Just some of the onions we cropped, laid out for a couple of days to dry.
It’s been a busy six months at FAS Learning CIC (fàs) since our last update.
Our four test beds grew vigorously throughout the extremely dry summer. We had just four days of rain in six months – if you take a day of rain of when it rains for more than four hours in one day. That has caused lots of problems for our neighbouring farmers, who’s grain crops didn’t meet the required standards for the drinks industry. Basically, the grain didn’t swell enough to be large enough to be of use.
For our part we had to install a new 60m irrigation pipe to our test beds.
We planted the following.
- Two types of white onion.
- One type of red onion.
- Two types of leek.
- Two types of potato.
- One type of cauliflower.
- Three types of Lettuce.
- Four types of Squash.
- Two types of Corn.
- One type of Cabbage.
- And one type of Carrot.
We prepared our test beds all in the same way. Along the contour of the land. With a carboard base laid on top of existing pasture grass. On top of that we laid a mix of grass clippings and leaf litter to about five inches deep.
Then we used the Bricks and Mortar method of planting with a twist. If you’d like to know more about the Bricks and Mortar method just let us know.
In our case we adapted it and used a hammer drill and spade bit to drill through the grass and carboard to the width of the seedling plug, filled with compost and dunked the seedling in. The percentage of seedling taking to this was extremely high – although our first seedlings perished due to the late chill and a hard frost.
We did no digging, no weeding and didn’t try and remove any pests. We just let nature take over.
The result was we could spend less time doing mundane stuff and more time doing other more useful things.
The Cabbage was mostly destroyed by pests, but all the other plants suffered no pest damage at all. It seems that in this area Cabbage is a great sacrificial plant. Caulis nearly fell the same way but have made a late summer comeback and are now producing excellent heads.
Potatoes were MASSIVE with a capital M, easily the largest potatoes I’ve ever grown.
Similarly one of our breeds of onions “Globe” by Real Seeds gave us the biggest onions we’ve ever grown. The ones in the photograph aren’t even the biggest ones!
We did get a few squash but they are smaller than anticipated and suffered by not being under cover we think.
Corn failed to mature before the first frost of autumn did for them.
Carrots did well, but the ground is stony here so they did go in all directions.
Overall, for four test plots we’re really encouraged. The local farmer came over and was very impressed by the yield we achieved. We’ve got 50KG of Onions, 50KG of potatoes, 20KG of Squash from just one 8m x 1m bed. That’s 150Tons per hectare if you multiply that up. Compared with the best big agri can do of 90 Tons per hectare. And for so little work!
Other stuff
We’ve also been busy, as you can see from our photos, converting an old plastic play house into a chicken tractor. The chickens took a long time to start laying, but now provide us with plenty of eggs. We want to test them on a new bed by utilising a chicken tractor to see if it makes any difference to yields.
You’ll see a couple of IBC tanks in the photos. One is to be used as a water container that will collect water from a shelter roof and then drip feed crops with an automatic natural fertilised interspersed. The other is to build a biodigester similar to the one found at Solar Cities. This will take all our food waste and allow us to syphon off biogas while simultaneously producing huge amounts of natural liquid fertiliser. If we can feed that in automatically into our watering system via mechanical means then we’ll have a brilliant system.
After the Chicken Tractor is finished we’ll be on to building a small pond and getting some ducks, then finishing off the goat shelter and getting our milking goats. Oh, and the small measure of building volunteer accommodation and natural swim pond and sauna.
