Home & Shop Companion #0063
letter from a small corner of far away
Dear Lynn, dear Everyone,
It has been a cooler week with a touch of frost most mornings, so I fear our blossoming plums might not amount to much this year. With the cooler weather, the grass is not growing as fast and the springtime rush seems less of a hurry. However, I have planted out the onion sets and sown parsnips and beetroot in the field this week. Often, I do this with the sun on my back and without a coat, but this year I needed it as I placed the onion sets in the rows made with the garden cultivator. Last week, I made a modification to the cultivator by adding a bout marker which bolts onto the cultivator frame. In previous years I marked the rows by setting two tines as wide as they would go, which was only 9 ½ inches, and planted in every third row, but with the bout marker I have been using a single tine in the centre of the cultivator and flip the marker over to the other side when coming back down the field, so now I need to only walk once down the field to make a row. As soon as I had made it I gave it a quick test, but with the tine of the bout marker being straight and nearly vertical to the soil, it kept on digging in and caused the cultivator to twist round. So I brought it home, lit the forge and bent both ends at 45 degrees so it now drags a mark down the soil. There is still some side draft when it catches, but not enough to throw it out of line.
Although marking out the rows is now much quicker, the planting out was slower because I have cut out the mangolds this year which have not cropped well for a couple of years and are a lot of work to harvest and keep frost-free over winter. Instead, I am growing more onions, some for friends, and they are slower to plant. Because of the extra onions, I have changed their place in the rotation; this time they are in the general vegetable bed instead of the potato bed, so this year’s onions are now in a bed where they were grown only two years ago. However, for several years I grew the two rows of onions on the eastern side of the bed, so this time they are on the western side, keeping them away from potential disease.
Just like last year, the beetroot and parsnips were simply dropped into the tiny furrows left by the garden cultivator, with some mustard to mark the row where the parsnips are always slow to show. Then I pushed the cultivator along the row with the wheel running in the furrow and a tine each side to throw some soil over the seeds, followed by my feet placed heel to toe as a roller. When covering the onion sets, I keep my feet out of the way to avoid squashing the tiny onions, but otherwise use the cultivator in the same way, except the wheel runs just to the side of the onions. This year I am also going to grow a few parsnips in the garden at home, because on retrieving the seed from the freezer, which keeps a hundred times better than new bought seed, I noticed that seed was saved in 2011. So it is time I saved another batch. Since that requires two summer’s growth for the biennial parsnip to set seed, it is easier to do in the garden where I am not likely to run over it with a horse or tempted to plough it in.
This morning I was back in the field planting potatoes. The forecast was for a dry morning, though still not very warm. In the east the sky was a dark blue, but lighter in the west with small fluffy clouds, and the soil was dry enough to make the rows. With five furrows ploughed with the ridging plough, I tied the horses to the barn and returned to where I had left the sack of seed potatoes – half way down the length of the patch to minimise the amount of walking – filled a bucket with potatoes and started dropping them in the furrows. Last year the seed potatoes were small so I had enough for five rows, but this year they were much bigger so I cut most of them in two before planting and still didn’t have quite enough for all five rows. If Molly had not been out of action, I would have planted the potatoes sooner, and it would have helped because at the bottom of each bucket there was a layer of shoots that had fallen off. Gardeners generally like to ‘chit’ their potatoes, to allow them to sprout indoors before planting and so gain a week or two of growing time, but that does require careful handling, gently placing the sprouted potatoes straight from the trays into the furrows by hand, fine for twenty or fifty potatoes, but very slow.
Half way through planting the potatoes, the sky dropped a few flurries of hail, and by the time I put the horses to the ridger again to split the ridges and cover the potatoes in between, it had turned to sleet, and then heavy snow, enough to make the soil sticky and my boots and trousers covered with mud. The horses didn’t seem to mind, but by the time I had walked home after unharnessing the horses and cleaning the ridging plough, I was wet enough to discard all but my underclothes, and before doing so, my son even came to have a good look at me to see how wet I was, and probably to see how I was taking it! [cheap local entertainment]
So now I am in the house, my clothes are in the wash, the plough is in the barn, but the potatoes are at least in the ground.
Take care,
William
William Castle is a violin maker, farmer & SFJ contributor who lives in Shropshire, England.