Feeding the birds through the winter – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 30 November 2010 in frugal, growing | 1 comment

I don’t mean feeding the girls, they get more than enough. No, I mean feeding wild birds. Last winter, we had bird feeder on the balcony stocked with wild bird seed and nuts from our local miscellanea store – I think the squirrels raided it more than the birds but we regularly saw feathered ones at it too. We went through quite a lot of feed during the six weeks of snow.

Back in September, Colette at the Permaculture Cottage wrote about how wasteful it is to spend money – and all the carbon cost – of importing peanuts & seeds to feed to wild birds, when there are other alternatives. I had a bit of a smack-my-forehead moment when I read that – I’m doing all I can to minimise our food miles but importing food for them.

Colette has noted a number of trees & plants that are good for providing winter food – those suggestions alone are a good starting point for me. I try to maximise the good growing ground in our garden for food for us but further down the garden, in the shade of the trees, there might be some space for bird-friendly bushes. Perhaps my living fence shouldn’t be all focused around our wants & needs…

Alternately, Kate from Living the Frugal Life grows sunflowers in the summer for their nectar and cheer – and for the free-bird-feed seeds to use over winter. I’m tempted to use some of our under-utilised front garden to grow sunflowers next year – although I suspect I’d be tempted to offer at least some of the seeds to our chickens…

Do you feed the wild birds in your garden over winter? Do you buy in feed or do you grow your own? If so, what do you grow? I’d love to hear your comments/suggestions.

(Photo by PsychoPxL – I tried to take my own version but every time I went outside all the birds disappeared, the little pesks!)

Fruit bushes/trees to make a living fence?

Posted by louisa on Friday 26 November 2010 in growing | 3 comments

I’ve just posted this question over at UKVegGardeners but thought I’d post it here too – all suggestions very gratefully received!

I’ve not really grown any fruit before but have big plans for 2011 (don’t we all?).

As well as getting some (currently on order) trees in and containers of soft berries etc, I’ve had an idea to kill two birds with one stone. We need a new divider between our garden and our neighbours – there hasn’t been a fence up to now but I want to discourage our dog & chickens from wandering over there – and we’d presumed we’d fit a paling wooden one.

But as there is a narrow bed where the fence will go, I’m wondering if rather than a boring wooden fence, whether we could use fruit bushes/trees to grow a living fence/mini hedgerow.

The row gets a decent amount of light but not full south-facing sunlight. We could easily “lose” 3ft or so to bushes, but the neighbours side would have to be
kept quite neat.

Any suggestions for things we could plant to achieve such a thing?

(One thing: there are a bajillion – I counted – blackberry bushes in the field on the other side of our house, so we’d rather avoid those if possible.)

Any ideas?

Next year’s growing plans

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 16 November 2010 in frugal, growing | 2 comments

I think this time of year may be favourite part of gardening – when I get to start making exciting plans for next year from the comfort of the sofa. Mmm, sofa.

So far, I’m planning the following – and thankfully, it doesn’t look like I’ve have to spend too much more on new seeds.

Old faithfuls:

• All sorts of lettuce including winter gem & spicy leaves – all leftover seed & seeds bought in a 75% sale off
• Broad beans – some saved seed, some leftover seed
• French beans – some saved seeds, some sale seeds
• Pumpkins a go go – I seem to have four different types of pumpkin seeds, bought in various mega-discount sales – not sure I’ll grow them all
• Courgettes & marrow – some saved seed and some new
• Chillis – super hot birds eye ones and cooler jalapeno types – leftover and sale seeds
• Carrots – sale seed, bought 75% off
• Misc brassicas – try broccoli, kale & cabbage again, maybe not cauliflower. Got leftover seed for all
• Leeks & onions – leftover seeds
• Tomatoes – some saved seeds, some new sale seeds
• Swiss chard – leftover seeds
• Potatoes – will have to buy some new seed potatoes, probably go for salad ones

Herbs – old and new:

• Borage – leftover seed and I suspect we might get a few plants from self-seeding too
• Tarragon & Oregano – might be able to coax a couple of plants through winter…
• Mint, Rosemary and Lavender – existing plants should survive
• Sage – new seeds bought in 50% off sale
• Meadow-sweet – new seeds, tempted to try use them, and some other wild flowers, for a bit of guerilla gardening in the local environs…
• Basil – need new seeds by the look of it
• Comfrey – a little amount for green manuring, sale seeds
• Cat nip – existing seeds, existing cats

New exciting things!

• Cucumber – not sure why I didn’t do them this year, seed bought on sale will be grown next year!
• Apples & pears – trees en route, might get a little fruit next year
• Strawberries – since I don’t do fruit, I’ve not grown any but John is interested in strawberries and mmm, strawberry jam. Need to buy seeds/plants.
• Scotch Bonnet peppers – more hot hot chillis. Need to buy seeds.

Extra exciting maybes!

• Achocha – if I get organised enough to buy some seeds
• Asparagus – ditto substituting “seeds” for “crowns”
• Some sort of berry thing to grow in a planter – maybe cranberry or lingonberry – need to decide & buy
• Mushrooms – we’ve got the space, shade and wood, so we might as well try to grow some deliberately rather than just letting nature take its course. I’m thinking maybe oyster mushrooms.

What are you planning to grow next year? Anything new?

Is there something I’ve missed off my list that you think I should definitely try?

Learning patience from wild food (and veg growing)

Posted by louisa on Friday 5 November 2010 in growing, meta, wild food | 0 comments

As I said in my post about our fungi forage last weekend, that walk taught me to confidently identify about half a dozen wild mushroom species, and the wild food walk we did in the early summer taught me how to identify another half dozen things, mostly green leaves. These built on things I’d learnt how to identify myself and the obvious things that we all know (nettles, dandelions, blackberries etc). So after a couple of years of being interested in wild food, I can identify maybe 25 things with enough confidence to eat them. That’s not exactly that many when you consider the variety of stuff out there.

When I want to learn a new craft or a new way to cook or bake something, I tend to grind it – a video game term for doing some repetitive task/quest over and over again in order to “level up” as quickly as possible so you can go onto more exciting things. When I was figuring out my (lazy) way to make slow rise no knead bread, I made it every other day for a fortnight. By the end of it, I was knocking out perfect, uniform loaves without much effort at all. By grinding it, I can quickly learn from my mistakes and don’t ever get stuck in a “it didn’t work last time, I don’t want to try again” slump.

But I can’t grind wild food. Nature won’t let me grind. It won’t let me focus on finding just one type of thing at any given time. I have to learn by its schedule and its randomness, an enforced slow learning curve.

Growing things in our garden is possible even worse. I’ve usually got a couple of months to collect and experiment with different wild plants before they go out of season, but I have, by and large, got one shot at growing things each year. If I miss the narrow sowing window or my seedlings die a few days after transplanting, that’s pretty much it – I have to wait a year to try again.

I always feel a bit sad when each wild food window closes – but I suspect it’s good for me to have these limitations in part of my life. It’ll teach me patience and there is nearly always something new to move onto finding or planting. I can continue reading about boletes & russulas and tomato seed varieties & manual pollination techniques over the winter – grinding the theory – but I have to wait until next year to continue the practical work.

After three decades of flitting from one thing to another fractionally more exciting thing, I think developing the skills of patience and sustained year-on-year learning is as important for me and my sustainable living as being able to tell the difference between a death cap and field mushroom. I just wish I’d started earlier ;)

Picking fruit trees – what to choose?

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 19 October 2010 in growing | 4 comments

Having missed the window last year, we are keen to get some fruit trees plants this autumn – but it’s not as easy as we thought it would be.

The difficulty is partly, mostly our own fault of course. We could buy misc off-the-shelf trees from a garden centre but since we’ve only really got one shot at trees here, we want to make sure we get it right so are hoping to order custom ones from a niche supplier – ones that will suit our wants (in terms of height & flavour), our soil type and our climate. This is where we need an advanced degree in mathematics to figure it all out.

We’re hoping to plant three apple trees, a cherry tree and a plum tree, and I’m thinking about some raspberry canes or blackcurrant bushes, and maybe something very dwarfed in a pot (possibly the cherry).

The nursery we’re going to order from has 65 varieties of apple, combined with 6 different possible rootstocks – a total of 390 options! Some varieties are good for eating, some for cooking and some for cider making – John wants to eat them & make cider, I want to cook with some (although that’s less of a priority).

The rootstocks will determine whether they’re tall or short, very vigorous or considerable less fruitful. Some only prosper in good soils, some are more forgiving. Some take longer to start fruiting than others. We’ve got to decide where we want to compromise.

Unsurprisingly, the most vigorous ones are the tallest ones – but I think we’ll struggle to harvest anything over 10-12ft from the ground so there seems little point getting one that grows more than 15ft tall. They also don’t usually start fruiting until they’re five or six years old. Conversely, the most dwarf type grow to just 4-6ft and fruit at 2 years – but only produce about 10-15lb of fruit a year, which hardly seems worth bothering with.

Even picking the variety for flavour is a challenge: I don’t eat apples and John doesn’t really know what he likes and what he doesn’t. From the supermarket (not a good place to use as a guide for fruit flavours!), he likes Braeburns but they need warmer climes than we can offer.

So many options! The only thing I know for sure is that we have to order them ASAP!

Anyone got any advice or suggestions? What did you pick and why?

(Photo by iscott)