no dig gardening, seasonal cooking, permaculture, preserving, foraging, storing, crafting, home life
This week began with the Autumn Equinox, the festival of Mabon, which starts on September 21st
Like much of the country, Bruton has been very hot and dry for weeks and weeks. Frustratingly all of the recent rains have missed my small town.
The vegetable gardens are filling up with gorgeous summer abundance, almost every day it seems we are welcoming back another seasonal delight.
We celebrated the first day of May by flying from Bristol to Aberdeen, to visit Beechgrove Gardens.
Every year I mulch my no dig allotment with an inch or two of composted manure or homemade compost, but this year I am trying something different!
Homemade newspaper pots are quick and easy to make and use, biodegrade in the soil and worms like munching them too! Put into reusable containers to make your own module trays or use as individual pots.
We are often asked to start no dig gardens and so Charles, the admin team of our Facebook group and I have come up with the Top Ten Most Frequently Asked Questions.
If we haven’t covered your questions, please ask them in the comments here (or on the Facebook group if you are a member) and we will answer them as soon as we can.
There’s a lot more information in our (Award Winning!!) book, No Dig Organic Home and Garden, in Charles’ other books, on his website and his You Tube Channel.
Beetroot grows in my garden from April right through to the end of autumn, some in the polytunnel over winter too. This tasty root vegetable stores so well that I can make this hummus at any time of year, but there’s something especially autumnal and satisfying about the combination of roasted beetroot, carrot and onion.
This gorgeous bright seasonal salad is almost a meal in itself and can easily be adapted to include other summer vegetables in your garden (and winter root veg later in the year). It is a zingy, delicious, colourful way to use up gluts.
I’ve been trying out a few variations of this seasonal muffin, using our course people as guinea pigs! Low in processed sugar, these satisfying baked treats are great to nibble on for an extra boost of energy when gardening. They also make a great breakfast muffin.
Regular readers of my blog will know that one of passions, and fortunately work, is harvesting seasonal homegrown vegetables, fruit and herbs and delicious food. For our no dig gardening day course at Homeacres on Saturday, I made lunch for 17 (including Charles and myself) using Charles’ gorgeous vegetables (plus some bought ingredients, things we can’t grow easily which I’ll explain later) for around £1 a head, including muffins.
Perennial fruit bushes play a key role in my garden, producing an abundance of delicious berries during summer months. These I preserve, to enjoy year round: jewel coloured jams, cordials, liqueurs, chutneys and other delicious additions to my homegrown larder.
On Monday 3rd July, I was interviewed by Jen Gale about my work, in particular about the ethical aspects of it. This was the first interview for her new series entitled “Meet the Changemaker”. All of these interviews will be uploaded so anyone can view for free onto Jen’s You Tube channel Jen Gale – Ethical Business Coach,
My first real introduction to no dig gardening was when I started working with Charles in his market garden at Lower Farm nine years or so ago. He lived in a nearby village, so I had heard of Charles and his methods (local shops sold his mixed salad leaves too) and borrowed his book Organic Gardening, the Natural No Dig Way from the library but didn’t see it in action until I visited his farm for the job interview – it looked amazing! Learning about Charles’ method through experiencing it, his way of working with the soil and nature felt natural and I was soon wanting to apply the methods to my allotment and garden.
Somerset Garden Day is happening today! I think this is a brilliant idea – of course I don’t need much encouragement to spend time in my garden, but this day is a bit different.
The temperature has fallen (again!) and the wind can be so cold, but things are hotting up in my no dig greenhouse and polytunnel. Germination is so rapid it feels as though seeds are popping almost as soon as I plant them, thanks to the heat mats and heated propagating bench.
Less temperature vulnerable larger plants, including the tomatoes, peppers, sweetcorn and aubergines, have been moved to unheated areas in the greenhouse and polytunnel – they are still being protected from the cool wind and cold, and I am ready to cover them with fleece if there is a risk of frost – tonight has been flagged up as a potential problem, so I’m going to check all of my outdoor potatoes and protect with earthing up, cardboard and fleece.
On the heat now are young courgettes, cucumbers, melons, basil, squash, blue butterfly pea and beans, in various stages of growth – some ready to pot on, others just emerging from the compost. The wind last week was so cold I appreciated being able to sow, prick out and pot on in the shelter of my polytunnel.
This year I’ve sown 13 different varieties of basil, including Thai, Indian, Cinnamon, Lemon, Lime and Holy, as well as three different kinds of sweet basil. I use basil widely in cooking, from salads to Thai dishes (for which I also grow lemon grass, special Thai aubergines and Thai chillies). The vibrant spicy flavours available are far more exciting than anything you can buy in a regular grocers, making basil a really worthwhile herb to grow.
There’s still plenty of time to sow basil!
Basil needs warmth and daylight to germinate and thrive. A windowsill propagator is ideal for smaller spaces. Sow the basil in rows in a seed tray to maximise space – you can easily fit 7 or 8 full rows of basil, more if you sow half rows. Remember to label them all! Once they have germinated, prick out into modules for single sturdy plants, to grow on somewhere light and frost free. Alternatively, sow a pinch into modules, or more into pots, for clumps of fragrant leaves for the kitchen windowsill. Most of my basil goes into the polytunnel as individual plants.
After pricking out, I leave the rest of the basil in the seedtray to grow on as microleaves. This provides two or three harvests of extra-early basil for salads, pesto and sauces.
There are seed trays, modules and plants everywhere! On tables in the garden, temporary staging made from upturned crates, anywhere I can find until they are ready to plant out. Growing in modules makes it very easy to put plants in crates and then into the car, to go to work or up to my allotment – they can be stacked in the boot too, an important space and time saving consideration as my car is very small. I bought more herbs and four step over apple trees from Pennard Plants last week and somehow managed to fit them all in my boot!
A spider used one of the crates to make her nest – here are her beautiful babies. I always try to keep spiders safe, they are such great predators in the garden.
I am very much enjoying this wildish area next to the perennial bed (there are potatoes on the other side of the dalek composters). The florence fennel has overwintered somehow and is producing small fennel bulbs from the base where I cut the bulb last autumn – I expect it will bolt quite soon. As well as the annual flowers, here are two euphorbia varieties, a red rose and a wild white rose. This polyculture adds to the biodiversity of my garden, providing a wide range of forage for insects and birds throughout the year. It is a bit of a pain to keep weed free though – both roses are very thorny!
This is one of the two Florence fennel that I sowed in September and overwintered in the polytunnel (on display at Hauser and Wirth with some of my stored squash and garlic; the potatoes were harvested by Charles in July and stored in a sack in his shed all winter). Most of the young fennel plants were killed by the cold temperatures.
Every day there are more flowers! These are all in my back garden, except for the bean flowers which are at work.
It looks as though the greengage blossom was undamaged by frost as the small tree is full of potential baby fruit. At work, I am enjoying the amazing vibrant pink of this chard.
On Bank Holiday Monday, Charles and I had a stall selling our new book, and many of Charles’ other titles. It was a fun day, so many people came, great music, fantastic food and the Morris Men.
And on Sunday 8th, Charles and I celebrated the book with Maddy and Tim Harland and the rest of the team at Permaculture Magazine, at the South Downs Fair, Sustainability Centre, Hampshire.
It is doing so well, we’re having great feedback and it is still a best seller on Amazon! (If you’d like a copy, please buy from us or the publishers, if you can).
Friday 21st April was uniquely special for Charles and myself. Two very exciting events happened quite by chance on the same day: our book arrived at the publishers and Charles was featured on BBC Gardeners’ World. Life has been so busy since that it has taken a week to be able to find the time write this post 🙂
Our publishers, Permanent Press, released gorgeous photos on social media of our book. It was quite a challenge focusing on other tasks over the weekend, with the anticipation of delivery on Monday, wondering what it would look like ‘in real life’ and looking forward to holding a copy.
Meanwhile, Gardeners’ World were busy promoting the evening’s programme on Twitter, with the help of Monty’s dog Nigel. We were delighted to read the BBC describing Charles as “legendary”!
Neither Charles not myself own a tv, so we had arranged to visit a friend to watch the programme. Charles’ part was filmed at Homeacres on 10th August 2016; we were looking forward to seeing how they had edited a whole day’s filming into around 6 minutes.
We thought it was great – loved Monty’s introduction, calling Charles a “guru” (!!) and afterwards, explaining that he has been convinced by Charles’ work. The programme included footage of Charles with Geoff Hamilton back in the 1980s, when a whole episode of Gardeners’ World was filmed from his then garden, an 8 acre organic no dig market garden. Fun to see Charles as a young man, too! You can see the programme on You Tube here.
The feedback has been fantastic: lots of discussion and a massive increase in people wanting to find out more about no dig. I had the briefest appearance on the programme too, captured here in a screenshot by my daughter. There’s been a lot of interest in this little bed, people wondering whether it was made just for the programme and then removed. I’m happy to say that it cropped until mid-winter and recently we planted potatoes in it. Charles and Ed made a video about creating and planting the bed here.
We were thrilled when the courier arrived on Monday afternoon and we could finally see the result of all of the work done by ourselves, the editors, proofreader, designer, indexer, etc. The book was much bigger than we’d anticipated (it is so full of information, photos, ideas…) and looks lovely.
There were a lot of boxes, we were so glad it was a dry day!
After carrying all of these boxes into the conservatory for storage with the help of Finn, Charles’ helper who took these photos, it was time to start signing copies for all of the pre-orders and package them, ready for the post office the following morning. The envelopes Charles had bought were a fraction too small which created a bit of a problem initially, solved when we worked out a way if making larger envelopes using the existing ones and packing tape. (Larger envelopes have arrived now!)
By 6 pm, our hands were getting tired and the champagne was calling us – also, we hadn’t properly looked through the book yet! So we drank champagne and have a first real look at our new book. We love it 🙂
No Dig Organic Home and Garden has received some really wonderful feedback, I’ve hardly stopped smiling all week thanks to the many kind, enthusiastic responses to our book. It was a best seller on a certain online store one day after being published and today is also #2 in Organic Gardening (#1 is Charles’ Diary) Copies has gone to the distributor in America, we have been sending them worldwide too. We are so delighted with the sales, it is fantastic.
The best way to support authors is to buy direct so if you would like a copy, please consider buying from Charles’ website here. We can sign it for you, too! Alternatively, the book can be bought from the publishers. Both ways support everyone who has worked to produce the book. (Some online retailers have policies which means that they get most of the proceeds.)