Spring is in the Air

Seasonal Change
Spring is definitely in the air and I am itching to get back into the garden. Over the three months we have lived in the new/old house we have seen the garden change from a luscious jungle of overgrown shrubs and perennials intertwined with old pieces of furniture, rusty wire frames, old planters and footballs into a muddy wilderness.
The garden looked lovely on the surface when we first moved in. I took some lovely photos of it as it was and they were worthy of a centre spread in a gardening magazine, but the more I looked at the garden, the more I knew we had to do something.


Apologies
It’s a bit like going to a friend’s house where they apologises for the mess in the garden, you can’t see it at first, just like you wouldn’t notice on a photograph and you don’t know what the fuss is about. When you look closer though the neglect starts to appear and you see the overgrown shrubs, weeds and old broken children’s toys scattered around. Thankfully though it’s your friend’s garden so you can just sit and relax on the patio chairs drinking Pims or a can of lager.
It was the same for me at first because the garden still felt like it was tended by the person who lived here before us. I enjoyed the fact that there were self set sycamore trees towering over the washing line and an old rotten fence that had 20 layers of different coloured paint holding it together.

Clearing
The urge to set up raised vegetable beds to grow our own crops this year has given me the incentive to do a bit of clearing though and over the last few weeks I have taken out all of the trees with my trusty chainsaw. That sounds a bit dramatic, there were only two of them, it felt like more though because over the years the trees (both sycamore) had been chopped back, allowed to grow and then chopped back again. The results of this were multi stemmed sycamores that were mini forests in themselves. They had to go. The large rhododendron shrub has been reduced to a stump and so have the cotoneaster, again self set by the birds. I’m going to have to remove their roots soon as they could do some damage. You usually find self set plants grow in the most awkward of places, in small cracks and crevices near walls. Their roots can be problematic though if left unchecked.


New Secret Weapon
There are a lot of roots growing where the raised beds will go and I have a great idea to get them out without any effort on my part. If you remember I secured the garden a few weeks ago to keep the dogs in. This has worked well for now and the dogs have more or less destroyed the lawn, leaving it a muddy mess. I want to take things to a new level though and instead of just the top of the soil being cleared, why not the roots too? The dogs wouldn’t do it, but a pig would. I was on Donedeal last night and saw pot bellied pigs for sale for 17 euro. Now that’s cheap labour, they could have the ground cleared in a week, roots and all.
There are a few objections though which will need addressing first though that the family have raised. What happens to the pig once the ground is cleared? What if there are pretty bulbs that we don’t know about that will get eaten, (pigs are not known for being fussy eaters) and thirdly, my question was, can you eat pot bellied pigs? I couldn’t raise an animal to kill them though although I do threaten to boil up the guinea pig sometimes when it’s not being fed regularly. I wouldn’t of course, there’s not enough meat on it to make it worthwhile.


For Hire
There was the suggestion of just hiring a pig (another one of mine I might add) I couldn’t find anywhere or anyone that offers this service on Donedeal or any other classified site though. I think it would be a great idea. It doesn’t have to be a pot bellied one either, it could be one of those massive pigs used for hunting truffles, I’m not fussy. I’m open to any offers, if anyone has a pig they wouldn’t mind hiring out for a few weeks, you know where to bring it. Just let me know first, I still have to convince the family it’s a good idea.

Biodynamic Agriculture

 Here’s a bit of biodynamics the dogs prepared earlier.

 A cow horn preparation courtesy of Howard Sooley

I got some very interesting feedback from last week’s article about homeopathy in the garden. Some people say that water has a conscience and you can even alter it with mind control even before adding drops of plant extract. We’re not without the odd sceptic too, which keeps everyone on their toes, or their feet on the ground anyway. Here’s what EK said about water. “Water should work as a homeopathic remedy for all preparations, as it would have had the substances dissolved in it before. The controversy surrounding homeopathy is that the dilution recommends a dilution of 10 to the power of 60 - i.e. the original solution is diluted to one million billion billion billion billion billion billionth of the original strength; diluting any active ingredient out of solution.” EK isn’t a fan.

There are more down to earth techniques to use in the garden though if you fancy delving into the work of animal parts. Biodynamic Agriculture is proving to be very popular and although criticised as pseudoscience by scholars, biodynamics is practiced in more than 50 countries worldwide.

Biodynamic Agriculture

Biodynamics originated out of the work of Rudolf Steiner around talks made in 1924 and is considered to be one of the most sustainable methods of farming.
Biodynamic agriculture is a method of organic farming that emphasizes the holistic development and interrelationships of the soil, plants and animals as a self-sustaining system. Biodynamic farming has much in common with other organic approaches, such as emphasising the use of manures and composts and excluding of the use of artificial chemicals on soil and plants, it’s very widely used in moon cycle gardening techniques.

The 500 Preparations

The classical biodynamic preparations are usually known by the names given them in 1928 when they were being investigated by early BD experimenters keeping their cards close to their chests. These are the numbers 500 – 508. And fascinating they are too, if you try this at home please let me know!:
500 - Take a well-developed horn from a cow that has had a calf; fill it full of firm and fresh cow manure. Bury it a foot or so down beneath a rich soil over the winter. Identify the site well! Exhume it around Easter and, for each acre, about 50 grams of what comes out is put into about 20 litres of water and stirred vigorously for an hour. Make sure there are vortices one way and then the other which reach to the base of the bucket or barrel, and interrupt them vigorously to change direction. After stirring, take this to your land and sprinkle it over the soil. 500 is sprayed when soil cultivation is taking place and before new crops are planted. It is thought to act primarily upon the soil and roots.

501 - Uses finely crushed crystalline silica in a cow's horn and is buried in the soil over summer until Michaelmas. Much less is used in the stirring and it tends to be used in the foliage to increase its use of sunlight. Together, 500 and 501 are known as the 'field sprays'.
502 - 507 - The 'compost preparations'. A pinch of each of the following are placed in holes bored along manure and compost heaps.
502 - Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium) flowers are stitched into a stag's bladder and hung up over summer. These are then buried over winter.
503 - Chamomile (Matricaria Chamomilla) flowers are stuffed into the small intestine of a cow like sausages. These are buried over winter and then exhumed.
504 - Nettle (Urtica dioica) is buried in the soil for a year from June to June.
505 - Oak bark (Quercus robur) is kept in a domestic animal's skull and left under flowing water and organic sludge over winter.
506 - Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) flowers are wrapped in a cow's mesentery and buried over winter.
507 - The juice from valerian (Valeriana officinalis) is squeezed out and sprinkled over the heaps when they are created.
508 - Equisetum arvense is boiled for 15 minutes and cooled, diluted and sprayed to minimise fungal infestation.

Now where’s my cow horn?

Homeopathic Gardening

Homeopathic Gardening
I’m in the kitchen attempting to open a jar of curry paste. The lid is stuck tight and try as I might it just won’t come off. Tapping the lid with a knife could work as could giving the jar to a stronger member of the family to open (that’s all of them). As no one else is around I pretend I am an oak tree with big roots harnessing the earth’s energy. Sounds a bit daft but it worked. Homeopathy is another thing that sounds a bit daft, but it seems to get results in eradicating pests and diseases in the garden.

Homeopathy and plants
Homeopathy works by adding tiny amounts of plant extracts into a solution to the body, (or plant in this case) to help eliminate problems that chemicals are generally used for. For example Calendula is used for damage during repotting , and Calcium phosphoricum can be used for root rot. For an idea just how watered down these solutions are, there are generally only 20 drops of the homeopathic liquid in a litre of water. It doesn’t end there. This litre is then added to 19 litres of tap water and stirred. Some scientists say that the amounts used are so minimal that it’s only the memory of the solution present in the water.

One of the leading lights in this field is experienced Dutch homeopath Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj. Kaviraj stumbled by accident upon the homeopathic treatment of plants (called Agrohomeopathy) when he was asked to treat a rust problem in apple trees. The apples had dark red rings on the skin and needed more watering than normal. The symptoms of redness with thirst fitted the remedy Belladonna, which he duly administered. To everyone’s surprise, the rust problem disappeared. What‘s more, the apples the following year tasted noticeably better. For Kaviraj, this was a turning point. In the next twelve years, he undertook intensive research in this area, employing homeopathy for all kinds of plant diseases. He has published a book on the subject that focuses on the homeopathic treatment of plants in cases of malnourishment, parasitic and fungal attack, bacterial and viral disease, damage, and weed infestation.

Here are a couple of examples how homeopathic remedies could help.


Powdery Mildew
For powdery mildew use Silicea or Sulphur as a remedy. Both are good remedies to cure fungal diseases. However, they should not be used simultaneously.
Ants
Ants do not like the smell of Marigolds. Mentha piperita and Calendula are both remedies that can be used to deter ants. Also Tagetus.
Blossom End Rot
Tomatoes love Basil, in the kitchen as well as in the garden. Ocymum basilicum is the remedy to use. Silicea is also a remedy to use, but that is more useful to soak the seeds before planting them.



Suppress the weeds
As well as preventing and curing plant problems homeopathy also helps to keep weeds down. VDK has this to say about the issue. “In homoeopathy we have nothing that kills. However, we do have a remedy that will suppress weeds for a considerable time. It also inhibits the seeds from germinating. It is called Juglans Nigra. In order to use this, it must be applied thinly to existing weeds, which will then stop growing any further. Three days later, plant the crop. It will be safe to plant other plants 72 hours after application. The weeds will remain suppressed for up to 7 months.” He tells us.


Quick Return
There are other natural ways of treating plants. You might be familiar with Dr Bach's Rescue Remedy for a sick house plant, then there’s Maye Bruce’s 'the herbs are enough' policy of healing. She developed her own 'Quick Return' (QR) method based on homoeopathic dilutions of herbs and honey. Maye was originally associated with the method of Biodynamic agriculture but branched out on her own to get away from using animal parts such as the horns.

Those Darn Dogs....

I got fed up of running up and down the road this week trying to track down my wayward dogs. Both of them found a way out of the garden even though I am constantly piling up chopped branches and anything else I can find to block up escape routes.

As soon as I took my vigilant eye off them for a second they were away, high tailing it to one of three places where food is left out. The first port of call for them is the neighbours who leave food out for the cats, and if you have ever had cats you will realise that most of them are grazers popping back and forth to their dinner bowls when the urge takes them. It only takes one sitting and a couple of seconds for the plate to be licked clean when one of my two get there. Another destination is a few hundred yards away where someone puts food out on the lawn for the birds. Bird feed isn’t very well digested by dogs and looks the same going out as it does going in. The third place is at the edge of the park where someone is a bit sloppy putting their leftovers in the bin. They feast on spaghetti one day then a pile of mashed spuds the other.

Making the most of every opportunity

The dogs make the most of every opportunity to get food. Julie’s dad came over the other day and delivered a beautiful homemade loaf. It was a bit early in the day and as we were in bed he decided to leave it in a “safe place” in the garage carefully wrapped up in a brown paper bg. The safe place was on top of the boiler so it didn’t take much for one of the dogs to get it down and devour it. It also didn’t take much to see who the culprit was. Chips, the daftest of our two dogs could hardly walk let alone run when I took them for a walk later, her stomach was like a balloon.

I had to do something about the dogs escaping so I went down to the wood yard and bought myself 75 metres of 2”x1” strips of wood to make a sturdy trellis. I did a bit on the other side of the garden so knew what I had to do. There is a really wavy concrete block wall that rises to about 3 feet high so I screwed vertical posts onto these for a start before gauging how far to space the horizontals out so the dogs couldn’t squeeze through them. It took me all day to build the trellis, and fine looking it is too.

It took the dogs less than three minutes to break the defences and high tail it down the road again.
I wasn’t going to be beaten so after getting the pests back I got my lad to let them out of the house whilst I hid in the neighbour’s garden undergrowth to see exactly where they were getting out. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Because the wall has a slight wave of subsidence to it, the dogs found the bit that had the biggest gap and twisted themselves sideways to get out. The gap was only inches tall; you would never guess they could sliver through such a tight gap; they looked like flapping flatfish that were trying to escape a net.

Let them witness the work

I chained both dogs up to their kennel and let them witness firsthand how I unscrewed each section then lowered them following the contours of the wavy wall. It looks a bit odd, but there is now a uniform gap all the way along the wall. I sauntered over to the kennel and let them off their leads. I went indoors and when they thought I wasn’t looking made a bid for freedom. Their attempts were foiled, try as they might they couldn’t find a gap.

I’ve won this round. It probably won’t be long until they find a way to climb up the trellis like a ladder. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.