The Idler

Country Diary 84

THANKS TO THE GOOD weather, everything in the vegetable garden has been shooting up. I lifted the early potatoes. There were about ten kilos of them, which at Riverford prices are worth about ten pounds. Delicious, but is it really worth growing potatoes? They are in actual fact quite a difficult crop to grow because they are susceptible to disease and the tubers are always nibbled. When you consider how cheap they are to buy, you wonder if it makes sense.

The broad beans though have been easy and bountiful as ever. We also have a lot of peas, with rocket growing madly between the rows. This year, as well as Alderman, we have Kelvedon Wonder which is a more conventional pea. The lettuces have grown well but have been attacked by hens and slugs. Again, I have not kept up with my successional sowing. You really need to sow a few every two weeks, either inside in a tray or in a well-protected nursery bed. Nasturtiums are always easy and the French climbing beans and the runner beans are all doing well at long last. It is the same for my one remaining courgette and three pumpkin plants: after a few deaths, they are flourishing, and it all goes to show that sun is what these plants love best. Even the beetroot are doing well this year.

After reading a book on wood burning by a Candian logman, I have changed the way I dry the wood out. Previously I piled up the wood inside the log barn. But my authority points out that wood will dry more quickly if exposed to sun and wind. He says the best place to put your logpile is where you would hang out the laundry. The pile should be off the ground, preferably on pallets. So I have made a few piles outdoors, as well as ordering a new load. “You need to get ahead of the log merchants,” as my landlady says. The log merchants all say that their wood is seasoned, but as a general rule, it never is. It will sit smouldering in the fire and produce very little heat. The only properly dried loads I have bought have come from the National Trust. Therefore to be safe you should order you logs a whole year in advance of when you want to use them. My “solar drying system”, as it is called, may speed the process up a slightly, but probably only by four to six months, meaning you still need to plan well in advance.

I also bought a wood moisture meter. This gadget will tell you the moisture content of the wood, and this is the most important factor. You are aiming for a moisture content of 20%. The logs I have just been delivered, and most of the logs thatweredelivered six months ago, have a moisture content of 60% or more. That is no good for burning. It is this moisture content rather than the type of wood which is key. We have had a few good fires from some gorse wood I picked up from a nearby National Trust bit of land where the gorse had been burned. Like a medieval peasant, I carried a bundle back home with me after a walk and it produces a mighty blaze.

Alan came round to help tidy things up and we used the excellent scythe I bought form Simon Fairlie of The Land magazine to cut all the weeds in the field. It was infested with ragwort – poisonous to horses – and docks. The scythe is very good at topping such weeds and is easier to to use for this job than the oil-powered strimmer. Alan also scythed some of the long grass, and has laid it out in neat furrows for a hay-making experiment.

Victoria has created a second colony of bees with a swarm and a queen from the first. She has found a better site with more light and plans to move hive number one there at some point. The plan right now is to take a little honey later in the year but to leave most of it for the bees to eat. She is heading for a three or four hives and one idea is to make mead — or honey wine — from the honey. Certainly it would make sense for us to start examining new areas of income, since the future of journalism looks uncertain, thanks to a combination of illiterate bloggers blasting their guff into cyberspace for free and greedy media owners who must be wondering why they need to pay proper journalists when they can get content for nothing. Back to the land!

ENDS