FEEDING THE GARDEN
This is a passion I have learnt a lot about over the last eight years, since keeping pigs, goats, sheep and chickens there has been a lot of manure! Growing all our own vegetables successfully and un successfully every year comes with the important task to feed (manure) your empty vegetable beds, I do this in winter and again in the rotating empty beds at the end of the summer harvest. I like to think of this as the same as feeding our livestock, every living thing has to eat and vegetables are no different, the sun and water are enough but give them great manure and soil they like and they will generally reward you with a bounty of generous vegetables, this is mostly true but I do find every year a different crop that was prolific the previous years turns out to be a poor crop the following year, this year my beetroot and courgettes are terrible, that’s a first for me, go figure!
Year Five Farm Manure Heap
There is a little science to manure and I have learnt the hard way as always! I like experience to teach me and one year I took the manure too early from the farm muck heap, dug in to all 30 of our 2 m x 1 m beds and basically I grew green GRASS TURF this was because the manure was young had not heated hot enough to kill off the seeds and basically I just dug in fertilised grass seed, it resulted in the most hardest constant weeding over a whole season I have ever done! Lesson learnt, let the muck heap manure mature, so here I am year five and I have the most premium grade manure ready to use
every year from now on, and it is a huge muck heap so I will be able to share in abundance with my other veg growing friends.
This Seasons Bounty
We absolutely love our growing garden, we spend hours just wandering talking to the vegetables, checking on their progress, picking leaves for the chickens and enjoying that self sufficient feeling of going food shopping down the garden daily!
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