anything man-made or natural. So here I’ve got some ponds, compost loo because we had a compost loo that I built in the woods and woodland partial fencing shade and ducks. So these are all resources in the area that I can use that we should try not to waste.

We’re going to run through them one by one again. Well, a lot of this area was the sun so that’s not a resource that I want to waste. Anything that’s in full sun. I want to be used to photosynthesize, to produce plants, to produce food to feed the soil. The next one was the ponds. You can use them to grow food by way of plants or fish and you can use them to house ducks. You can also use them to produce fertilizer, which is several of the things. I’m doing a great use of a pond. If you don’t really have a use in mind, just grow duckweed as feed for ducks and geese. The next resource was a compost loo. The reason this is Is a great resource because it produces fertilizer, but also it means that it’s an easier to use area. We can spend more time in the area without having to go away back to the house. Woodland is a great resource for coppicing for timber but also for harbouring nature partial fencing. So again, we’ve got some fencing ready in place to act as support for climbers. We’ve also got shade so I spent quite a lot of time researching things that would grow in the shade around my woodland as part of my food forest.

Problems Encountered

The next thing was the problems. I only had two here: pests and soil drainage. We’re on clay so when it rained for prolonged periods, it would get very wet in some areas. I found out that in that area with it being the highest point on our property doesn’t have an issue with drainage. So the only thing I had to think about was pests and we’ve dealt with that largely by building tree guards and many tree farms around most of our planting.

SWOT Analysis

The next thing is a list of four things: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This was basically condensing those thoughts into ultimately opportunities things that we could go forwards with. Under strengths, I put peace. It was a very peaceful place very quiet fertility.
The soil hadn’t been touched and it was a very fertile area and nice sun and shade mix. For weaknesses, I put pests and predators and then we get to opportunities and threats. So for opportunities, we could create strong gilts. There was lots of space that we could create nice strong plant gilts around individual trees in the food forest and other opportunities are edible pond permaculture. So the two biggest things I wanted to go forward with was developing the pond area and developing the food forest. Under threats. I’ve put waterlogging and fox/badger damage. Both of them were mitigated for us. It just didn’t waterlog. We’ve been able to put barriers in place to stop the fox and the badger getting to the plants and in our garden where we don’t want them.

Desirable Goals

The last heading was just desirable goals and here is just a list of things that I wanted to achieve. In this example, I’d written continued introduction of edible plants, create a safe duck habitat, create edible pond permaculture, planting of Edibles between ponds, a water pump and solar power pump. Introducing irrigation wasn’t a problem because the area drains okay and finally protecting some crops from wildlife. So I’ve achieved that goal. We’ve created a safe duck habitat. However, the pond development is still on my to-do list, but we haven’t been able to move forward with it very much because I’ve just got sidetracked with other things like the planting of edibles between the ponds and the water pump. Then finally protect some crops from wildlife and I’ve been able to do that. It really did make a difference and made it so much easier for me to think clearly about this space.

Final Thoughts

One of the biggest benefits of doing something like this is it’s going to reduce the chances that you end up doing something and then wish you’d done something different. So it is something that’s really practical and I strongly recommend you do it. Even if you’re only doing it for the practical benefits, peaceful mental health activity is just a side benefit for me. But I hope you found that interesting and I hope that you go ahead and you do at least one of these in your garden. So if you are thinking of doing what I’m just going to run through the headings once more just as bullet points. When I say resources, these can be anything from water access so water butt would certainly be a resource as would standing water pipe. Resources can really be anything. It could be closed access to the tool shed. So don’t undersell your space when you’re going through this list and I look forward to hearing how you got on with it. I hope that you’ll enjoy doing the process.

21: Episode 21 – No Dig Gardening

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

Ever wondered if you could grow vegetables without the backbreaking job of turning soil or digging up potatoes? Well you can, and in this episode we discuss how.

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Transcript:

No-Dig Gardening

If you’ve ever grown your own potatoes, chances are you have dug them into the ground
and over time you’ve mounded up over the potatoes with a lot of soil as they grow. Then when they’re ready, you’ve put off the inevitably back-breaking job of digging them up and in doing so you’ve probably stuck a fork through several and wished there was another way. Well, what if I told you there was?

Today we’re going to talk about no-dig gardening. Now, no-dig gardening is a term used frequently to describe a way of growing annual vegetables without digging up your soil. There’s no working of the soil with a fork, or tilling, there’s no digging things up in the manner that you might usually. All of the growing and planting we do is done right in the very top of the soil. So, it’s either literally at soil level or even in compost above what you would normally consider to be the ground that you’re going to grow your vegetables in.

There’s a community online that’s grown up around this and it’s been made famous by, among other people, someone called Charles Dowding who is a leading proponent of his no-dig gardening method and he’s very easy to find online. However, I didn’t actually come across him
or his way of doing things; I sort of stumbled across it on my own through just experimenting with different things. So, I’m going to tell you how I do it and why I do it and how I decided to try different things. If you want to know more, you can find lots of articles online relating to how to use no-dig gardening in different ways and for different crops.

The Benefits of No-Dig Gardening

The first thing I want to do is explain why we no-dig garden, what the benefits are, what the thinking was, and then we’re going to talk a little bit about how those benefits work and how we actually do the process. So, why should you no-dig garden? Well, the obvious starting point is the amount of effort involved. It’s far less back-breaking work. No one that I know actually enjoys tilling soil, especially by hand and everything I do is by hand – we don’t have a tractor or machinery. All the forking that we did to originally establish our beds would all have to be done by hand. Anything I could do to reduce that was certainly a benefit.

The thing that actually pushed me over the edge and made me think, “Right, we have to do this,” was when I was digging up potatoes and I actually started to experience quite a lot of pain in my back, despite the fact that I consider myself to be physically fit. It was such an arduous task; I just thought there has to be a better way. So, I started trying out a few different options and it turns out that I’ve actually had great success, and yields can be increased. All the things that you worried about when you initially think of the idea of a no-dig gardening plot, all those things actually aren’t a problem and some of them turn into benefits. So, things like yields can actually go up. Pest control is actually sometimes simpler or a lot of the time simpler, and there are a lot of diseases that seem to be much less prevalent with a no-dig gardening system. That’s the main reason that I got into it and once you start thinking about it, there’s a lot of side benefits to it as well.

If you are not using the method of loosening up all your soil to allow that growing medium for your plants to grow in, then also you don’t have to worry about soil compaction. You don’t need to worry about keeping off your beds and walking in very strict lines up paths, because compaction isn’t really an issue. You’ll find that most plants that grow are quite happy growing in compacted soil in a no-dig soil. Now, of course, we add lots of organic matter to our soil over time – all gardeners that really are trying to get decent yields and do things the right way will be doing that anyway, so this is going to create that soil environment within which plants are really going to thrive in, without you having to loosen the soil.

There’s no back-breaking work, there’s no need to avoid compaction, and there’s no disturbance of the mycorrhizal fungi and the soil food web beneath the top layer of the soil. For me, that is the most important part.

Permaculture Principles

Along with my thinking of trying to reduce the amount of physical labor involved, I was also doing a lot of work in other areas of the garden with a lot of permaculture principles. Now, if you’re not familiar with permaculture, we’re going to do a much more in-depth article on permaculture in the next coming days, but the basic principle is what you’re trying to do is create systems that look after themselves. You’re always trying to reduce the number of inputs, be that labor, be that things you need to buy in, or things you need to add to a unit of space, be it feed for animals, you’re trying to reduce them while maintaining your outputs and have everything just working together in a symbiotic relationship, so that it just carries on. In a permaculture system, you would create a guild of plants that all work together really well and help each other, and you don’t need to weed and do all those kinds of things.

The Soil Food Web

Through learning about permaculture, I became familiar with the soil food web. Now, the soil food web is everything that’s happening just below the soil and it’s a fascinating subject in and of itself. Just below the top layer of soil, you’ve got fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and nematodes, and all sorts of other organisms that are all working in symbiosis with the plants that you’re growing.

They support the plants, which in turn supports themselves. So, the plants support the soil food web by photosynthesizing and in doing so, some of the sugars that are created through photosynthesis are deposited into the soil. That’s what the mycorrhizal fungi distribute and all the organisms in the soil food web need, and in return they raise things like nitrogen levels and help to feed the plants. Mycorrhizal fungi on their own are a fascinating subject. Some types – there’s lots of different types types of fungi obviously – but some types actually form a symbiotic relationship with plant roots and they literally penetrate the plant roots with their mycorrhizals and they will communicate with the plants in such a way that they can take excess nutrients from different plants and different spaces within the ground and deliver them to the plants that need them.

It really is a fascinating area and every time you till your soil and you turn it up, you disturb that environment. Just by forking over an area of ground that’s not been worked for a long time, you can do so much damage to that ecosystem. That’s why on a lot of monoculture farms the system is completely different, and they need to add fertilizers and commercial products at such a high rate because they are tilling the ground, they are spraying the ground with pesticides and they’re doing everything to basically inhibit this culture below the ground.

By not disturbing this ecosystem and allowing it to do the job it wants to do, which is to support your plants and have your plants support them, it’s already doing so much good and that more than makes up for any good you’re going to do by tilling the ground and disturbing it.

Creating a No-Dig Gardening Bed

Those are the reasons why I started looking at different ways of growing without disturbing the ground and ultimately came to no-dig gardening. I’m going to start talking about how you actually go about no-dig gardening, how you can turn an area of lawn into a vegetable bed without putting a fork in the ground.

To create a no-dig gardening bed, you take any piece of land and usually it would be something that’s got grass on it, but it might be a vegetable plot that you’ve already had. If you have grass or something there that you don’t want, then the first thing to put down is some kind of barrier that’s going to stop that grass growing up through your mulch. What we use is feed sacks; we buy animal feed that comes in paper sacks, but the paper is quite thick, so we cut those in half and lay them out and then we put on top of that some mulch. I have seen online lots and lots of people recommend using cardboard. So, that’s another method you could use and it’s really easy to get hold of cardboard. If you don’t have any lying around, it’s quite easy to find businesses that have lots and lots of boxes that you can take home to make your new bed.

One of the benefits of doing it this way is it’s going to biodegrade and it’s going to keep your weeds down without installing a weed-proof membrane, which doesn’t make any sense for what we’re trying to do. What we want is it to break down over a season or so. The best time to do this would be in the autumn, before you’re planting the following spring, but you can do it anytime. The reason autumn is the best time to do it is because that allows the cardboard to degrade to a point that you can plant above it and your roots are going to have no trouble getting down through it, but it’s had time to inhibit that weed growth. If you do it later, and you can do it today and plant tomorrow, just be aware if you’re planting that you’re going to want to create pockets where your new vegetables can get their roots down through that membrane, whatever it is that you’ve used.
Once you’ve done that, you then put a nice thick layer of mulch on top. When you’re thinking of planting, you’re going to want to be using compost as that mulch. But if you’re doing this in the autumn, or you’re doing it over a large bed and you’re not planting all of it straight away, which is how I tend to work, then we use woodchip, but you can use any mulch, any kind of loose organic matter that is going to break down and feed your soil. If you’ve used woodchip or straw or some kind of mulch that isn’t compost, then you have to effectively think about that as going to be next year’s compost. So, we’re always a year ahead.

When you’re ready to plant, you just pull aside a row wherever you’re ready to plant and you put your compost in that row. Effectively, what you’ll have is your soil and then you’ll have your cardboard or paper which has degraded, and then above that you’ll have four or five inches of mulch, and if that mulch is not compost you will have just pulled aside some of that and you’ll have filled that hole with compost. So, effectively what you’re planting into is four or five inches of compost and this is all above your actual ground level. Whatever you’re planting, you plant into there and it will quite happily get its roots down into the soil which hasn’t been disturbed, so it already has all the benefits of having the food web working for it, ready to go, just waiting for your plant to deliver its end of the bargain. You’re going to find that you get at least as good yields as you do in any uncompacted, loosened soil without hardly any of the work.

<2>Harvesting Time

Once you’ve done that, when it comes to harvesting it gets even better, because most of your root vegetables are going to be in that nice loose top layer. You’re not going to have to dig down through to get hold of them, even for things like potatoes. We mound up our potatoes using just mulch. Again, it can be anything, because the part of the plant that is seeking the nutrients in the soil is either going to be in that small layer of compost or down below in the original soil. That’s where it’s drawing all of its nutrients, but the bit that it’s delivering to you is going to be in that easy to get hold of section in the loose upper layer of compost or mulch. So, when it comes to harvesting your potatoes, nine times out of ten you can literally just pull the plant out and most of the potato will just come up with it without any effort whatsoever, and certainly without any digging.

This works for all plants, but the reason I keep referring to potatoes is because potatoes are where you feel that benefit the most, I think, insofar as harvesting. I got so put off harvesting potatoes when I experienced the back pain that I spoke about in the start of the article, that it made me consider not planting them again if I couldn’t come up with a different way.

Once you have an understanding of the soil food web and how it works, to me, it just doesn’t make sense to garden any other way. We only use no-dig gardening now for all of our vegetables and it’s not a case of it’s a garden hack and it can save you time by cutting these corners – it’s quite the opposite. It’s just the best way of doing it for your plants. So, the corners that it cuts are just a side effect of, I believe, giving your plants an even better growing environment.

Increased Yields and Decreased Crop Rotation

Now, there’s lots of evidence online that suggests that your yields will actually increase. Now personally, we don’t have the data and evidence to tell you that ourselves. Yields can go up and down over years and we don’t control that; we don’t have an area that we no-dig and an area that we dig so that we compare the difference. But online, there are lots of people who have done that and they will tell you that their no-dig gardening yields actually increase year on year against standard methods.

Also, there is less requirement for crop rotation and pest control measures and things like that. I believe on Charles Dowding’s site, he controls for no-dig versus dig gardening over five or six seasons. It’ll show you that his potato yields have gone up, but also that he’s not rotating his crop for several years and not having issues with blight and things like that, which you would normally associate with growing potatoes in the same place over two or more seasons.

There’s lots and lots of ancillary advantages beyond the actual main advantage of growing your crops in a fashion that’s a lot less work and does the right thing by them. It encourages your soil health and encourages your vegetable health, without you having to do nearly as much work as doing it the other way. Hopefully that’s all food for thought and you find that interesting and if you’re not already doing it, then I hope you think about doing it in the future. I’m certainly a massive proponent of it.

20: Episode 20 – sourcing seeds

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

Where to source seeds? There are more options than you might think.

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Transcript:

Sourcing Seeds

Today we’re going to talk about seeds and where you should be looking to source your seeds for your vegetable garden. There’s lots of options available to you and some of them are obvious and some of them perhaps not so much. We’re going to run through them in order of what people are probably already doing.

The Six Best Ways to Source Seeds

Online

We’re going to start with online. I imagine that’s where a lot of people buy their seeds and there’s pros and cons of ordering your seeds online. The first thing is that you’re ordering from a global community, so it’s very easy to buy any variety you wish. That has ups and downs, because it’s not necessarily the case that the seeds are going to be suited to your climate and it’s also far easier to buy seeds from somewhere that perhaps doesn’t have the highest standards. I’ve found that when you buy seeds online, you have a slightly lower germination rate and things like that. So, that’s something that’s worth bearing in mind.

Garden Centers

The next option down the list, insofar as how readily people tend to do it, would be garden centers and shops that sell seeds. Garden centers are great because they also have quite a wide availability. The only downside at the moment with garden centers is, depending on where you live, you may not actually have access to them with the current pandemic. I know that where we are, you’re literally not allowed to open up if you’re a garden center. You might be able to do online purchases from local garden centers where you can go and collect them, but it’s certainly a restriction at the moment.

One huge advantage though of garden centers, when they are open, is that they’re far more likely to be selling the sort of seeds that are produced in such a way that they’re going to be suitable for your environment, for your climate. Another advantage is that, generally speaking, there will be a member of staff there that you can speak to and get a little bit of advice from.

Seed Banks

The third way of procuring seeds, and this is one that perhaps more people are unaware of, are seed banks. There’s lots and lots of different types of seed bank setups and different areas will have different availability, but it’s certainly worth doing a search and finding what seed banks are available in your local area. Seed banks are a great place to communicate with other people who are doing something similar to you and to get advice on what type of seeds to get, but the reason I love seed banks is the ethos of community and they can quite frequently actually be a way of getting free seeds.

Generally speaking, how a seed bank works, or at least the seed banks I’m familiar with, is there’s a communal pool of seeds and you go along and you take whatever seeds you want. They’re also referred to a seed libraries in some cases and I’ll explain why here, because effectively what you do is you borrow some seeds, so you withdraw a packet of seeds from the seed library and then at the end of the season you return the seeds in the form of seeds that you’ve saved from your plants.

This is a fantastic, sustainable way of growing, because it perpetuates the seed varieties – there’s no actual outlay; the only outlay is in your time. It also encourages community and it encourages you to perhaps go slightly outside your comfort zone with saving the seeds, and it helps you to learn some more skills. And of course everybody that’s going there is in the same boat. They may be slightly further up the stream than you insofar as experience, but they all are doing the same as you are. So, not only is it a great way to initially get your first lot of vegetables growing at no cost, but it’s also a great way of upskilling, because everybody there is going to have the knowledge and be more than willing to help you learn how to do your seed saving.

Saving Your Own

So, my fourth way of procuring seeds is saving your own. Now, the whole ethos of self-sufficiency is one around perpetual systems that keep themselves going and don’t require inputs, and there’s nothing more perpetual than the system of growing your own plants, saving your own seeds and then growing your own plants the following year from the seeds you’ve already saved. It’s the best way of keeping your own seeds. Not only does it guarantee that you’re going to have varieties you’re familiar with that grow in your area, but it’s also going to allow you to select the best plants for the saving of those seeds.

Something to be aware of when you’re saving seeds is how different plants germinate. Different plants will germinate in different ways that can hybridize across species. One of the things to be aware of, for example with tomato plants, if you’re growing four or five different types of tomato plants in the same space, then the seeds you’re saving from those tomatoes are very likely going to be a genetic mix of those plants, and this can happen across species and different plants are differently susceptible to this. Some plants are very rigid and will only pollinate amongst themselves, others will cross pollinate. It is something that you should do your own research in into the different varieties you want to grow, but it shouldn’t put you off the idea of saving seeds

Things like beans and peas are the easiest seeds to save because they literally do all the work for you. All you need to do is leave a few of the beans or pea pods on the plant, let them dry just as mother nature intended, and then harvest them later than you’re harvesting the ones you’re going to eat, and they’re ready to be sown the following year. Keep them nice and dry, and in a cool place out of light and they’ll just sit there quite happily ready to go the following year.

Local Gardening Community

The next place to source seeds, and this is another favorite, is to ask your local gardening community, that can be your neighbors, it could be your family members. But anyone who’s growing their own plants and has done so for some time is probably saving at least some of their seeds, and in most cases they would be delighted to share some with someone else.
So, it’s a great way again of connecting that community and getting hold of free seeds.

I certainly recommend you start reaching out and trying to start those connections if you haven’t already, because especially now there’s so many people out there that are keen gardeners and they are struggling for these connections because everything’s changed. No one is operating in the way that we did six months ago. So, it’s a great time to try and forge these new connections, even though it might be difficult to do it with social distancing rules and what have you. Just pick up the phone, or speak over the garden fence.

Perennial Plants

The final option for where to source seeds is that you don’t have to source seeds for your perennial plants. If you introduce more and more perennial plants, then that’s less and less seeds that you will need to introduce every year. So, when I’m talking about perennial plants,
I’m thinking of things like asparagus, artichokes, all these things that can deliver fresh veg
for you every year, but you don’t need to actually be sourcing those seeds every year. Those are great things to have in your garden. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t save seeds from these plants to propagate more, of course you can, but it means that you’re not necessarily needing to sow those seeds every year.

Choosing What Seeds To Grow

Those are my quick thoughts running down where to source seeds. In the next section, I’m going to talk about the things that you need to be thinking about when you are actually choosing the seeds that you’re collecting.

So, once you know where you’re getting your seeds and you’re going to start choosing which seeds you’re going to purchase, the sort of things you need to think about are different varieties within species. You might want to think about early and late varieties so that you can extend your season. So, you can get some early varieties of something in the early end of the season, and then have a second crop of late varieties coming along after them.

The second thing is locality. Now, local is always better. It’s definitely something that’s worth looking at. A variety that is proven to grow well in your area is definitely worth far more of your attention than an unknown variety from somewhere else in the world that you’ve no idea how it’s going to actually adapt to your climate.

The next thing you might want to consider are seeds of plants that have been specifically bred for resistances to certain diseases or things that they might be susceptible to. There are lots of plants out there that are resistant to bolting and if you’re someone that thinks, “Well, when it comes to harvesting I might not have as much time as I would like to go and harvest as readily as might be perfect,” then you might want to go for an anti-bolting variety, so they’re going to stay harvestable for longer.

And the final thing I wanted to say is, and I’ve already touched on this several times about locality, it really is worth speaking to people who are having good success growing things in your area.

So, that wraps it up for this article. Hopefully you found something in there that’s thought-provoking, makes you think slightly differently, or you might have learned something new.

18: Episode 18 – a conversation across the pond

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

This episode I talk with Phil Schultz, a homesteader in the process of building his new homestead in Missouri. I started out expecting the conversation to revolve around the differences between a U.S. homestead and my own family home were, but it turns out there was far more shared experiences and thoughts than diverging ones…

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17: Episode 17 – Wild Mushrooms

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

I have a shelf full of dried foraged mushrooms, you should too! Here we talk about how to safely forage for edible mushrooms.

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Transcript:

Wild Mushrooms

If the idea of foraging for mushrooms fills you with dread and fear, then you’re not alone. It’s quite common for people to categorize the idea of foraging for mushrooms as something completely unsafe. Well, I’m hopefully going to try and dispel that for you. I’m certainly not a mycologist. I’m not a mushroom expert. What I am is a proficient forager and I’m going to try and just work through the whole idea of foraging for mushrooms to hopefully give you the confidence to go out and start looking yourself. Well, of course, I have nothing but respect for mycologists and I rely heavily on the expertise of people who have spent years and years studying the field of fungi.

I’m not by any stretch trying to say that I am the authority on this subject. I’m not saying that I know better than anything you might have read in a book or anything like that. But what I am saying is, there are some steps you can take which should be able to demystify the subject and lift the veil of fear that a lot of people have around the subject because it really needn’t be that way.

Looking For Wild Mushrooms Out In Nature

There are over 10,000 known species of fungi of which we can see just by walking around in nature. That’s part of the reason why it becomes a bit of a minefield and very difficult for some people to get their heads around the idea of going out and looking for them. So, I’m going to try and break down a lot of the different areas that you might want to spend a bit more time researching. But also I’m going to leave you with some really clear pointers as to what you might want to look at next and also give you the confidence to go out and start having a look.

Availability Of Edible Mushrooms

Even though there are thousands upon thousands of different species, we can quite quickly just discount a large portion of that because over fifty per cent is going to be of no interest to the forager. What I suggest you do when you’re starting out is you pick a very narrow range of things that you’re going out and looking for. We’re going to talk about that range in a little bit, but I just want to talk about the actual proportions of mushrooms out there.

Once you’ve discounted well over 50 per cent, what you’re left with is about 1/5 that will make you sick to various degrees, about 1 per cent that are deadly and then 5 per cent which is delicious. Now, this isn’t in terms of the percentage of how readily you’ll find them. I’m talking about species. So It’s really important before we go any further to introduce the standard caveats, which are that make sure you use multiple sources to identify something. Don’t ever just rely on one source. Do your own research and homework and never ever eat anything
unless you can personally 100 per cent guarantee that it is what you think it is.

These are the caveats that you see on every mushroom foraging site and in every mushroom foraging book and they’re there for good reason. No one wants to be responsible for someone else’s mistake. Now, there are some good practice guidelines around this as well. So when you have identified a mushroom that you believe to be edible but have not eaten before, even if you’re a hundred per cent sure, the best practice is to only eat it once it’s cooked. Also, eat a small amount and keep some of the mushrooms in the fridge. The reason you keep some in the fridge is so that should you get it wrong, then a doctor or someone else is able to identify it and give you the antidote if one exists. Now when you’re first starting out, it can be very difficult to know where to start. There are a few things that I recommend and I’m going to go through them in order of preference.

Sources Of Information

Guidance From Mentor

The absolutely best way to learn how to forage for edible mushrooms is to have a mentor. A mentor can be someone you know, who’s willing to take you out on foraging walks. You can also pay to go on mushroom foraging courses, which I’ve been on and I find them incredibly useful to this day. So that’s certainly the best place to start. However, these things are not quite as easy in the current environment as they used to be with the coronavirus pandemic. We’re not as readily finding groups that we can go and meet nor should we undertake these activities right now.

Online Forums

So the next best thing is online groups and forums. There are some fantastic mushroom identification groups on Facebook and other places and they are a great place for you to post pictures of what you find and to ask for help identifying them. Again, you need to make sure that you find your information from a varied group of sources and never just trust one source. In my experience, they have a fantastic wealth of information.

Books And The Internet

The third place to get your information is books and the internet. There’s a wide variety of information that conflicts in books as well. Mushrooms and fungi are a field that is constantly changing and adapting as mycologists discover more about them.
So the Latin names for mushrooms can quite often change and there are also several mushrooms that you can find from varying sources that tell you a mushroom is edible or inedible as science changes. So it’s always worth checking multiple sources.

Easy-to-identify Mushrooms

I’m going to now suggest that you start by finding, whatever source of information you use, very few types of mushrooms that are easy to identify and specifically cannot be confused with anything poisonous. I’m going to run through a shortlist of those now.

Giant Puffballs

The first one is the giant puffball which is the easiest mushroom for anyone to identify. If you find a giant white ball that’s clear all the way through, white rather all the way through, firm and large, then it can’t be anything other than the giant puffball. Only when these are very small can they be mistaken for some dangerous mushrooms. Those are mushrooms that are still within their egg sac and ultimately won’t go on to look like a giant puffball, but when they’re very small the giant puffball can look similar to the poisonous species. So once it’s over a few inches across, then you really won’t have a problem.

Beefsteak Fungus

The next one is the beefsteak fungus. The beefsteak fungus grows as a bracket on trees and from a few searches online or from your books, you’re going to be able to identify that readily. It’s another mushroom that cannot be mistaken for anything poisonous. A few others are wood ears. So once you find an illustrative reference source, once you find a mushroom that looks like that growing in the right habitat, it can’t really be anything else.

Hedgehog Fungus

Finally, Hedgehog fungus is one of my personal favourites to eat as well. It’s one that you can readily familiarize yourself with and it’s gonna be very difficult for you to confuse that with anything else. So those are four or five that I think you should definitely get under your belt
for ones that you’re happy to go out and identify.

Parts Of Mushroom

When it comes to identifying mushrooms, you need to be familiar with the different parts of the mushroom particularly if you’re asking for help with identification from someone else because they might mention parts of the mushroom as a specific feature that you can use for your identification. So if we picture a typical mushroom that you might see on a game of Super Mario Brothers or in the supermarket, what we have is the stem of the mushroom and then a domed cap. So we’re going to work from the top down. So that domed cap is indeed referred to as a cap. On the underside of that, you will find gills or pores and these are very important for identification. So if you are taking photos of a mushroom to show someone else for identification, it’s really important that you get a picture of the underside as well as from the top.

Working down, we’ve got the stem which is called a stipe and then on the stem, we might see a ring. This ring is formed when the cap of the mushroom that was attached to the stem gradually comes away. So this can also leave remnants of that veil around the outside of the cap. These are all key identifying features for different mushrooms. At the bottom of the stem, you may see what’s called a volva which is an egg sac. Some mushrooms start life in what looks like a little egg and then they gradually break free of it and that egg sac is remaining at the bottom. So the cap and the volva are all connected up in a ball and then as the mushroom grows, they come apart and the vulva is left at the base. Those are all the basic parts that shape a mushroom, Then, of course, you have another fungus that doesn’t necessarily have the stem particularly growing on trees. You’ll have the bracket fungus which is attached to the tree and come out like a shelf or a bracket.

Legality Of Foraging Mushrooms

With regards to the legality of foraging effectively, check your own legislation where you live and see that you are allowed to forage for mushrooms for personal use on basically any way you’re allowed to go. So if you’re on a piece of public land, then you are allowed to harvest mushrooms
for personal use. What you’re not allowed to do is commercially harvest mushrooms. You’re not allowed to harvest all the mushrooms in the new forest and sell them to restaurants. That would be a commercial foraging venture and that would be illegal. When you’re first starting out wherever you’re going to forage for mushrooms, it’s really important to manage your expectations as well because I spent probably six months or more before I found the first edible mushrooms that I could identify.

A large part of the reason for that is because I wasn’t really doing the things I’m going to teach you to do and I wasn’t really looking in the right place and the right things. I went out with my mushroom books and basically started looking for as many mushrooms as I can find and identify all the ones and then I’ll know which are the edible ones. This is not the right way for starting out. Once you have become familiar with a range of edible mushrooms, then you can start diving a bit deeper into mycology. I strongly recommend that way of doing things. So once you’re familiar with a few species that you can readily identify all year-round and you’re looking to increase your knowledge, you need to start looking into mushroom families and how you can start putting things into groups of mushrooms. That’s going to increase your ability to readily identify things but also critically increase your ability to discount a lot of mushrooms as you go around foraging. This is really crucial if you’re going to spend the time trying to identify unknown mushrooms and you want to make sure you’re not wasting that time on big groups of families that you can discount as being uninteresting to the forager.

Foraging Mushrooms All Year-Round

I live in the UK and the climate is different in different parts of the world where you’re living. So at the start of the year when it’s still very cold in January, we’ve got oyster mushrooms and velvet shank. Oyster mushrooms are really easy to identify particularly once they get to a decent size and velvet shank mushrooms likewise. The only poisonous mushroom look-alike of velvet shanks is the funeral bell. We also have wood ears right through the depths of winter through February and through March which you find growing on Elder or downed Elder tree. It can’t really be anything else. So that’s another great easy to identify edible mushroom that’s available all through winter.

Then as we come into March, April and May into the spring, we have St. George’s mushrooms. These mushrooms are grassland mushrooms. So if you want to go out looking for them, my only advice really is to just put the steps in and keep your eyes open. They are a mushroom that looks similar in shape to our portobello mushrooms, but they’re a bit creamier and one of the key identifiers for those mushrooms is actually the smell. They smell melee or flowery. There are also Morels. Morels have completely different habitats. They tend to grow on wood chip and they are a highly sought-after mushroom. They’re quite easy to identify, but they’re not as easy to find.

Then towards the end of spring and into the start of summer, we have chicken of the woods and dryad’s saddle that grow on trees. Continuing into the summer, fairy ring champignons are fantastically edible. We also have charcoal burners, common puffballs and shaggy ink caps coming out towards the end of summer. So it’s also important to bear in mind that nature doesn’t share our diary and it’s quite apt at changing its mind on when it might do something in any given year. Towards the end of summer and as we roll into autumn, we have our parasols, wood blewits and cepes. Going into winter, we are back to our oysters and velvet Shanks. So that’s illustrative to show you that there are mushrooms that you can forage

Final Thoughts

The last thing I have on this subject is really possibly the most important one in is how you can go from someone wandering aimlessly in the wilderness to someone who is really focusing their search. You have to start with two things: season and location. So you start with the season and find two or three most common edible mushrooms available that season. Suppose, they are St. George’s mushrooms, morels and chicken of the woods so we know that we’re not going to reduce our chance of finding them to zero by looking at them the wrong time of the year.

The next thing is the habitat. Spend the time to make sure that you are familiar with the type of habitat and that the mushroom you’re looking for grows in again. It’s about reducing the chance of us wasting our time. Once you’ve done those things, your chances of success are going to go through the roof. It might take you a little while before you find your first edible mushroom. You might not be a hundred per cent confident with it and it takes you a bit longer to find someone who can ratify what you believe to be the truth. Then it might still take you longer to go back out find them again, bring them home and be a hundred per cent sure to eat them.

Eventually, it’s going to take you less time to go through that process with the next lot of mushrooms that you’re looking for and you’ll move through the environment much quicker and be able to discount things because you won’t be in that mindset of needing to identify every single type of fungi that you find. I’m not an expert and certainly not a mycologist. I’m just talking from the point of view of a forager someone who’s self-taught, someone who’s quite confident to be able to go out and identify maybe 25 30 different types of mushrooms in a year, someone who has jars of dried foraged mushrooms at home and never has the buyer mushroom in a shop. I’m trying to share what’s worked for me and hopefully, it works for you as well.

16: Episode 16 – Plant watering tips

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

It’s important to understand how to give our plants the best chance for survival. Understanding how the way we water effects them can be really important.

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Transcript:

Plant Watering Tips

We’re going to be talking about some plant watering tips. Plant watering is something that sounds simple and ultimately it is once you understand what’s going on. Many people make very simple mistakes that are so easy to cure and it’s just a lack of understanding of what’s happening that leads to those mistakes. So we’re going to go through a few tips today.

How To Water Your Plants The Right Way

Seed Germination

The first thing I want to say about plant watering is you need to understand what’s going on with your actual plants and the stage your plants are at. When a plant is just a seed, it’s nothing but a load of stored information. It’s the genetic code of that plant waiting for the right environment. The right environment is usually moisture. As soon as you place that seed in your compost and introduce some water to it, it starts growing. At this point, it is literally just a package of information. It doesn’t have all the root system, stems, and all the ways of storing energy and water that it will have as a mature plant. As it grows bigger, it requires a different type of care. So as a plant grows, it’s going to send out some tiny little roots and a couple of little leaves. It’s pretty obvious what these things do. The roots are to take in the water and nutrients that it needs and the leaves are to photosynthesize.

Keep The Soil Moist

Once you’ve got your plant germinated, it’s really important not to let it dry out. It’s a tiny little thing and it doesn’t have much water in it. Those little leaves have got hardly any water in and the second that you ask the plant to look after itself with regards to fluids, it’s going to fail. So you need to keep that soil moist. Once it dries out, that is when your plant starts to germinate.

The first tip is to keep the soil moist, not wet, when your seed is just starting out. You don’t want to rot your seed. By keeping the soil wet as opposed to moist, what can happen is that your seed can actually start getting mouldy and rotting. So if you look at the soil, pick it up and squeeze it, could you imagine ringing it out? If you can, then it’s probably too wet. But if you touch it with your finger and it feels a little dry like dust, then it’s definitely too dry. So it’s a bit of a balancing act when you first start it out and you might want to water your plants a little bit less and more often particularly if you’re keeping them in a greenhouse or somewhere like that.

How Plants Get Nutrients

The next thing to think about is that plants don’t eat the nutrients in the soil. They drink it. They can only access the nutrients in the soil if there is some moisture. This is more critical with your seeds and seedlings. If you go out into your lawn and you poke your finger down into the soil, it doesn’t matter if it hasn’t rained for three days, the soil is still damp and that’s because of the bulk of it. It’s very different from a little seedling in a pot. So if the soil is not moist, then your plant literally cannot drink and it cannot take what it needs from the soil.

Mulching Your Soil

One way to help your vegetable bed to keep moist once you’ve planted your seedlings is to mulch it. Mulch is especially important for young plants for all those reasons we’ve just talked about. It keeps your soil moist if you’ve got a couple of inches of mulch on top of the surface of your soil. This is really important regardless of your soil type particularly if you’ve got soil that is going to dry out very quickly. If you keep that mulch there, then everything underneath it is going to be nice and moist and a perfect environment for your plants to grow.

Best Time To Water Your Plants

Some people make a mistake and that is when signs of overwatering look like under-watering. Plants can wilt through over-watering just like they can through under-watering. So don’t necessarily assume that if your plants are wilting and look thirsty, that’s necessarily a sign that you’re under-watering. Just have a look at the soil and then make your decision.

The next tip is to water in the morning. When your seedlings are young or in very hot weather, you might find you need to water more than once a day. But if you are watering just once a day, try and do it in the morning if you can. The reason for this is because the plants have got the water when they need it most. They’re doing most of their work during the day when they’re photosynthesizing. It’s when they’re doing most of their growing. So if you can water in the morning, then your plants have got what they need and when they need it. By watering them, you’re not only giving the plants the water they need but also allowing access to the nutrients in the compost of the soil because they can’t eat, they only drink.

Consistent Watering

When it comes to vegetables in particular consistency is really important. So you don’t want to have a situation where you are absolutely deluging your plants with water one day and then not watering for three days. Lots of plants will really struggle with this like cucumbers, tomatoes and hungry plants of that sort. They need that consistent watering. They will just fail to set through otherwise. All the fruit they set will be very poor. If you suddenly increase or decrease the amount of water for carrots, they can split the roots. So it is quite important to be consistent where you can. You can do this with any method you please but do try and consistently water your plants. We use a little drip-feed in our polytunnel. That’s the method we choose so that they’re constantly getting that low-level watering.

How Do Plant’s Root System Work

The next thing is to understand how your plant’s roots work. If you’re giving your plants a very light sprinkling of water a couple of times a day, that water is going to sit near the surface and that’s where your plant’s roots are going to be encouraged to grow. If you think long term if all your plant’s roots are sat up near the surface, they’re not going to have access to that constant moisture that’s available deeper down in the soil. Particularly with tomato plants, once they’re planted in the ground, make sure that you water them deeply and that means give them a really good soak so that the water gets down deep into the ground if the weather is dry. This will encourage your roots to go down to that same depth and that same depth is where the water is going to keep that soil moist for longer.

This is going to do two things: It’s going to allow them to be more healthy and able to look after themselves when there isn’t as much water available on the surface and it’s also going to take the pressure off you to have to water them every day once they get established because their roots are going to be in the right place to look after themselves. A very shallow root layer is going to struggle because it’s only going to have access to the water when you put it there whereas the deep root layer is going to be able to look after itself in the long term.

Final Thoughts

One of the last things I wanted to mention is not to water your plants with a big spray hose all over their leaves in really hot weather because this can scorch the leaves. So when it’s the middle of the day in the middle of summer, you want to make sure that you’re getting the water to the base of the plant and not over the leaves because you can actually damage the leaves that way and even kill it in really severe cases.

Finally, the last thing is to make sure that you’ve got a method of watering your seedlings that aren’t going to damage them. So if you’ve got a drip irrigation system, which you can set up yourself by just a piece of hosepipe and punched little holes in it that you can run around the base of the plants, then that’s great. But other than that if you’re going to use a hose system with one of those trigger guns, make sure you’ve got it set to mist or the finest setting you have. Even on mist, make sure you stand a fair distance away from your young seedlings because you will just blow them over flat with the power of that water because they’re very young plants
and they’re doing everything they can to get established and we don’t want to knock them back. So I hope you find all of my plant watering tips useful.