March resolution

Own up time (which just happens to be my favourite Small Faces track). Last year I spent far too little time on Otter Farm, and far too much on other things. Too little outside, too much inside. This year it’s not going to happen that way.

The forest garden i’ve been meaning to start since I’ve been here (and even got underway once, before backtracking and digging up due to lack of time) is this year’s big project. So no pecans. Instead ones and twos of pears, hazelnuts, Oregon grapes, Myrica rubra, Nanking cherries, Cornelian cherries and a few hardy kiwis (like the usual ones, only happier in colder weather, smaller fruit, but even more delicious). And 32 Japanese peppers to go with the ones I planted 2 years ago, some Szechaun peppers to go with the zillions of others and 14 apricots. All well cheaper than 30 pecans.

More than that, I want to care for a few things that don’t merge into an orchard, where each one is more consciously precious by virtue of being the only one I have.

Peach blossom, already on its way in the polytunnel.

  • That's a lot of Japanese peppers in comparison to everything else (apart from the apricots, perhaps)?

    And do you grow your peaches in pots? presumably because of peach leaf curl?

    Peter.

  • i only have a dozen or so of the Japanese peppers already so this brings it up to the sort of numbers for a good small commercial harvest, the rest are to go into half an acre or so of forest garden – a kind of edible jungle which I'll write more about in the next few days. The 14 apricots are from a supplier friend who knows I'm keen to create a good sized orchard of different varieties.

    Peaches – hhhmmm, funny one peaches. Bought 40 of the so-caled leaf resistant ones….complete cobblers. They all got leaf curl badly, took them to court, they settled a few days before the case. If you want the best peach go for Peregrine – it's common and brilliant – or Rochester. Avalon Pride just aint resistant to leaf curl. I've about 20 in the polytunnel, most of which are in pots and about 40 in an orchard….altough i'm about to plant out maybe 15 of the indoor ones. I always keep a few of whatever I plant in the polytunnel to get an earlier crop and see what they taste like a year or two before but the idea is to make this work outside. Thanks for asking

  • Does that mean that you don't protect the ones in your orchard against leaf curl? Does that mean you risk some years of getting no peaches? or do you spray or something?

    Peter.

  • i dont protect them, although they're only 3years old so not expecting a crop yet, and the older they get the more readily they should throw off leaf curl…i hope. i never spray!

  • A question I’ve had from a couple of comments you’ve made in the blog.

    At about the same time as I attended Martin Crawford’s forest gardening course, I also was reading books about small-scale, yet commercial, vegetable production. What struck me as an immediate contrast was that the vegetable growing was all about straight lines (for ease of weeding, planting and harvesting), whilst the forest garden was “messy” (the term used here in a purely descriptive way).

    The vegetable gardening was all about making things regular so that you didn’t waste time, since margins are tight; you can’t afford to be all over the place. Yet, with a forest garden, you do want things all over the place. You don’t want all your nitrogen fixing trees/shrubs clustered together; you want your horse mint and lemon balm spread around the place to attract the hoverflies everywhere. You don’t want all your apple trees (or whatever) together to minimise the risk of disease spreading through all your stock. And so on.

    So, when you come to plant out your Japanese pepper trees or your apricots (on a semi-commercial scale), are you going to plant them all together? Or are you going to plant them in clumps, and then have to wander all over the place to pick your berries or apricots? More generally, have you thoughts about the trade-offs between the efficiencies of planting things together in regular lines, and the benefits of planting things apart to benefit from their neighbours and prevent the spread of disease?

    Cheers,

    Peter.

  • lovely question! anything i plant any umber of (say 30+) i plant in regular pattern, together. On 17 acres you've got to have some efficiency spacewise. Elsewhere there aerw more mixed areas coming together – a forest garden starting up, a climate change allotment, a 'regular' allotment etc and these are very mixed. When the larger orchards have established a little, my idea is to underplant them with something useful/productive so that at the very least every area will be a form of agroforestry. In a few years I hope the whole place will be a sort of forest garden, with some 'rooms' (eg the apricot orchard) very mixed but perhaps more orderly than others. So tomorrow the apricots go in to join the other ones, but are bounded/divided by Japanese and Nepalese pepper hedges

    How's that sound?

  • "How's that sound?"

    Not too bad, I'll let you off 😉

    As a sort of follow-up, what about fertilization? I have ideas about interspersing plantings with alders / robinia or eleagnus (for smaller crops) for N.

    Martin has got comfrey coming up everywhere for K, and that would seem quiite easy to do.

    And he uses urine for P (pun intended). To my shame, I didn't have the courage to ask him how he organizes this. Does he have a plan of which tree the next wee has to be up against? Or does he hope that statistics will come to his aid and that it all evens out over a season 🙂

    Anyway, what do you do?

    Peter.

  • any apricot ending in 'cot' will do well in most of england, plus hargrand, and petit muscat (bunches of grape-sized apricots) – they're all delicious….alders and eleaegnus everywhere plus much clover sown….spray/water a fair bit with comfrey, and pee wherever the nearest tree is! Im guessing martin does the same, but he's from totnes so he may have more adventurous methods…….

  • After trying to find late flowering Apricot varieties and from my research on the internet throughout different countries websites COT International – an Apricot varieties trademarking and licensing company from Nimes, France is currently concentrating it's effort only towards earliest flowering and ripening varieties with shortest dormant period from warmer climates – specifically California! Therefore COT registered varieties should be avoided for cooler and wetter UK conditions and instead Apricot growers should orientate their attention towards hardy later flowering Canadian, Czech, Hungarian, Michigan and Slovak varieties from their breeding programs, but especially Canadian research stations from southern Ontario at Harrow (Harcot, Hargrand, Harlayne, Harogem, Harglow, Harval, Harostar, Harojoy, Haroblush) and Vineland (Velvaglo, Vivagold, Veecot, Viceroy) or Michigan (Goldcot and Goldrich). V.Tutko, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

  • V interesting V. I've got some of a few of them, but not many…will investigate further, thanks

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