See our totals on the new site:
http://farmasadlowo.pl/harvest-totals2013/
January 2, 2014
December 31, 2013
December 20, 2013
After a busy 2013 working out what we were going to do and how to do it, we’ve decided we need a more flexible site. To this end I’ve spent the last week learning a bit of wordpress.org stuff, very confusing initially but it did make sense in the end, and now have a site almost read.
I have moved this blog over there with all the old posts, comments etc. The only problem is it doesn’t copy over the people following the blog. So please visit farmasadlowo.pl have a look around and fill in the email subscription thing in the righthand side of the homepage.
The new site is hopefully a little better organised, allowing us to easily add sections when we take on new ventures. As we go on my wife will be translating it into Polish as well, I just need to work out how to get one of those neat little translation flags in the corner of the site first.
From now on I’ll be posting and updating farmasadlowo.pl, and not Cityandthemountains, so please come over and subscribe to our blog.
October 17, 2013
October 16, 2013
September saw a few of our crops finishing up for the year. We dug up all the rest of the potatoes, and picked our last courgettes & tomatoes. The carrots were ready to get in but I’m going to finish digging them up and storing them this week. Beetroot and parsnips are about finished growing now as well, I’ll also be getting these in before the end of Oct.
Rather than the graph I did last month, I think it will be clearer to just highlight the main harvests as we get them in, I’ll then give a summary of everything towards the end of the year.
Crop |
Sowed area m2 |
Harvested Total (kg) |
Harvest (kg) per m2 |
Potatoes |
60 |
121 |
2 |
Courgette |
7.5 |
14.85 |
3.16 |
Tomatoes |
20 |
23.7 |
1.18 |
Cucumbers |
10 |
29.3 |
2.93 |
Sweetcorn | 5 | 3.5 | 0.7 |
Pumpkin | 10 | 47 | 4.7 |
October 12, 2013
Autumn is here, and winter isn’t far behind.
The last couple of weeks we’ve been researching how to store our potatoes, carrots, beetroot and parsnips over winter. In Poland this is a little more tricky than it sounds as the winter temperature can average -10, and some gloomy weather people over here are predicting lows of -30 this winter. Our storage solutions have to stop things rotting as well as freezing.
It seems potatoes can be stored in all sorts of elaborate ways, most revolving around digging holes and burying a heap of potatoes and then covering with straw. We settled for just digging them up, bagging them into 5kg sacks and then covering in the cellar. It should stay above freezing down there.
Carrots are a bit more tricky. Most people said to layer them in some sort of container, separating the layers with sand. Apparently you have to make sure the carrots don’t touch. I tried this with my first batch of carrots and found it quite tedious arranging them in an old basket. The next batch I’m just going to layer on top of Styrofoam with sand. We’ll have to see what works best.
We also had our first hard frost a couple of weeks ago, which killed off all the courgette and pumpkin plants. We took in all the pumpkins which turned out to be a nice little batch. They are now organised in a very autumnal fashion around the house. Hopefully we will also get to eat them!
Some other things we’ve been up to:
September 17, 2013
September 14, 2013
If we ever want to live on our own food all year through we have to learn how to preserve what we have an abundance of in the summer. There are plenty of ways to do this, stick it in the freezer would be the obvious one, but we want to avoid a mains hook up on our house in the future, so we need something a little less energy hungry.
I started with two easy ways: Making Alcohol & Jarring.
I had quite a few tomatoes that were beginning to turn, and which were a a little blighted, so I cooked them all up and jarred them. It’s easy to do, a bit of outlay on jars the first time, unless you managed to collect your old jam jars (which I did but now don’t know what happened to them), but it pays in the end. So just make the sauce the way you like it and then completely fill jars that have been in the oven at 150c for 15mins or so. This is easier said than done, and it was a a good thing I didn’t video it, I may have had a few choice words for the jars as I burnt my fingers. But all worked out well in the end, although we’ll have to see what the contents is like in a few months.
Next is something I’m very interested in learning about. One of my little pleasures is a beer or drop of wine in the evenings after a hard days work. Ensuring I can make my own is very important for my survival. We have a few old elderberry trees about so I thought I would give some elderberry wine a try as my first attempt. This is my method so far:
My only real problem was that I didn’t have a big enough bung for the demijohn and didn’t have an airlock. Solved the 1st problem temporarily with some electric tape wrapped around the smaller bung (suggested to me by the guy down the hardware shop in the village). Next day got an airlock and bigger bung, it is now bubbling away nicely. I also wasn’t quite sure how much yeast to put in. My packet said enough for between 10-35 Litres. I had 5L, so put half the packet in, we’ll see.
I have to research the next steps but I know I have to wait for the fermentation to stop first, I also know I wont be able to taste it and find out what I did wrong for 8 months or so. My next project is cider, I don’t think you have to wait as long to drink this.
September 12, 2013
I thought it would be interesting to have a look at what we harvest, when we harvest it and how much of it we get. I struggled a bit to find the best way to display it, this is what I ended up with. All numbers are weights in Kilos.
Some highlights are 29kg of cucumbers, which is a large increase from our last attempt in Cornwall of 130g, and tomatoes, so far at 14.8kg with some more still to harvest in the tunnel and outside. I’m also interested to see what our potato total will be, due to dig them all up next week. We have 21kg from our 1st row, with another 10 rows to harvest.
From June to end of August we have harvested 117kg of veg from a cultivated area of 330 m2.
I’ll add an updated graph each month as I get the info, and start summarising the different veg to try and clearly show how much we sowed and how much we harvested (any suggestions on how to do this welcomed!).
September 11, 2013
I was given this toy from a friend of mine before leaving England. I finally got a chance to put it to the test when I cam up against some logs that were a bit too wide for my chainsaw.