The Seasons

Pictures of the seasons in Sadlowo (Sadwovo; Eng pronunciation):

Early Spring

Early Summer

Autumn

Winter

 

September Harvest Totals

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

I was pretty happy with our potatoes this year, although we learnt a good lesson about watering. I would say 75% of our harvest weight came from the bottom 1/3 of each row, which was as far as our hose went when watering. Next year I will plant a similar area but will work on a better irrigation system so that we can maximise the whole row. Cucumber were a great success, it seems all of the Cucurbitaceae (don’t ask how to pronounce it), which includes, courgettes, pumpkins, melons, and cucumbers, all did very well in our soil. Next year I will focus on this family, planting more of everything including the melons, which did surprisingly well considering I didn’t treat them very well. We had a good harvest of Tomatoes, certainly my best effort yet. I think in the end we had about 30 plants outside, which gave us 90% of our harvest, and another 20 odd in a poly tunnel, which didn’t do very well at all. From May-end Aug the weather was hot and sunny with very little rain, I think the polytunel became too hot and we weren’t here enough for watering and airing. Next year I am going to try for 200 plants, with most outside, I’ll use the polytunel for peppers and aubergines.

 

Harvesting, Storing, & a Frost

Autumn is here, and winter isn’t far behind.

Autumn View.

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.

Nice Bunch!

Tools at the Ready.

Neatly Arranged in a Basket.

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!

First Hard Frost

Courgettes Dead

Cabbages taking it on the chin.

Pumpkin Harvest

Some other things we’ve been up to:

Planted Another 6 Fruit Trees in the Orchard.

Planting Blackcurrant Bushes.

Deep hole with lots of manure!

 

Making Butter Quickly

One of the guys working on the house gives us fresh milk from time to time. We’ve been meaning to make butter from it for a while. I had a spare 15mins this morning so gave it a go:

 

5L fresh milk left over night with cloth cover.

Cream taken from the top of the milk.

Put cream in jar and shake.

And shake a bit more.

As if by magic..

Butter!!

Lovely, even if I do say so myself.

 

Preserving: Alcohol & Jars.

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.

Cleaned an chopped.

In the pan with my secret blend of herbs and spices.

Fried up for a bit and reduced.

Jars out the oven and filled whilst piping hot.

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:

1. Pick 3lb of elderberries, make sure they are nice and black.
2. Boil up 8 pints of water.
3. Mix some wine yeast with a bit of warm water and leave for 25mins whilst doing the other bits.
4. Meanwhile pick of the berries into a bucket and mash up with your hands.
5. Pour half the boiling water into the mashed up berries. Allow to cool.
6. Pour other half into another container with 3lb of sugar.
7. Pour berry mixture into the sugar water container through cloth.
8. Add teaspoon of citric acid and the yeast.
9. Pour into demijohn and seal with bung & airlock.

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.

3lbs Elderberries

Stripped into a bucket

Mashed up by hand.

Poured into another bucket which contains half the boiling water with 3lb sugar, yeast and citric acid, through cloth.

Pour into demijohn. Schoolboy error not having funnel!

5 Litres ready for fermentation

Rubber bung too small, a temporary fix courtesy of the guy at the hardware shop.

The aftermath!

 

Harvest; What, When & Weight

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!).

 

 

Wood Grenade Demo

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.