More home: food production 2

Here we are in what I call the tunnel paddock again, but looking in the opposite direction from yesterday’s Blip. The tunnel house is just out of shot on the right.

For purposes of locating yourself, in the background against the hill you can just make out the study, truck and guest cabin.

The five raised beds taking up much of the photo are looking past their best now, but are still full of produce. One bed of brassicas, one of onions / leeks / garlic, one of squashes, one of courgettes, and one of broad beans and peas. They are on a rotation system.

As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, I grow heaps of different crops because there is always something which doesn’t do well. This year I’ve experienced what I think is a virus or fungus in some of the horse manure I collected from a friend’s pile and used as compost. Both the broad beans and the peas struggled badly.

However thanks to the abundance of other things I’m not going hungry.

Beyond the raised beds is the back of the garage: more about which soon…

The extra shows a closer view of the squash bed and the open area at the back of the garage in which I store wire, netting, pots, hosepipe and the like.

To the left of the garage are another couple of raised beds in which I grow perennial food plants: asparagus, rhubarb and skirret.

Skirret is an ancient starchy root vegetable which was popular in Britain before potatoes arrived from South America. It has long spindly roots which are a bit fiddly to clean, but taste delicious.

When I created and planted these perennial beds two years ago I made a big mistake in the shape of three horseradish roots, thinking how lovely it would be to have homemade relish. I had no idea that they would take over.

So last winter I dug and removed every fragment of root. Repeatedly. But it was clear in spring that I’d missed some when small shoots appeared. I resorted to weed killer, which is absolutely a last resort here, even though I use an organic one. And I’m still spot-spraying rogue shoots. Slowly I’m winning…

What I’m not winning with is grass-control. It is usually short all around the raised beds and tunnel house. There’s been too much rain this year for regular cutting.

Questions?