Little Green Space
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Little Green Space |
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July 2008 July 31, 2008 Crops This morning I pulled up the first couple of carrots from the veggie patch, and a parsnip. Ok, I know, I know. Parsnips should be left in the ground until after the first frost, which gives them more flavour. But October is such a long time away, and I couldn't wait to see how they were doing. The leaves look pretty great, but I wanted to see if the roots were great too. Well, they're doing very well, if the one I pulled up is anything to go by. It wasn't exactly a whopper, but big enough to peel, chop and roast for lunch. Which is of course exactly what I did. The potatoes are good too, but I'm now wishing I'd planted more. There are only about eight plants left to harvest, which I doubt will see us through the winter! I'd planted one pack of second earlies ("Kestrel") and a pack of maincrops ("Desiree" - a bargain at £1.99 from Wilkos). Next year I shall do double the kestrels, and maybe add a first early variety too. July 30, 2008 Bees I'm turning my thoughts now to other food we can produce for ourselves. There is an excellent article about bee-keeping in the current issue of Countryfile magazine which has got me thinking. I do like honey, and keeping bees is a very eco-friendly thing to do. Honeybees are a threatened species, which is bad news for us, as they pollinate a large percentage of our food. Plus locally produced honey is good for your health. A spoonful a day can help alleviate the symptoms of hayfever - you are supposed to start taking it a couple of weeks before the hayfever starts; how you know when this I don't know. So the answer is probably just to have a spoonful a day anyway, from, say, February. This would be no problem for me, because I love the stuff. I also give honey to the kids when they have a cough - it's the only thing that seems to work, as we find over-the-counter medicines no use at all. I dissolve the honey in some boiling water and add a splash of orange or apple juice, just enough to cool it down for drinking. So bee-keeping might be a good idea. The only problem is that it does look a bit complicated. I think I need to get down to the library and do a bit more research before I rush out to buy a bee suit. In the meantime, I'll buy local honey from a supplier such as The Honey Pot - available at farmers' markets! July 26, 2008 Food Glorious Food We have had a very foodie day today. This morning we visited Bakewell Farmers' Market - the first time we have been, but certainly not the last, as we are trying to buy food more locally and with less packaging. They sell just about everything there - all sorts of organic meat, sausages, free-range chicken, (even emu steaks! - not sure whether they were locally farmed or not!) as well as veggies, bread, cakes, honey and flour. The flour is from the only working windmill in Derbyshire, at Heage. On the way home we called in at Promised Land Fruit Farm near Two Dales, a pick-your-own place. We spent a happy, sunny hour gathering strawberries and raspberries. All of this reaffirmed the fact that buying food locally is better. For a start, it's cheaper - if you buy direct from the producers you're not paying for store overheads or lining the pockets of supermarket share holders. There is generally less packaging - most people at the farmers' market carried their own shopping bags or baskets and the produce went straight into these, mostly sans plastic. And it's so much better for the environment: the Peak District farmers markets only allow producers from within a 30 mile radius, so less food miles have been used to get the food from farm to fork. Local food tastes better, too! For info on food suppliers in the Peak District, click here. Since growing our own vegetables we've become so much more aware of where food comes from. We can't provide all the food for our family, but I've taken to checking supermarket labels, and certain things - like Braeburn apples from New Zealand - go straight back onto the shelf. And if things go wrong in the veggie patch, such as slugs eating all my lettuces, I'd rather buy from Rob and Jane down the road - who will pick the lettuce for you while you wait - how fresh is that? - than buy one that's been imported from Holland. I will also think twice about out of season food: strawberries in December may be nice, but doesn't it kind of spoil strawberries in June, July and August? July 25, 2008 Children and Animals Today Paul Robinson, a photographer from the Derbyshire Times, came round to photograph Rosie, Bramble and Snowy (and us and the kids). The paper is doing a piece on people who are trying to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Angela Walsh, the Derbyshire Times journalist who wrote a piece on Little Green Space when it launched back in March had remembered that we kept chickens, so was able to quiz us on all aspects of chicken management. We also discussed our growing vegetable patch and our new orchard. The children and animals behaved surprisingly well and Paul managed to get a couple of good shots quite quickly. He was then off to visit Fairfield Nursery just down the hillside on Hackney Lane to photograph Rob Griffiths and Jane Holmes, who grow and sell organic vegetables. Our painted lady caterpillars have grown at an alarming rate since arriving two weeks ago. They got so big so quickly that you could almost see them growing. They are now all formed into chrysalides, so this morning we carefully removed them from the plastic pot and popped them into the butterfly house - a sort of mesh basket, available from Insect Lore. In a couple of weeks we should hopefully see our butterflies emerge, and can release them into the garden. July 15, 2008 Transition Town Rich and I were both able to make it to last night's Matlock transition town meeting. It was very inspiring, particularly because of the energy and the positive attitude of those involved. The project has the potential to make massive improvements to Matlock's environment, communities and quality of life. Many towns across the country are now in the process of becoming transition towns, and in fact Rich had an e-mail from a friend in New Zealand who is involved in the process over there. The launch of Matlock as a transition town is set to happen with a big event in October - more details to follow. July 14, 2008 Owls Last night I caught sight of our resident tawny owl, as it flew over the house and into the ash tree where it is nesting. I am still to get a glimpse of a barn owl, but we have had some very encouraging news. We had an e-mail from Stuart Slack, a local man who has lived in the area for years and who had read about our work in the Peak Advertiser newspaper. He remembers watching barn owls in flight over the fields around here during the 1950s and 1960s. So now we know that the area has had barn owls, which is a boost to our efforts to bring them back. A friend of ours also caught sight of a barn owl recently, just a few miles up the road. If there are barn owls around, they will hopefully take residence at Hackney Leys in the future. July 12, 2008 Veggie Patch Makeover At last the weather has stayed dry for long enough for me to get out into the vegetable garden. It has been very frustrating of late because every time I've had a spare hour to garden (which doesn't happen that often!) it has been pouring with rain. Lots of perennial weeds had taken hold, including bramble and the dreaded bindweed. So today I had a good old clear-out. It was also a chance to have a really good look at the veg, to take stock of what has been successful, what has failed and what needs to be done next. The parsnips are looking fantastic - especially the "Gladiator" variety that I sowed into toilet roll tubes. The carrots seem to be doing fine, too, and we've harvested a couple of good helpings of peas and several bag-loads of potatoes. The second lot of cut-and-come-again salad leaves sown a few weeks ago have been devoured by slugs, which is frustrating as the first lot of salad is near the end of its life. I've sown more, and will have to do a dusk vigil with as torch and pick off the little blighters when the seedlings emerge. And the cauliflowers were a dismal failure - the heads didn't form properly, and they too were eaten up by slugs. It's time to start thinking about stuff to grow for eating in the autumn, so I've put in chard, kale and perpetual spinach. I'm now also thinking that I need more space for planting! July 6, 2008 Happy Birthday
Today would have been my grandmother's 100th birthday. She died in 1999 at the age of 91. So this afternoon we planted an oak tree for her in the top meadow - one of the trees that Ash grew from acorns from the Old Man of Calke (see Diary, April 26) Hopefully the tree will still be standing there in 2108.
While we were planting, we stumbled upon these caterpillars, feeding on some nettles. I'm pretty sure they are peacock butterfly caterpillars. Our youngest daughter was very excited at the discovery - she had just received some painted lady caterpillars in the post, a birthday present from her granddad. We sat and watched the caterpillars for ages. The hay meadows are teeming with life at the moment - we also spotted a grasshopper, butterflies and moths of all shapes and sizes, and, not so happily lots of slugs! July 4, 2008 Educational Programme Launch This morning I visited Wessington Primary School to give a talk about mini-beasts to a class of year 4, 5 and 6 children. We then went out onto Wessington Nature Reserve, just next to the school. It's a fantastic habitat, full of native trees, long grass and wild flowers. We took some digital video cameras with us and the children made short films about their discoveries, which included grasshoppers, speckled wood and meadow brown butterflies, bees and hoverflies. By the end of the morning, the children were able to identify lots of different creatures and flowers - it was a really enjoyable day. July 3, 2008 Transition Town Last night Rich had a busy evening, first working at the All Saints Infants school garden, and then on to a local meeting about transition towns. Anyone who is aware of the problem of peak oil will know that something needs to be done - and pretty urgently. Matlock is in the very early stages of becoming a transition town - in basic terms a town which is sufficiently self-sufficient to survive once oil shortages strike, at the same time as tackling climate change. The first step is to raise awareness of the issues: many people still believe that these problems don't really exist. An issue that goes hand in hand with the idea of sustainability is making Matlock as environmentally sound as possible - and we hope that Little Green Space will be able to play a key role in that. And we've re-evaluated our impact as a family (again! - we keep trying to find more ways to live in a more ethical way). We have decided to try to cut our energy consumption even further by not heating water in the evening. This means no baths, only showers. And we're making that extra effort to cut our car use down. Plus we're looking into log burners that will heat the water, and whether we can harness energy from the stream that runs near the house. These are all small changes, but if many people make many small changes it can make a huge difference. July 1, 2008 Wildflowers A friend who is a Peak Park ranger came to Hackney Leys at the weekend to help us to identify the wildflowers on site. It was incredibly useful, and we spotted 15 different varieties of flower in the meadows. Most exciting was the confirmation that we have Great Burnet, which is apparently becoming more and more rare in these parts. But the flower I really liked was Goatsbeard - it has the most peculiar looking flower heads which are only open in the morning, hence its other name of Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon. It's growing amongst a gorgeous patch of ox-eye daisies, buttercups and clover.
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