Author: Carl Mintern

15: Episode 15 – Incorporating chickens

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

Chickens are an integral part of almost every self sufficiency system. Here I talk a little about breeds, fencing, breeding, feed and other points regarding keeping hens.

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-sufficient-hub/message

Transcript:

Incorporating Chickens

Even if you are remotely interested in self-sufficiency, you absolutely have to get some chickens. They have to be a part of your self-sufficiency plan. They do so much work and to try
and set up any kind of self-sufficient system where you want to work towards being 100% food self-reliant, then chickens are just an absolute no-brainer. They’re such an integral part of what we do here on my farm and I’m going to talk to you today about why you should have them. I’m also going to discuss a few more basic introductory things that you need to know about choosing your chickens, how you look after them, what they’re going to do for you and why you really do need to consider getting them if you haven’t already.

How To Incorporate Chickens in your Homestead

Deciding Type of Chickens

First of all, you need to decide on which chickens you are going to get. To start out at least, you should focus on egg-laying breeds now. Strictly speaking, there are three different types of chicken: Egg-laying chickens, meat birds and dual-purpose birds, which do both but they don’t do either quite as well as the dedicated birds would. I’m going to start talking about those three types of birds but there is a fourth type and they are more ornamental ones.

We have quite a selection here on the homestead. We’ve got lots of egg-laying birds. We don’t have any specific meat breeds. We get our chicken meat as a byproduct of what else we’re doing here. We have aesthetic birds as the fourth type which we have here as a small flock of predominantly Pekin Bantams, which do lay eggs. We are happy with the number of eggs they produce but they are more like our pets. They also command quite a decent price so you can breed your chickens and sell the young chickens of whatever breed you have. So that’s just another way that they can pay for themselves.

Egg Laying Birds

I’m going to start by talking about egg-laying birds and the main breed to promote from my point of view are ISA Browns. The breed basically makes up the whole of the battery farming sector of our farms. They don’t have a particularly nice life when they are barn birds. So I do want to encourage you to look into saving battery hens. ISA Brown is just a great bird. They’re so well-behaved and we find them so easy to look after. We’ve got over a hundred here and it’s the bird that we have the most of. Over 50% of our flock are ex-battery hens. Ex-battery hens will be put into work at a very young age. They start laying eggs when they’re very young and they lay eggs every day at a ridiculous rate. Then they start to drop off when they’re just a year and a half old. So after a year and a half of living in not very good conditions there, they are no longer deemed worthy and they go off to slaughter and end up in the animal feed (dog food) and things like that. At that point, even though under the very tight margins of a battery farming set up, they’re not viable. They are very much backyard hens.

So we get most of our birds as ex-battery hens. They spend that period of their lives churning out eggs at a ridiculous rate under not very good conditions, and we give them a beautiful retirement. We give them lots of open space and grass. You can consider getting them because it’s a nice way of increasing the well-being of that animal’s life, that’s already served humanity in such an abhorrent way. We also buy some ISA Browns which are of the same breed but we buy them at point of lay, which means they’re just about to start laying. So we also get that extra bit of time when they’re at their highest point of production. But again, we don’t try to make any of the situations that they live in, out of nature. These are the egg-laying breeds that I personally use but there are also some different varieties if you want to go down that road, for example, Australorps, Rhode Island Reds and Leghorn are well-known egg-laying breeds.

Meat Birds

Any bird that is raised for meat can be referred to as a broiler. But the broilers that are used in the factory farming process are super inbred to a point where they don’t even function as animals anymore. They’re bred to put on weight at such a rate that their legs can’t even support their weight and it really is quite a disgusting state of affairs. There are some less inbred versions of birds that you can breed. If you want to breed something specifically to get them to a nice size fairly quickly, then Jersey Giant and the Orpington are great options. Orpingtons are nice birds because they’re dual-purpose birds. The only downside is they don’t lay as many eggs as your egg breeding hens and also they take a little bit longer to get to their full size. But if your main goal is to have a dual purpose bird and maintain the welfare of the animal, then all Orpingtons are a great variety to go for.

Breeding Chickens

When you’ve got a flock of birds, you’ll have a decision to make and that is whether you’re going to keep a cock bird. My advice is that you do and the main reason for this is breeding. So I keep all of our hens with at least one cock bird. You only need one cock bird / 12 hens or more and they will keep all of those eggs fertile. then you can raise your own chicks, which you can do either in an incubator or you can let nature take its course and allow your hands to sit on those eggs and raise them.

Now, ISA Browns don’t tend to go broody and sit on their eggs because they’ve had that bred out of them. It’s not a useful thing for a battery farmer to have to deal with a lot of broody hens that aren’t laying anymore. But if you’ve got a mixture of birds, then you almost certainly will have some broody birds every Spring and quite often, other times of the year as well. Our Pekins are well-known as being really good broody hens. So when one of our Pekins decides that she’s going to sit on some eggs, we make sure that she’s got some of our ISA brown eggs under her and she’s going to hatch our next round of egg-laying birds, which is, a great way of keeping that cycle of energy. We don’t have to go out and buy more birds.

Now, of course, only the females will lay your eggs. So a byproduct of your own breeding system is you’re going to have cock birds that you don’t want. Beyond the few cock birds that you will want for breeding, every other bird is just going to be hungry mouths to feed. It doesn’t actually give you much back. We allow them to grow to maturity, have a great life and then they become meat birds. So that’s how we produce our meat which is a byproduct of our egg-laying birds.

How To Breed Your Birds

I’m going to talk more about how you breed your birds and how you use an incubator. So breeding your own hens, if you’ve got a broody hen, is that you’ll have a hen that decides she’s not getting up anytime soon. She’s literally going to sit in the nesting box for days on end.
She will just come out for the drink and a quick bite of food and then straight back. It’s because she’s decided she’s going to sit on these eggs and hatch them. In this period, they will readily accept extra eggs. So you can either swap the eggs that are under her for the egg you want to be hatched or you can just add a few to hatch the ones that are already under her. It’s quite important that you separate her into another little run so that other hens can’t continually lay eggs that she might try to adopt and you’ll lose track of which ones were she supposed to sit on. Eventually, she’ll have too many that she can’t keep them warm and you’ll have a high failure rate. Another way is to use an electric incubator. We personally use the broody hen method because it’s natural and free. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using the incubator method. The only downside of the incubator method, apart from the electric costs, is that you also don’t end up with a mother hen who can teach chicks how to eat, how to forage etc.

Feeding Your Birds

When you’ve got your baby hens, you can either buy a product called chick crumb, which is basically like chicken feed pellet but a much smaller version for them and it’s got all the extra nutrients the chicks need. What we feed ours are mashed up boiled eggs mixed with a bit of bread and it’s got everything they need along with a bit of foraging that their mum will take care of for you. So that’s how we feed our chicks.

Feeding your birds in general across the board is dependent largely on the size area you’re able to give them. The bigger the area you’re going to give them, the less you’re going to need to find a feed for them. That is because they are great forages. They will eat slugs, bugs and worms and also peck at the grass and other plants, in my experience. You can check online for lists of plants that are poisonous to your hens. They’re also great at eating scraps from the kitchen. So with a bit of thought and enough space, you can get your food costs down to 0. Corn and mealworms also make a great treat for them. If you’ve got some chickens that you’re struggling to tame or you’re struggling to get to go away at night, teaching them that a few mealworms will be put in the run before you shut them away will definitely do the job. Like all animals, they will need access to lots of fresh, clean water.

If you’re going to feed your chicks in a feeder, I strongly recommend that you use a treadle feeder. They do have a cost. It is a big box that stores the food in and it’s a vermin-proof box. To access the feed, the chickens stand on a little trap door that opens up where the feed is and they’re really effective and they keep your feed costs down primarily because there are no rats and mice that you’re feeding.

How To Keep Your Birds Safe

The next thing you’ll want to think about is keeping your bird safe. When we think of free-ranging birds, we imagine they’ve got access to acres of land and everybody’s having a grand time. But unfortunately, that’s not the reality. If you were to truly free-range your birds and if I was to allow my chickens access to our whole garden, they would get picked off by the fox in short order. They would not last a month. So we do free-range our birds but we do it an electric fence. We’ve got an electric fence that we move. They’ve got access to grass all the time and they’ve got lots of space.

Unfortunately, the idea of actually free-ranging a bird doesn’t really work if you also want to keep them alive. Free-ranging is important for keeping the costs down because the more you give them access to land, the more they can feed themselves. The hens that we’ve got outside our kitchen have got access to probably half an acre of fenced-off garden and dogs are also free-ranging in so they keep our animals safe in that space. The hens that are a bit further out are mainly egg layers. They’re not in that space with the dogs so there’s nothing there to deter the fox and the badger. Within that electric fencing, we have another run within that’s got six-foot harris fencing all the way around it. We’ve also got a strip of the electric fence about 8 inches off the ground all the way around as well to stop things digging under it. So you do need to think about the safety of your birds.

Another way a lot of people do it is they keep them in a hutch overnight and then they let them out onto their lawn in the day. The fox is the biggest predator here in the UK so you need to keep them safe from whatever predators live in your area. Something that can help with that is an automatic door. We’ve got two automatic doors on our runs out in the field where the electric fence is. Once our hens are away at night, the door comes down automatically. It’s on a solar sensor and that’s just that extra layer of security for our hens. Once you’ve got your fencing in place if you’ve got a normal four-foot fence or something of that nature, your chickens will, depending on your breed, learn to jump up on it and get to wherever they want to get. So you can clip their wings. It’s really simple, you just extend their wing out and you take care not to actually damage the wing itself, just cut the flight feathers back with a pair of scissors. We normally just do one wing and that stops them from being able to fly where we don’t want them. It doesn’t hurt them any more because it’s like cutting your grown out fingernails.

Another thing is that you might want to worm your chickens. It really does depend on your stocking levels and whether you’re able to change the ground because the worms live in their faeces If you’re moving the hens to a different plot every six weeks, letting that ground recover and using good animal husbandry, then you probably won’t need to. We’ve also got some wormwood bushes that I’ve transplanted into all the areas that we put the chickens and they can also self medicate from that bush.

Final Thoughts

So that’s just about everything I’ve got to say about raising chickens. Hopefully, if you don’t have any already, I’ve inspired you to consider getting some. Even though the main purpose of having them is to feed into what we’re trying to achieve and being food secure, they also make great pets. They’ve got great characters and I’m sure if you get them you won’t regret it.

14: Episode 14 – planning a vegetable garden

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

What sort of things go in to planning a vegetable garden? Here I discuss things like wind exposure and crop rotation.

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-sufficient-hub/message

Transcript:

Planning a Vegetable Garden

Today, we’re going to talk about planning your vegetable garden. When it comes to planning my vegetable garden, it’s one of the jobs I actually really look forward to – I get quite excited. I personally do it on a Word document and plan it all out. I’ve basically drawn out a map of my vegetable garden that I printed out and I take with me, which I now keep in the polytunnel. You don’t have to go to that effort. It’s really as much or as little as you want it to be, but personally, I like to spend quite a lot of time planning what’s going where. I put quite a lot of different factors into my decisions. It doesn’t have to be as in-depth as I make it. I do it because I enjoy it, but there are quite a lot of factors to be considered if you do want to think about them. So I’m going to go through some of those.

Planning Around Your Soil Type

When it comes to planning your vegetable garden, particularly if it’s the first year and you currently don’t have a vegetable garden, then one of the things to think about is what sort of ground do you have? If you have a big garden, like we do here, then you might have more than one spot in which to choose. What sort of soil do you have? Have you got a loamy soil, or a sandy soil, or a clay soil?

These likely are going to be the same throughout your whole garden, but you might find that some areas are better than others, particularly if you’ve inherited a garden where one area was already worked, then you might find that area is more conducive to growing vegetables than a separate area. So, have a look at what sort of soil you have. If you have a choice of different areas, then you might opt to go for a loamy type of soil, if you’ve got that choice; most of us aren’t that lucky. Where we live, although we have quite a large area, it’s all clay.

So, if you have a loamy soil, what that means is that it looks almost like when you buy compost, it’s that lovely, black material that falls apart in your hands and it’s the sweet spot in the middle of the most common soil types. On one end of that common soil spectrum, you’d have your sandy soils, which do feel quite sandy and you can see that when you look at them. And on the other end, you have the clay soils, which clump together when you roll them in your hand. They each have different characteristics that you, as a grower, should be aware of. Sandy soil, as you might expect, drains quite fast, so you might find that you have to water it more frequently. But, you don’t get some of the issues that you do get with clay, because that fast draining soil is actually a benefit when you have quite a lot of rain and for a lot of plants that are going to enjoy having dryer feet. On the other end of the spectrum, you have clay, which is very clumpy and very hard to dig. The biggest issue with clay is that it will dry out quite quickly if you get prolonged dry periods. It’s going to dry and crack, and if you get very wet periods, it’s going to get very claggy and difficult to work.

Whatever type of ground you have, you’re going to want to at least consider using a mulch. The best way to increase the quality of almost any sort of soil is just to add organic matter, so compost. Hopefully you’re making your own compost that you can use, but you can also use well-rotted manure or the old bedding from your animals. All those things really increase the quality of your soil for growing.

Positioning Your Garden Bed

Once you’ve decided what sort of soil you have and where you’re going to put your vegetable bed, the next thing to consider is what position is it in? Is it going to get lots of sun? Is it a south-facing part of your garden? Is it a north-facing part of your garden? Is it particularly exposed to the wind? Whatever it is, with regards to how it’s exposed to the elements, then that might guide some of your other decisions about what you’re going to plant and maybe whereabouts on that plot you’re going to plant things.

There’s very little that can’t be grown, regardless of where in your garden your plot is, but you might change up the ratios slightly. So, if your plot doesn’t get a tremendous amount of sun, you might try to grow some more of the leafy green type vegetables and less of the nightshades, because those leafy greens are quite happy with partial shade, whereas the nightshades are really going to want as much sun as you can give them in most cases. Another thing, is it very very exposed to wind? Because if it is, you might need a windbreak. You could even use your pole beans as a windbreak. This is a great way of getting a dual purpose from your crop, which is something I’m very keen to do.

The final thing about positions is to think about the actual slope of the ground. You might have it undulating slightly and you’ll find that higher points obviously are going to dry out that little bit quicker than the lower points.

Knowing When to Start Planting

The last thing is, and this really is only if you have quite a large space, is it a frost pocket?
Is it quite exposed or is it fairly sheltered. Do you personally live in a frost pocket?
Do you live out in the country or are you in a town? Because this is going to affect your frost dates.

Which brings us on to the next thing to consider, which is when to plant. Again, this is predominantly going to be based on your climate. If you are in the UK or in America or anywhere else, you will have access to some kind of zoning system. Even though I’m not an American, I’m familiar with the USDA zoning system and I imagine most people are, that’s why I mention it. Here in the UK, we have our own, so familiarize yourself with that and work out what zone you’re in. That’s going to dictate to some degree when you should plant certain crops, but it’s also going to dictate which crops are going to do well where you are. That’s an important part of planning your garden.

Working Out What to Plant

The next step is to go through everything I went through in the “Which Plants” article, and that is to work out what your family wants to eat. What are you going to be able to grow? What do you want to grow? Get together your list of actual plants that you’re going to choose to put in your plot, bearing in mind all those other considerations that we’ve just spoken about.

The next thing is to plan your rotations, after you’ve gone through all those other steps. This is where it does start getting fun. What you’re faced with, if you’re doing it the way I do with a physical piece of paper, which I’m ultimately going to print out, but ultimately what you’re going to have is this blank canvas on one hand and a list of crops on the other hand. This is where you start getting to add the color to your color-by-numbers book – it’s the exciting bit. I try and plan my rotations quite simply. I’ve separated my vegetable plot into four equal sizes and I have my crop rotation working so that basically everything this year in bed number one will be planted next year in bed number two, then number three, then number four, and everything that was in bed number four for this year will go into bed number one. That’s how I have my rotation all planned out.

What you’ll find is there are lots of different types of plants and you’ll want to make your own categories that work for you. But for instance, legumes are a very certain type of plant.
I keep them all in their own bed because they have very specific nutritional effects on the soil.
After the legumes, this year I’ll be planting nutrition-hungry plants like sweet corn
and things like that in the same bed, because those legumes actually add the right type of nutrients for the sweet corn to follow on after. I’ll do an entire article on crop rotation in the next few days, but it’s something for you to look into and certainly I include it as part of my planning and I recommend you do the same.

How To Maximize Your Cropping

The next thing to think about, when you have a rough idea of what’s going where, then you want to start thinking about how you can maximize your cropping from the space you have by doing things such as double cropping. For instance, you might have some early peas that you’re going to put in and they’re going to be producing all through the early summer, up to the middle of summer and then they’re probably going to fall away, at which point they may well leave room for a second crop in that same place. These are all things that you can be planning at this stage. It’s worth taking a note.

You have everything written down on paper, where you think everything’s going to go, now look at the actual specific varieties that you have and work out, “Okay, so this is going to go through until late August; that’s going to leave me a gap for x” and then you can come up with what x might be. There are quite a lot of quick-growing plants that will give you a second crop.

The next thing to bear in mind is succession planting. In our first year here, we planted a beautiful big row of lettuce and, like an absolute idiot who didn’t think about anything, I planted them all on the same day. Of course, they were all ready at the same time and I’m talking probably 20 or 30 lettuce. Lettuce is one of the crops that you’re really going to struggle to preserve, so for all the crops like lettuce, you’re going to want to be succession planting. What that means is, if you think that your family might want two lettuce a week, then you might plant the lettuce in batches of six. Then you plant six lettuce every three weeks so that, as they come to fruition, you can crop them and then there’s a steady succession of lettuce for the foreseeable weeks and months as you go.

The Benefits of Crop Rotation

Those are the basics and a few not-so-basics of how I planned my original vegetable garden, what I’ve learned from that and how I plan it now every year. There’s lots and lots of information out there and, for me, it’s one of the funnest parts of the downtime that we get in the winter, is planning what’s going to go where next year, and I might decide I’m going to try out a few exciting, different varieties or unusual plants that I haven’t tried before

I just want to very quickly talk about why we rotate the crops and it’s basically for two reasons. The first is, as I’ve already mentioned, different crops have different effects on the nutritional values of the soil. Some crops are what we might call mining crops. They’ll mine minerals from very low down with taproots, very deep roots, and they might bring some of those minerals up to the surface and deposit them in the soil, which is great – we really want that to happen. I make sure that my crops are doing that, it might be comfrey or something of that nature.

The other reason is a buildup of pests. Over time, pests that like a certain crop will feast on your crop during the growing season and then throughout the winter. By planting the same crop there the next year, what you’re doing is you’re basically making sure they’ve got the perfect environment to come back to and expand their numbers. By rotating crops, you very much deal with a lot of those issues.

So, there you go. That’s my thoughts on how to plan a vegetable garden. I hope you’ve found it interesting.

13: Episode 13 – waste

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

Managing waste is a crucial part of self sufficiency thinking. Everything wasted is exactly that- a wasted energy or resource that could potentially be used to enhance some system of self sufficiency.

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-sufficient-hub/message

Transcript:

Waste

We’re going to talk about waste and what does waste mean to a self-sufficient system. When I say waste, most people think about the things that we throw away for the bin man to come and clear from our homes. It does mean that but it also means a wasted opportunity, a waste of something that could have done something else. It also means a waste of energy i.e energy removed from the system. Self-sufficiency means something that is self-supporting. If something is supporting itself then that system of self-supporting is going to break down very quickly. As soon as we try to remove more out of it than it needs to survive, the system’s going to break down very quickly.
For example, we would say that our animal waste products make our compost that feeds our soil. That energy that we’ve put into the soil grows our crops. The energy that the soil is put into the crops, we then take and put into our animals and that energy that we put into the animals again comes out and feeds our compost. So that’s a cycle of energy that’s working around our system. If you’ve got your system working really well, then there’s going to be byproducts of that that we’re going to use and that’s going to be the vegetable crops and our animal products that we eat. So the self-sustaining system is happening and it’s producing a byproduct that is useful to us. That’s what you’re looking for, something where you don’t need to go and buy, for instance, compost.
You don’t need to go and borrow animal feed. These are all inputs. What you’ll find is that your inputs are going to come very close to your waste. The more you waste, the more you have that you’re not reusing. The more you’re putting in your bin, the more you’re going to have to purchase to replenish that energy that you’re throwing away. So when you have food waste in your kitchen and you put that in the bin and then it goes off to the landfill, you have to go to the shop and buy more food. Whereas if you can keep that food energy within your system by feeding your animals or by it feeding your compost, that’s the energy that you’re not going to have to go and replace. There are lots of ways that we make waste.

Several Ways We Make Waste Useful

Packaging

Some inputs that we’re already paying for and end up going to waste are things like packaging. Whenever we buy toothpaste or a new gift for a family member from Amazon for Christmas, it comes with the packaging and lots of people put that in the rubbish to be disposed of. That is an energy source that we could be using to feed our system quite often. So paper and cardboard, for example, are an energy source that we usually throw away that have better uses of it from a self-sufficient point of view.

There are two ways where it’s actually going to pay us back some of that energy cost straight away. One is the compost pile and the other is the fire. Getting a wood fire is such a fantastic addition to a self-sufficient way of doing things because it allows you to heat your home with quite often byproducts of what you’re creating. So we’re heating our house in a way that’s costing us nothing. It also allows us to save the energy that we’re already paying for in the waste of packaging by creating either energy for our home or energy for our plants by way of composting.

Food Waste

The next thing is food waste in your kitchen. There’s really no reason why anyone should have any food waste that has to go to the landfill. The easiest home for food waste is obviously to get some animals. If you’ve got a full complement of animals, for example, chickens, a couple of dogs pigs, there is going to be a home for every single type of food waste that you’re creating. Even if you don’t, you’ve always got the backstop of the compost pile. These animals and the compost are already creating elements that go into our self-sustaining system. So by feeding them, it just adds to the energy that’s in our system, which is the goal.

Clothing

Another thing to avoid waste is to just avoid the number of things that we throw away and don’t reuse or repurpose. Clothing is a great example. If you have children then they are always growing and so there’s a need to replace clothing. We only replace clothing as it wears out and we try very hard to think about sustainability when we do that. But old clothing can be repurposed. If somebody at your home knows knitting and sewing, any old clothing can be repurposed into something that you might sell and again, that’s a way of keeping that energy in the system. Rather than just throwing away, these items are remaining in the system.

Compost Loo

Lots of natural fibres can be composted if you want to go that way. Speaking of composting natural fibres, compost loo is also a great thing to have on your property so rather than flushing away that waste you can compost it. A compost loo is super easy to build. It sounds kind of icky if you’re not familiar with the concept, but I can assure you it’s nothing of the sort. It doesn’t stink and it’s a great thing to have in your garden and also an efficient way of recycling that energy back into your system. So you’re literally composting your human waste just like you would with the animal waste products through your compost pile and again that feeds the soil, feeds the plants, feed the animals and feeds you. It’s another way of reducing your waste and also the amount of water waste. It is also a great way of keeping that energy in the system because every piece of energy you remove from the system needs to be replenished somehow.

Water Butts

Next thing is water butts. Water butts are something every house should have because it means you’re not putting pressure on the water supply. If you’re on a meter, then you’re paying less for your water. But it also means that you’ve got that water in other places that you might otherwise not have it. So every single piece of animal housing or shed should have its own water supply. It’s a great way of not having that wastewater going out from your system.

Recycling

We also should be thinking about recycling things. A tremendous amount of the building that I do at home when I make a new house for an animal or anything of that nature is done from repurposed materials. I usually find them by taking something else down or a byproduct from something I’ve done at work or are available free online from places like Freecycle. It’s important to find whatever it is in your small ecosystem that are ways your local community used to dispose of things because they’re such a huge resource.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, the way I’ve been talking about waste made you think slightly differently about what waste can mean and ways in which you can reduce the amount of waste that you’re sending away. You shouldn’t consider it waste, you just consider it an energy that is currently within your system. It will need to be replenished somehow. When we’re talking about waste, there’s this whole other ecosystem happening around this and hovering just above it and that is finance. So we all have costs. We all have rent or mortgage or electric bills or council tax then we have to pay. So it’s also super important to look at that as a cycle of energy as well and make sure that you’re reducing the amount of waste in that cycle by paying for things that you either don’t really need or that are available for free.
I’m talking about it from a very practical point of view and it quite literally is an energy cycle. We ss human beings require energy. We require the food that we eat to give us the energy we need to function and of course, we excrete some of that energy and flush it away and we exert that energy by working on our land or in our jobs. So that energy has to come from somewhere and it’s not free. Just because you butcher an animal that doesn’t mean that that’s all free energy. You can eat that energy that was put there in the first place by feeding that animal. If you’re feeding it crops, then that energy had to come from somewhere and that’s by feeding the soil. So it is an energy cycle that goes round and round and we need to think of every part of that and make sure that we’re not wasting any source of that energy because it is something that’s going to cost you money. So I hope this was some food for thought for you all.

12: Episode 12 – Superplants – Watercress

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

Watercress is a great plant for anyone to grow. Super easy to grow and propagate. You can also forage for it in the wild.

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-sufficient-hub/message

Transcript:

Superplants – Watercress

Today, we’re talking about one of my favorite plants. It’s a plant I’m very, very passionate about and that is watercress. It’s a plant that I love so much for so many different reasons.
It’s such a utility plant. It serves so many purposes. It’s so easy to propagate. It’s so easy to grow. It’s easy to harvest. You can find it in the wild. You can grow it yourself. It really is a fantastic plant.

Growing Your Own Watercress

The first thing I’m going to talk about is growing your own watercress. It is the easiest plant in the world to grow; you can grow from seed or you can grow it from any part of the plant itself. In nature, different plants have different characteristics. There are some plants that can only be propagated from their seeds. There are some plants that can be propagated from cuttings of a certain part of the plant, be that a stem or a root cutting. There are some plants that can be tip-layered. Some plants that can be divided. There are some plants that you can create new ones purely from a part of the leaf. Watercress is one of those plants that you can do all of those things with.

When I was talking about the different ways plants propagate, it’s to do with which part of the plant contains, effectively, the equivalent of stem cells. Within a raspberry plant, for example, the stems, if you tip layer them, contain all the genetic ingredients, all the coding, to create a new raspberry plant. Every part of that plant has all the coding it needs to create the roots and the stems, the leaves, and the fruit. With watercress, every single part of the plant has that information. So, you could literally take a piece of watercress that you bought in the supermarket and you could chop it up on a chopping board and every single piece is a potential new plant. That in itself for me is just an amazing thing and it’s one that we as self-sufficient gardeners can utilize.

But it gets better. It just gets better and better, because not only are every part of this plant viable to create a new plant with, but, in addition, it’s super easy to do. You don’t need to make a seedbed compost. You don’t need to expose it to rooting hormone or anything like that. The propagation process is literally as simple as throwing it in some water. You can literally take some Watercress from the supermarket, throw it in your pond or throw it in a water butt, and it will grow new plants from it. That’s just a gift we should all be utilizing. I strongly recommend that everybody has some growing in their water butts, and if you have a pond or any other areas, I strongly recommend you have some growing there too.

Guerilla Gardening

You can also do guerrilla gardening with it. You can introduce it to a pond or a stream near you. Please be aware of what that might do to the local ecology and infrastructure of the environment in that area. So, if you’re in an area where it’s not a native plant, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing that. But if it’s native to where you live, then you can take some from one part of a river and introduce it to just somewhere a bit closer to you, if that’s what fits. Once you have it growing, it’s as you might imagine, much of a “cut and come again” plant. You can just keep harvesting it and harvesting it and harvesting it. It’s a perennial, so it will stay there through the winter. You might not want to harvest it in the winter to give it every chance of surviving, but it all depends on how much you’ve grown.

The Uses of Watercress

It’s a great plant to grow yourself, because it’s so easy to do. Another reason it’s such a great plant is what it does in the kitchen. For me, it makes a great salad. I quite often have it as the only part of a salad. I’ll have a big bowl of watercress. Maybe I’ll throw some lemon juice in there. Maybe I’ll throw a little bit of olive oil in there and boom, that’s it – a great tasty salad. But also, you can cook it; if you blanch it, it becomes a cooked vegetable green. So, it’s a very versatile plant in the kitchen as well.

Foraging For Watercress

The final thing I have to say is that it’s also findable in the wild, as you’ve probably gathered by now. It’s something you can go foraging for and that’s another great tool in this plant’s arsenal, is that it can be cultivated domestically, commercially, but it can also grow in the wild. It’s a great thing to go foraging for I love foraging anyway, so the fact that I can forage for one of my favorite plants and maybe bring that home and introduce it to an enclosed, captive space at my house – wow, you know, what could be better.

There is something that is very important to be aware of though, if you are foraging for watercress, and I suppose also to be aware of even if you’re growing it on your own property depending on your property and your layout and where you are. There is a propensity within watercress for it to hold liver flukes; these are little parasites that live in sheep and can also live in humans and they can actually be quite harmful to you.

So, whenever you’re foraging for watercress, my advice is to only use that watercress for cooking. If you find it in the wild, only use it for cooking. If you have sheep on your property, like I do, and the water course that you’re taking them from is in any way downstream from that sheeps run, or in any way possibly connected to it, again only use it for cooking it. Not as much of an issue if you’re growing it and you have sheep, if you’re growing in a water butt or something like that, because there can’t really be any cross-contamination. If you’re in the wild though and you’re foraging, I strongly advise that you cook it, even if you can’t see any sheep, because there can be sheep upstream out of view. There could have been sheep right next to that little stream that you’re in, just three months ago, and they’re not there now. So, it’s always advisable, in my opinion, to take wild watercress and blanch it before you eat it.

Using a Multi-Pond System

We also use watercress in a multi-pond system. What our set up is, or will be when it’s complete, is we have three ponds. One of them is exclusively for watercress. So, in that pond, we just grow watercress. That pond feeds down into another pond, which is predominantly growing duckweed. And then that pond feeds up into the top pond, which grows a couple of edible plants around the outside of it, but is predominantly for growing fish that are
for the table. What happens is the fish excrement effectively is fertilizer for our watercress
and then our duckweed, and the duckweed and watercress both filter the water before it goes back to the fish, and the duckweed feeds the geese and the ducks. So, it works great in a multi-pond system like that.

Final Thoughts

That’s watercress. I strongly recommend you get some. It can be cultivated from seed and, again, that’s very easy to do. I bought a packet of seeds when I first started looking into it, before I realized how easy it was to propagate from the plant itself and they all came to fruition very easily. If, for whatever reason, you find it hard to get hold of fresh watercress, then maybe buying seeds is the way you go.

What I recommend you do, if you’re just starting out and you haven’t got any yet, is you just buy a bag from the supermarket. It’s not very often I’ll advocate buying a bag of food from the supermarket. Or better still, go and forage it. But if you can’t forage any and, for whatever reason, you can’t get hold of the seeds, go out and buy a bag of watercress and boom – that’s it; you’re set up. Turn half of it into an amazing salad and put the other half into a water butt or a bit of a pond or even a bucket of water outside, and that is starting your cycle of perpetual watercress production at home. What a great feeling that is.

11: Episode 11 – protecting seedlings from frost

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

Managing frost can be tricky at the start of the season. The longer you extend your planting season, the more you expose your plants to frost and the risk it presents. Even with the most risk averse attentions a late frost can catch you by surprise and decimate your crop before its even got a foothold. Here I talk about some cheap and free ways to protect your young plants from frost.

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-sufficient-hub/message

Transcript:

Protecting Seedlings From Frost

We're going to be talking about how you can protect your seedlings from frost. Everywhere has
a different last frost a day. You can find this online and this is the date that traditionally would be
the latest you could expect a frost. So the actual day of your last frost any given year is likely to
be earlier than your last frost date. That is the last date you could reasonably expect to get a
frost. From this day onwards, it's safe to assume you won't.
What that means is that on or around that date, you're ready to let your garden go on the
assumption that you're not going to have any frost. It still makes sense to keep half an eye on
the weather because the climate is changing all the time, but on the run-up to the last frost date,
the chances of you having a frost get lower and lower. So it's very tempting to get your plants
out a little bit before this date and when I say tempting for me personally, it's irresistible and I
don't even try to hold off for that date any longer, I simply go for it.
The downside of this is that you are exposing your seedlings to the risk of frost for a lot longer
and at a lot higher frequency. I've already planted out a fair number of seedlings that will need
to be protected from the frost because the frost will kill them. I'm going to go through a number
of different ways of protecting our plants from that frost and tell you how you can do the same.

How To Protect Your Seedlings From Frost

Greenhouse or Polytunnel

The first thing is a greenhouse or a polytunnel. If you’re growing your seedlings in pots or trays in a greenhouse or a polytunnel, then chances are they’re already protected from frost. That’s the first thing you need to remember because that’s doing the job. If you’ve got plants out in pots, even if you’re growing their seedlings in pots, you can always just bring them inside of the polytunnel or the greenhouse to protect them.

But if you’ve got them growing in the ground as I do, then you’re going to need to do one of a number of other things to protect them from the frost. You need to be aware of how deep that frost is going to be because if it’s only a light frost you only need to take very light measures but if it’s going to be a deep hard frost then you need to think a little bit more.

Hoop House

One of the favourite methods I have is a hooped run. It’s about six little wire hoops with clear plastic that runs over the top of them and I bought these from the one-pound shop two years ago and they’re doing really well. They’re still holding up fine. The reason I like using these is the cost. They’re just so cheap. For 10 pounds, you can get enough to cover a significant number of rows of plants. You set these up by pushing the edges of your loops in the ground either side of your row and then a piece of string at each end just pulls them tight.

The upside of these is that they’re semi-permanent so I can put them in when I plant and I cannot worry and it’s almost like those seedlings are growing in a greenhouse until I take them away. The downside can be if we’ve got really unseasonably hot weather and bright sunshine, then some of the plants that you might have growing under them can perhaps scorcher little because they’re quite delicate and so small. But that’s really an outlier for that to ever be an issue.
If you don’t have anything like that and you have to make do with what you have around you, then I’ve got three other methods that are super simple and I’d be stunned if you didn’t have at least one of these available to you.

Jam Jar

The first one is a jam jar or something similar. You take the lid off, turn it upside down and place one on top of each of your seedlings. Now if you’re mulched like I am, this can actually serve two purposes. If you’ve got tiny, little seedlings, then this is going to enable you to mark your rows a little bit easier because you’re going to be able to see where everything is in your mulch. They are working exactly the same as a greenhouse. So it’s not a bad idea. Even if you’re not going to get a frost, they’re going to help give your plants that extra boost.
One thing I do want you to be aware of though is that they’re going to recreate that greenhouse environment. So you’re going to have to go through the process of hardening off again if you’ve got nice warm weather and you’re leaving them in place. When you come to remove them, just do it gradually. First of all, just remove them during the day and then slowly remove them overnight when your plants get strong enough and you feel that they’re ready to be hardened off that way.

Plastic Bottles

The next one is plastic bottles. I like to use these for things like peas. I cut both ends off the plastic bottles like an orange squash bottle and I like to feed that down over the cane that I’m using for my peas to grow up. I do this regardless of the weather because it also serves a fantastic second purpose when you plant peas and beans. Quite often they’re going to be seen as food by some of your friendly garden pests and I’m talking about mice, pigeons or anything like that. They’re going to love to find a pee while they’re scratching around on your soil. These semi clashes if you like without a lid serve two purposes.

They protect the plant from frost that’s growing but also they protect it from the pests that want to dig it up and eat it for their tea. One thing you do need to be aware of is that if you’re going to get a super hard frost, you might want to place something over the top as well like some plastic or cling film because the bottles that I use, I’ve cut both ends off because I leave them in place once they’re in and the plant grows up out of them and up the cane. If you’re going to use that method, just be mindful that the top is open and therefore if you get a really hard frost then the element that’s inside that bottle is still going to be susceptible.

Straws and Grass Clippings

The last way of protecting your seedlings from frost is by using something like straws. Straw is a great insulator because you can kind of fluff it up a little bit and it creates loads and loads of lovely air pockets. It’s also super light so it’s not going to do too much damage to your seedlings by pushing them down.

I’ve used grass clippings as well but I tend to use that more when I actually plant when I’m trying to protect a seedling. I’m certainly going to use hay much more common than grass clippings because grass clippings are going to weigh down on the seedling and probably damage it whereas, with hay, you can fluff up and really protect it. I tend to use hay quite a lot on my potatoes as well for their first covering because it gives them the opportunity to carry on and grow up through it really quickly while at the same time keeping the sun off those first few.

Final Thoughts

These are all the ways I use to protect my seedlings from the frost. Keep an eye on the weather and be proactive. Take those steps because there’s nothing more disheartening than coming out and just seeing a lovely row of vegetables that were just coming on or wilting because they’ve been frostbitten. Take all precautionary measures. You’ll appreciate it and it will certainly pay you back.

10: Episode 10 – Planting seeds

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

How to plant seeds, either direct sowing or in seed starter trays. I use a no digging method in my vegetable bed.

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-sufficient-hub/message

Transcript:

Planting Seeds

Today, we’re going to be talking about seeds. It’s the time of year when we’re all busy planting seeds. The weather’s just turned; some of us have just enjoyed some lovely hot days
and the summer is definitely just around the corner. Winter, I think we can say, is behind us. I certainly am very, very busy planting seeds, transplanting seeds, some I’m direct sowing already, others I’m putting in pots in the polytunnel.

There’s no mystery to planting seeds. It really can be quite simple. So, I’m going to try and demystify it a little bit here today. The first thing I want everyone to remember is that plants want to grow. They absolutely are built to do a job and that is to grow into the finished plant. A lot of the time, what we really need to do is give them what they need and then get out of the way. We don’t need to be tinkering too much; we just need to make sure we don’t do anything wrong. The plant is already raring to go. We just need to make sure we don’t do anything wrong to spoil it.

Planting Undercover

So, there’s two types of planting: one would be planting undercover in a polytunnel
or under a cold frame or something similar, with a view to planting out once the seedlings are strong enough to be handled and transplanted into their final destination. And then there is direct sowing, where we put the seed where the plant is going to ultimately stay. I’m going to talk quickly about planting undercover first.

There are a lot of seeds you can’t plant when there’s going to be a frost; they will benefit from being planted in a greenhouse or under some kind of protective environment. Now, obviously the information is going to vary from seed to seed. You’ll be able to find that on your seed packet or if you do a bit of Googling about the specific plant you’re going to grow.

Using the Right Soil

If you have a plant that you’re going to start in a seed tray or a small pot and put in a polytunnel or on a windowsill, then the type of soil that you use is quite important. If you are going down the route of buying compost and soil, then make sure you buy a seed starting compost. But if you’re not, you can make your own potting mix, which isn’t particularly difficult and does make quite a lot of difference.

You want to make sure that there’s no weeds and bugs in it. One of the common mistakes people make is that they take soil from their garden, put it in a pot, plant something in it and then put it in the greenhouse. Well, some of the problems that can happen from this is that there’s not just going to be the seed from your seedling in there. There could be something in there from a nearby weed. There could be bugs in there that are currently dormant but are about to be woken up by the lovely, warm temperature in the greenhouse environment, and lots of things of that nature. It’s always best, if you can, to use a piece of soil that has been covered or somehow protected from these things, so that when you introduce it to your greenhouse, then it’s not going to suddenly come alive with things you don’t want in there.

I have heard of people who take the soil and they put it over boiling water to sterilize it. Personally, I think that’s a bit too much work. But, by all means, that may be the way to go if you feel that you’ve got it in you to go to that effort.

You also want something that’s going to be fairly well draining, so you can water the plant
and without it getting waterlogged, but also something that’s going to retain plenty of the moisture. We’re lucky and we tend to just use the compost that we’ve made from the season before and we mix a tiny bit of sand or something with it. But you can buy products, such as perlite, which are designed to hold the moisture in the soil, but not in the soil where your seeds are. The perlite are little white balls that act like mini sponges. They soak the water out of the soil when it’s waterlogged, but they also slowly release it back after it has dried out.

How Deep Should I Plant My Seeds?

Once you have your soil in your pot, you go ahead and plant your seeds. Now, the methods for this are going to vary greatly from seed to seed. A general rule of thumb is that the bigger the seed, the deeper you plant it. So, a tiny little seed, such as that of a carrot, you’re going to plant under just the tiniest bit of compost, whereas a much bigger seed, such as a bean, you’re going to really push down in there with your finger. That’s one rule of thumb.

Monitoring Moisture Levels

Another thing to be aware of is that, once you’ve planted your seedlings, you’re going to need to monitor that moisture level, particularly if you have warm days and you have the pot in your polytunnel or greenhouse, as they’re going to dry out fairly quickly. Through the last week or so, we’ve had some really warm weather where we are and I’ve been watering my seedlings at least twice every single day. There are ways around that – you can place your pots in something that’s going to hold some water. Personally, I just make sure I’m out there checking them, because I’m in the garden anyway.

Knowing When to Transplant Your Seeds

Once you have your seeds planted in your pots and they’re in your greenhouse or other environment where you’re going to bring them on, could be on a windowsill, then really all you need to do is keep out of the way. You make sure that they’ve got the water they need and other than that, you trust that they’re going to do the right thing.

Now, you’re never going to get a hundred percent germination rate, so don’t be upset when you don’t, because no one does. Some of these seeds are not viable; they simply are not viable in nature. So, there’s no way you could make them grow, regardless of how perfect you made the conditions for them.

Once they’re big enough to transplant and when they’re looking sturdy enough that you’re fairly confident you can pick them up, take them out from where they are, and plant them somewhere else, then that’s the time to consider doing so. Now, there are lots of plants that will need to be protected from the frost, so you don’t really want to plant them out until the risk of frost is gone. But even the best gardeners I know – and I certainly I don’t include myself as one of the best gardeners I know, but I do include myself as someone who does plant their seedlings out a bit early – even I don’t like to wait until every single risk of frost has gone, because our last frost can be in May. I like to get things out in the garden before then, because otherwise I feel as though I just lose so much produce by not using that extra time.

So, if you’re like me and you’re going to put your seedlings out before the risk of frost has passed, then you’re going to just make sure you monitor the weather and be prepared to protect them from frost if a frost comes. I’m going to go into some ways of doing that in our next blog post.

Direct Sowing

If you’re going to sow something out directly, then, again, it’s based on the type of seed
and the information will be on the seed packet as to whether and when you sow it directly. But some things you really have to sow directly. For instance, with carrots, the whole thing you’re growing is the tuber, or the root. So, anything with a strong taproot like that, you’re going to want to plant in its final destination. Just bear that in mind.

What I tend to do is I just part the mulch, because all of our vegetable beds are covered all year round in a thick layer of mulch. I part the mulch and I tend to just place my seeds on the soil and then cover them in a tiny bit of compost and then recover with the mulch, but maybe not quite so deep. I do very little digging. I tend to plant everything in the mulch or just at the bottom layer of the mulch, down through the mulch. It saves a lot of back-breaking digging. But also, it actually does your soil really good, because there are a tremendous number of organisms, including the mycelial web, which is the fungi underneath the soil, that actually work like a distribution network amongst all your plants and they will make sure that all your plants get what they need. Every time you dig the soil, you disturb this and it has to start from scratch again.

You’ll find that some people with more traditional methods of growing food, will always say you need to dig; you need to keep the soil dug over and loose. But the method I use is very much a “no dig” method and there’s lots of evidence to suggest that it’s at least as good, if not better than the more traditional vegetable growing methods.

Selecting the Final Position For Your Seeds

Once you have your seedlings in their final position, again, it’s all about getting out the way and letting them do their thing. When you’re choosing their final position, be mindful of that particular plant’s characteristics: some will like shade, some will like full sun, some will need to be protected from the elements such as wind, some will need canes. Just bear all that in mind and make sure that you don’t plant something such as tomatoes on the south side of a big stack of runner beans, because what’s going to happen is that the runner beans are going to catch all that sun and the tomatoes, which are just behind it in the shade, are going to really struggle. So, make sure you plan how and where you’re going to plant things before you actually go out and do it.

Why You Should Save Extra Seeds

There you go – that’s seed planting and the time really is now. Another thing to bear in mind is to plant more seeds than you need. Generally, speaking, they’re almost free and a lot of the seeds that you’re going to plant next year are going to be seeds you’ve saved. Make sure you’re saving extra seeds so you have enough to over-plant. When it comes to seeds, I do this for three reasons:

  1. Firstly, there’s going to be a natural element of unviable seeds, which for whatever reason aren’t going to germinate. So, you’re going to lose some that way.
  2. The second reason is that it means you get to pick the strongest plants, the best looking plants, that are most likely to go on and do well and to be the ones you’re going to place in your garden. They’ll be the ones you save your seeds for next year.
  3. The third one is that you’re able to then sell some seedlings and that generates a small amount of income, which goes back into the homestead. So, make sure you over-plant. Let the seed do its thing and I’m sure you’ll have great success.

Good luck being more self-sufficient this year than last. That’s always the plan, at least, it is mine.

8: Episode 8 – making free plants through tip layering

Carl Mintern Leave a comment

One of the key components of a self sufficient life is to have plants that reproduce without too much effort. Tip layering is a great method for propagating more berry plants to increase your production, but also make excess plants to sell if desired.

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/self-sufficient-hub/message

Transcript:

Making Free Plants Through Tip Layering

Today we're going to be talking about tip layering. Tip layering is a way of propagating plants,
particularly woody stem plants, and it's a great way to get free plants, to take one plant and turn
it into ten, a hundred, so on and so forth.

What is Tip Layering?

Tip layering is basically mimicking what happens in nature anyway. In nature, plants, such as blackberries and strawberries, propagate themselves by effectively reaching out with a branch or a stem, touching the ground, forming roots from that bit of the plant and then shooting off a new plant from there. So, you can do it with almost any woody stemmed plant, and the actual process is very, very simple. Every plant is slightly different insofar as which parts of the plant contain the genetic code for the entire plant.

Watercress is a great example of this. It’s one I use all the time. Every single part of a watercress plant, a bit of stem, even a tiny bit of leaf, contains all the genetic coding required to make a brand new plant. If you just tear a bit of a leaf off of a watercress plant and put it in a bowl of water, it will grow roots and eventually grow a whole new plant.

Within most Woody plants such as blackcurrants, red currants, blackberries, raspberries, cranberries, blueberries, all these kinds of things, the genetic code required is in all the stems, all the branches, and this is also true of a lot of trees – almost all trees.

Simple Steps to Follow

One thing that’s not quite so easy to do with trees though, that is quite simple to do with the plants I’m talking about today, is you can bend the stems down and pop them into the ground. So, if you’re doing it with a pot plant, you’d get a pot of whatever type of soil you want and next to the pot that the plants are growing in, you’d bend the stem over and you’d force it into the ground. That will eventually root and a new plant will come up from that set of roots, forming a whole new plant.

How you do it is really, really simple. So, you take the stem of your cranberry plant, for example, and some of this season’s growth towards the end of the stem at the tip, then you scratch off a bit of the bark with your thumb and you place that into the soil in your second pot, or just into the ground next to where it’s growing, and you force that to stay below the soil. Then, in addition, you have a small amount of that stem coming back out the other side, just a few inches. That’s literally all there is to it.

How I do it is by following those steps, and then I break off a twig in a sort of y-shape and I turn that upside down. I pin the y-shape either side of our stem to hold it under the soil, put a bit more soil on top, and it’s as simple as that. Then, if you come back in six months or whenever it might be, you will find that, if you dig that soil around, you’ll see that there are roots growing from the stem.

The Benefit of Tip Layering

There’s one super important advantage of doing it this way rather than taking cuttings. That’s because we’re utilizing all the same tricks as taking a cutting, but a big bonus of doing it this way is that you’re enabling the new plant – what would otherwise be your cutting – to remain attached to the mother plant and continue to draw nutrients from it while it’s establishing its own root system. That’s really important. So, the failure rate is much lower with tip layering.

How it Works

You’ll find in nature this happens anyway. This is how blackberries propagate; this is how strawberries propagate. If you watch a strawberry plant, you’ll see that it sends out runners all across the garden and it just pops itself into the soil, sorts out its own roots and builds a brand new plant for you. This is exactly the same as tip layering. Once you’ve done this and it’s established itself, you literally snip the original stem on the mother plant side of the new root and you’ve got yourself a brand-new plant.

A couple of things to think about when you’re doing this: this is not the same as sexual propagation when plants are pollinated by bees or whatever other insect. This is an asexual reproduction. What that means is you’re creating a genetic clone of the mother plant. So, it’s only worth doing this with your best plants. If you’re going to do it with your gooseberries, and you have five gooseberry bushes and you want five more, then take five tip-layered clones of the best plant you have. There’s no point doing it any other way.

There is a product called rooting hormone, which you can purchase and it is supposed to increase the chances and the rate of roots forming. Personally, I’ve never really had a great deal of success with it. What I mean by that is I’ve not seen it increase my success rate, so I don’t bother with it. I just do it without and the success rate on the right plants is nearly 100% without it. So I personally don’t see the need.

Making a Residual Income

If you have got yourself some berry plants or other currants and that kind of thing that you want more of, go ahead, get out there, tip layer them and get yourself some more plants. The time to do it is right now in the early spring, and then it’s got all summer to get itself set up, ready for next year. I personally like to leave it a year. So, I will do my tip layering now. I’ve actually done all the tip layering I’m doing this year and I won’t touch those plants now, or at least I won’t touch that portion of the plant now, until next spring. Next spring will be when I sever the original stem, which acts a bit like an umbilical cord throughout this process, and then I’m ready to transfer the new clone plants to their final home.

It’s a great way of increasing your stock of plants. If you don’t need to increase your stock of plants, it’s a great way of getting yourself a small residual income, because this is just one of the other things that you can sell, so that’s how we use this.

So, there you go. That’s all you need to know about tip layering. It really is as simple as that. Get out there. Give it a go. I hope you have fun.