Starting with Compost

Last week my daughter asked me (it was Halloween) why the witches and magic happened on that night only? I found myself explaining that it is because it’s the end of one year and the beginning of the next. As time bends around the two ends of the year don’t quite meet up, allowing the past years to pop through the hole, bringing with it the witches and ghosts. She looked at me blankly and then went about her own witching and off we went trick or treating.
A pagan friend once explained this to me some years ago and I have often reflected how this story fits perfectly with the growing or agricultural year (I suppose the pagans were earth based). As an organic fruit grower my growing year is coming to an end, the apple harvest is in store, all 4 tonnes of them, I am pulling out the last of the summer crops, digging over the soil and “putting it to bed” with straw or black plastic. I am planting crops for next spring, in the glasshouse; Rocket, Mizuna, Pak choi, Namenia, Spinach, Corn salad, and Purslane. These will be welcome salad in February and March. Outside I am planting bulbs; Tulips, Daffodils, Anemones and Fritillaries for spring flowering and soon the broad beans and garlic will go in for spring cropping.

The garden is in it autumnal shagginess, which I love. Full of rosehips and spiders webs, red and yellow leaves, and piles of rotting fruit and weeds and leaves that need to be built into compost heaps.

Which brings me to my point; composting is, in my mind at least, the beginning of the gardening or farming year. It is making fertility for the next growing year, it is bending around the end of last years waste, to provide fertility for next years growth. The rotting process is the beginning of the cycle of sustainability and fertility as well as the end. It is a cyclical process not a linear one. This is the core difference between conventional and organic or sustainable farming.
Even if you are not a grower or farmer, 35% of waste from a household can be composted. So composting it on site saves on landfill space, and provides fertility for even a small garden.
If you want a go here is how its done.

Quick recipe for a Windrow compost heap;

Many people won’t be able to make one of these unless they have an allotment or large garden, this type of heap will break down in time for use in spring, and will heat up killing the weed seed and pest and diseases. High Carbon layers are stalky vegetable waste, straw, paper. High Nitrogen layers are grass cuttings, fresh manure, rotting fruit.

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  Alternate layers 1 m wider, and about 1.5 m high and as long as you like. Cover over to keep the rain off and nutrients in.
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  The heap will heat up and then cool down, at the cooling stage turn the heap over and it should heat up again.
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  Ready when brown and crumbly
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  Apply liberally to the soil
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  Hopefully a few witches will turn up to help me build the compost heaps as its really hard work!

Quick recipe for small garden composting;

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  Make or buy small container to go in the corner of the garden
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  Put in household and garden waste (not cooked food)
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  Leave to rot down on its own, will take 12 months, and will not kill the weeds seeds.
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  Apply liberally to the soil
  

You can visit my Apricot Centre website at www.apricotcentre.co.uk

Organic Duck Farming

I have a 4 acre organic orchard and once a year I raise a flock of 100 organic ducks for the table (to eat!). They complement fruit growing and create a very small mixed farming system that functions very well. I normally start them off around Christmas time so they are ready for Easter.

It is classic case of the benefit of multiple yields; the ducks graze the grass, eat pests of the orchard, leaving manure as they go. This saves me a job of moving 3 tonnes of manure every year, if I could source it. I cannot buy in manure and compost it anymore as most animals are now fed with GM soya, and this is not allowed under organic rules. I could buy in organic manure if it were for sale, but of course most organic farmers keep it to raise their own fertility of their own fields.

The Ducks are also very sociable animals, people come to visit them, they play with them as fluffy duckling’s and chase them as huge beautiful ducks. The children try to name them and count them spending hours in the barn. When they start to graze the orchard my 2 daughters will herd them and chase them around laughing, the ducks perhaps not enjoying it so much, quacking. Once “dressed” and ready for the table more people come to collect them and stay for a chat and tea, and of course we cook them ourselves and share them with friends for special meals. They taste delicious !

I also make a little bit of money from them, and have to remind myself when it is a shockingly low amount of these multiple yields, that the flock of ducks is not just about money.
I buy them as day old ducklings from a hatchery, as there is no local organic hatchery I have to buy non organic ones. They are housed in a barn on organic straw and fed with organic feed that I buy in and once they are a month old I start taking them out in to the orchard daily. They have to be kept in with electric fence to keep the foxes off, and I get up at 6.00am to take them out before the school run. They get put to bed and fed when its going dark. It takes only 14-16 weeks until they are of a size to eat. They are then humanely killed on site (not by me- cant quite manage that bit yet!) and “dressed” in a local tiny game abattoir.

Ideally I would have a permanent flock that I bred my own duckling from, but then I would need a mobile house to move around the orchard that would cost £1000’s and I would then have to be on site 365 days of the year. Something I am not quite ready for just yet.
Anyhow I am not raising duck this year ‘cos of the outbreak of bird flu in Suffolk, I live a mile from the Suffolk border in Essex and I couldn’t bring the baby ducklings across the border into Essex and out of the restricted zone. Also the price of wheat has gone up 40% this year because of the wet summer last year, so I would make even less money or have to put the price up so high I am not sure anyone would buy one.

So I am having a quiet January and get to lie in until 7.00 am !