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CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

About the Author and Thanks

Title Page

Introduction

January

Down to Earth

Recycling

Parsnip, Ginger and Apple Cake

February

Ducks: Where to Begin

New-Laid Poached Duck Egg on a Bed of Spinach

March

Encouraging Pollinators into Your Garden

Insect Pests

Eggstras: Quail

Lemon Curd

April

Hens: Where to Begin

Rhubarb Vodka

May

Herbs Through the Year

Washing Lines

G&T with Lemon Verbena and Self-Heal Flowers

June

Decorating Your House

Gooseberry Water Ice with Morello Cherry Sauce

July

Berries

Escargots?

Broad Bean Houmous

August

Stone Fruits

Celebrating in Your Garden

Damsons in a Roast Hazelnut Crumble

September

Orchard Fruits

Autumn Veg

Eggstras: Guinea Fowl

Pickled Fennel

October

Keeping a Couple of Pigs in Your Garden

Mushrooms

Mushrooms on Toast

November

Geese: Where to Begin

Pumpkin Soup with Roast Pumpkin Seeds and Walnut Pesto

December

Firewood

Growing Nut Trees

Christmas Decorations

Walnut Macaroons

Useful Websites

Index

Copyright

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About the Book

A punnet of plums from your tree, a handful of gooseberries; home-grown nuts and herbs, and a few freshly laid eggs from your hens – all enjoyed in your own small plot.

What could be more satisfying?

The Garden Farmer is an evocative journal and monthly guide to getting the most out of your garden throughout the year. Whether you would like to grow a few essential vegetables, some fruit trees or bushes for preserving, or even raise a small flock of hens, Sunday Telegraph garden-columnist Francine Raymond lays the groundwork for a bountiful year of garden farming.

Monthly chapters offer insight into the topics and projects you might be contemplating during the seasons, along with planting notes and timely advice, and a recipe that honours the fruits of your labour. With just a little effort and planning, every gardener can enjoy a host of seasonal delights from their own soil.

About the Author

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Gardening productively is one of Francine Raymond’s greatest pleasures, heightened by the chance to chronicle her experiences in a dozen or so books; newspapers, including a six-year weekly column in the Telegraph; magazines such as The English Garden, Country Living, Gardens Illustrated and the general poultry press; and on her blog at kitchen-garden-hens.co.uk.

After a lifetime on an acre in Suffolk, populated with hens and ducks, Francine now gardens a small town plot by the sea in Whitstable with the help of her grandsons and a few bantams.

She started her career as a fashion designer, moving to Milan in the seventies and returned to an abiding love – the English countryside – with her small children. Making the most of her plot, Francine opened her garden to the public – an evangelist, hoping to prove that a productive garden can be both stylish and a source of healthy food: a delight to all the senses.

Thanks

Thank you, Sarah for recording my efforts so beautifully and Friederike for displaying them to such great advantage: my garden and its occupants have never looked so glamorous. Thank you, Rose for having the vision and faith to commission this book, and to Lucy for seeing it through. It has been a pleasure to work with you all on such a lovely project.

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What could be nicer than a meal packed with ingredients you’ve grown yourself?

THE FRESHEST SALAD leaves, perfectly ripe tomatoes, an omelette from your own birds, even home-reared sausages; finished with some juicy berries and eaten on a table in the garden jollied with a bunch of homegrown flowers – all produce from your own small plot.

Gardens extend our lives beyond the boundaries of our house’s four walls, and I’m a great believer in making that little bit more of outside space. Some of us garden to show off artistic fantasies, others to create our own little bit of paradise, and a few just to improve the view from the house. It’s a full-time job to some busy smallholders, while to others who energetically mow their lawns at weekends it’s an occasional burst of exercise.

I garden to hold tight to my connection with the outside world. It lightens my mood and keeps me sane, improves my health and gives me hope – a small patch of soil that’s mine, where I follow age-old rituals and make things grow, just like that first child’s plot or indoor garden at nursery school.

The results may not be self-sufficiency – just a larder packed with small tastes of the season, tiny flavours to heighten the senses; smells that evoke souvenirs of good times; and flowery visions to cheer, all at peak freshness straight from the plot. And it’s fun to share this harvest month-by-month with friends and family.

Most of us live in towns and cities with little outside space and it’s a battle to keep in touch with the seasons and celebrate those seasonal delights that augur special times of the year. They give us something to look forward to, the thrill of new flavours and the satisfaction of harvest, however meagre.

I grow a few essential vegetables to taste the season: those first eagerly expected delicacies, the gluts of high summer and supplies of salad throughout the year. My herbs add spice to life, and since moving to Kent’s Garden of England I’ve concentrated on growing fruit. I love the blossom, the excitement of fruit ripening and the chance to eat it straight from the tree.

You need bees to pollinate fruit, and I’m keen to encourage early bumblebees to kick-start baskets of cherries and apricots, and other bees and butterflies. So, even though I’m not expecting honey, providing year-round flowers brim-full of nectar and a welcoming habitat is part of my gardening year.

Poultry-keeping has been my passion for a quarter of a century. My hens eat pests and leftovers, and in return improve the soil and produce the freshest eggs for the kitchen. Ducks, geese and other poultry are just as productive, and if you have the space, maybe even a couple of pigs. I love the companionship of gardening with my flock, the glamour and drama of their adventures.

So let’s decorate our houses with flowers on high days and holidays, and celebrate those occasions outside with garden parties or by just relaxing in the fresh air. Life’s pleasures are made of simple transient moments, so let’s share our plot’s produce with friends, family and wildlife, and make the most of our gardens.

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JANUARY PLANS & SCHEMES Down to Earth Recycling Parsnip, Ginger and Apple Cake
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A new gardening year, and it’s time to take stock, make plans and build up strength for the coming months.

LIKE OUR DORMANT plants, hibernating wildlife and warming soil, we need a period of vernalisation too, to re-energise and kick-start a year of growth and creativity. And where better to start January than the fireside, surrounded by the new season’s seed catalogues, a few scribbled garden plans, a cup of something fortifying and a piece of cake?

It’s time to ask ourselves: what exactly are gardens for? My younger son suggested ‘chilling, relaxing and having fun’; the older one wanted space for his children to play and somewhere to eat; friends chipped in with somewhere to grow food, to design a vista, and to make a sanctuary – a place to escape, to exercise or be self-sufficient. For me it’s food, fun and a fantasy world where I battle with the weather to create a haven for myself and my family, for animals, my plants and local wildlife.

Take a look out of an upstairs window and examine the bare bones of your garden. Do you need to make changes? Now’s the time, when everything slumbers, to rejuvenate, edit and change direction. Learn from past experience: was the table too far from the cooking area last year? Did you grow too much of one thing and not nearly enough of another? Is there too much shade, or more shelter needed? Did your gardening ambitions exhaust you or would it be fun to have more growing space?

Even in an established garden, there’s nothing more invigorating than a new plan – a slight change that will open views, challenge perceptions or solve problems. Perhaps you’d like to grow more flowers for the house, widen your vegetable repertoire, make a new herb garden, keep bees or poultry, or even pigs? Or maybe you would like to go off on a tangent and grow a crop of mushrooms or cultivate edible snails?

If you are growing vegetables, remember that you’ll need to rotate your beds to avoid diseases taking hold, and soil deficiencies developing. The best bet is to have four separate beds and to grow different crops each year in each bed. Vegetables can be divided into four groups:

Brassicas: Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kales and radishes

Legumes: peas, broad beans and all other sorts of beans

Onions: garlic, leeks, shallots and onions

Roots: beetroot, carrots, fennel, parsley, celeriac and other root crops

A further bed where you can permanently grow perennial vegetables like rhubarb, artichokes and cardoons would be useful if you have the space, but I grow these at the back of all my beds and leave them in situ as their compatriots move on each year.

Some veg, like salads, all the pumpkins and courgettes and sweetcorn, are less fussy and can be grown wherever they’ll fit. You could also pop your veg into your flowerbeds, or grow tomatoes and peppers in containers.

Take a look at the new season’s seed catalogues and see if there are temptations: stimulating new colours, cheering fragrances and reviving tastes to try. Perhaps you took seeds and cuttings from plants you coveted in friends’ gardens? If not, promise to do so this year. Make a resolution to get more colour, scent and excitement into your borders and place your seed order now.

Do you have the space and time to take up a new hobby? Maybe really fresh eggs would be a welcome addition. Just a few hens, ducks or geese will enrich your life as well as your compost, and widen your menu. Would you like to encourage more wildlife into your garden, especially pollinating insects? If so, create a more welcoming habitat and beneficial food for them.

Even if you’re entirely satisfied, the garden will be moving on, needing fresh energy and new heart, so it’s the right time to add compost, mulches, soil conditioners and natural fertilisers to the soil. There’s plenty to do outside on sunny days to re-energise both you and your garden and make this coming year the best yet.

Resolutions

• To try to get out in the garden for an hour or so every day.

• To edit existing schemes and repeat those that were successful.

• To water and feed containers before they desperately need it.

• To start fewer schemes but finish more.

• To take care of my gardening equipment better.

• To sit around in the garden with a cup of something more often.

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Down to Earth

While the garden slumbers, and you have the time, think about the bare bones and basic materials. A garden is as good as its soil, and now is a good time to add mulches to improve its texture and fecundity.

Every day I go out into my garden and become a magician. I take kitchen and garden waste, and hey presto – turn them into crumbly compost. It’s one of the most satisfying things about the process of gardening and appeals to the penny-pinching puritan in my soul. How we recycle waste effectively is one of the gardener’s biggest quandaries. A whole section of my garden is dedicated to this black art – a hidden coven where benevolent spells are concocted for the greater good of my plants.

Compost Heaps

Out of sight, at the bottom of my garden, under the canopy of a great oak, I’ve made a dead hedge in the gap between fence and compost heaps. Here, branches too small to burn and too big to compost rot slowly away, hopefully offering sanctuary to beneficial insects in the meantime. Backing on to it comes a row of pallet bays, where kitchen and garden waste – a careful balance between green and brown matter (see here) – decompose slowly throughout the year, enriched with and activated by home-produced chicken manure and bedding. There are as many ways to compost as there are cake recipes. Mine has been perfected to deal with my waste over decades of trial and error. I don’t have to turn my compost because it has been cooking for a whole year, with just the right balance of materials in a shady spot that helps to keep temperatures constant. I also use other methods that provide extra material for my garden.

COMPOSTING MATERIALS

Aim for two-thirds carbon-rich brown content to a third nitrogen-rich greens.

Brown

Straw and hay

Sawdust and woodchip

Shredded newsprint and cardboard

Dry leaves, stems and twigs

Cotton and woolly rags

Green

Grass and soft leafy growth

Fruit and veg

Pet bedding and hair

Uncooked kitchen waste

Coffee grounds and teabags

Flowers and crushed eggshells

BUILDERS’ BAGS

Packed close to the compost heaps are a couple of open-weave builders’ bags: one of gently composting leaves swept up from lawns and paths, and the other crammed with rotting woodchip and sawdust from the tree surgeon’s visit. Oak, chestnut and sycamore leaves take over a year to rot down; it helps to break them down by running a mower over them, but small leaves like ash and elder rot more quickly. Next to these I keep a neat pile of sodden cardboard and a covered bag of wood ash from my wood-burning stove, both of which I layer on the compost heaps.

COMPOSTERS

A vermin-proof aerobic composter takes pride of place in my compost battery. There to put pay to food waste, it will compost 32 times faster than a conventional heap. Mine is a Hotbin, the size of an elegant black wheelie bin, which needs no turning and reaches temperatures of 60°C. To achieve these temperatures, you need to feed the bacteria and give them oxygen by layering kitchen and garden waste with bulking agents: woodchip, shredded paper and cardboard. My only problem is a lack of leftovers, so I’ve requisitioned my son’s family’s binful every week.

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This is the working heart of my garden.
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My veg beds slumbering under a duvet of snow.

BOKASHI BINS

For those who want to compost food but have less space, the Bokashi system may be the answer. This is Japanese bran that pickles food waste in a small container (32 x 32 x 37cm) kept under the kitchen sink. Simply scrape your leftovers into the bin, sprinkle on a handful of bran and seal the lid. A few weeks later the compost can be added to your heap or used as mulch on the soil. A liquid is also produced that makes a nutritious plant feed.

WORMERIES

You could also try a wormery. These come in a range of different sizes and consist of composting trays with holes. As the worms eat the waste, it loses its volume – from cabbage to sprout-sized – and the worms climb to the next level, leaving behind a rich vermicompost to be used in the garden. Worms can be fussy eaters though, and often balk at bones, garlic, spicy food, eggs, dairy, salt and oil.

Animal Manures

Most soils can be improved by adding organic manure – it adds nourishment and substance to sandy soils and lightens clay ones. Always leave to compost between layers of brown and green waste, and never apply fresh. Animal excrement, added to their hair and feathers, plus litter and bedding, especially straw, hemp, corrugated card or shredded paper, is powerful stuff. Avoid wood shavings and sawdust, as they’re often treated with preservative and take too long to rot down.

Horse and cow manures are the most valuable, especially as a soil conditioner, but should be kept under cover as they lose value when wet. Goat and sheep manures are richer in nitrogen. Horse manure can contain weed seeds.

Pig manure must be composted to a high heat and turned regularly. Mix with brown composting materials and turn once a month, then leave to compost over winter until spring, when it’s ready to use.

Poultry manure is highest in nitrogen and phosphorus and these nutrients are readily available to plants. It should be stored in a dry place, then layered in your heap. Avoid manure from intensively farmed birds, and never use fresh because it will burn plants. Outdoor-raised birds’ droppings may contain weed seeds.

Rotted seaweed is nearly as beneficial as farmyard manure: it’s lower in phosphates, but richer in potash and makes a good soil conditioner. You’ll need permission from the owner of the foreshore to collect it (often the local council). It doesn’t need washing, just add it to your compost heap in layers.

The Annual Mulch

In mid-winter I assemble all the different elements and cast my spells. On a large tarpaulin, I mix year-old garden compost (emptying the heap ready for the new year’s offerings) with dark leaf-mould, a little woodchip with grit and occasionally some composted cow manure bought from the local garden centre. I aim to mulch all my beds as part of the great garden spring clean.

Then, because I live in the balmy south and my beds are already warming up, I spread a cosy 5cm layer on all raised beds, vegetable and soft fruit plots, and around my fruit trees, leaving a gap around stems and trunks. I rescue any self-sown seedlings that I want to save, and top up any large pots and containers with mulch; the smaller ones will be fed with a liquid seaweed mixture at fortnightly intervals from March onwards.

This mulch will act as a weed suppressant (though however long I bake my compost it always seems to grow a moss of tiny seedlings – easily hoed off as they first appear) and will improve my thick yellow clay soil’s texture, while helping to retain winter’s moisture in the soil. Now, my plants will kick off the new season in the best of spirits.

ESSENTIAL VEG

If you’re dying to get your food crops started, broad beans can be sown now.

• Sow seeds in small 7cm pots and keep them in a light frost-free place.

• Harden them off before planting out when they’re 15cm tall.

• Pinch out their growing tips when the first beans appear – you can use these in salads.

• Stake and keep an eye open for blackfly.

• Harvest pods when the beans are medium sized and not floury.

• If you like them, keep a few beans to dry and sow next year.

Recycling

Gardening on a shoestring is an art, and compost, pots and seeds are some of the gardener’s regular outgoings that can be most readily economised on.

Seed-saving is a great way to cut down overheads and since your parent plants will have already adapted to your growing conditions, success is guaranteed.

Throughout the harvest season, mark interesting non-hybrid varieties and plants you love with string and collect the ripe seed late on a sunny day before winter weather takes its toll. Pop them into labelled envelopes. Dry them in an airy place until completely desiccated, then crumble the pods and winnow the seeds to separate them from the chaff.

Some seeds, like cucumbers and aubergines, need to be collected from the fruit, so scoop them out into a bowl of water. The seeds will sink. Rinse them in a sieve and leave them to dry on a plate, then store in jars. Tomatoes, melons and squash must be fermented to remove their germination-inhibiting coating. Put these into a jam jar and leave in a warm place until bubbles appear on the surface, drain, then clean as above. Store all seeds in a rodent-proof box until planting time.

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Outside plants are dormant while inside seeds are waiting to be planted.

There are other ways of creatively saving money. I’m a passionate boot-fair trawler. At the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning when most sensible people are enjoying a lie-in, I’m trudging a municipal car park or some farmer’s muddy field, looking for bric-a-brac and gardenalia.

I pass by the mountains of baby clothes, the stacks of DVDs and vinyl, and the plastic toys on my way to the dealers who look as though they’ve emptied their garages, where I can find buckets and pans, old tin baths, and anything to pot plants in. Unusual planters like old chimney pots, stone sinks and metal farmyard feeds are available to the eagle-eyed, at a price.

But others are dirt-cheap. It’s not just the rock-bottom prices that appeal: I’m a master at make-do-and-mend, and love the thrill of the hunt. Over the past twenty years, I’ve found galvanised metal drawers (perfect for my alpines), enamel baking pans (ideal for my succulents), and a collection of buckets that do well as cache-pots for back-door plants, like salvias and bulbs. I have an old tin bath full of beautiful blue muscari that I’ll soon move into place by my porch to flower.

Since all these plants need good drainage, I make holes in the bases of new containers using a hefty Phillips screwdriver and mallet, cushioning my ‘find’ on the lawn. Some are painted using metal primer followed by topcoats from cycle and car shops.

Dealers who specialise in old tools are a good source of ladies’-weight spades, and builders’ barrows, wooden ladders and old shelves to convert into plant stands are common, but caveat emptor. Watering cans should be held up to the light to check for leaks.

There’s plenty of choice when it comes to garden furniture, too, though mostly in the white plastic department – which is irredeemable. But old deckchairs are good finds and can be easily re-covered by tacking on new lengths of canvas. Second-hand cushions can be re-covered to soften hard wooden benches, while old rugs, blankets and Indian bedspreads can be picked up really cheaply to use as awnings and tablecloths.

Car boot sales usually boast a few plant stalls as well. Some are genuine nurseries, others buy up plants at wholesale markets to re-sell, and then there are stallholders who pot up their leftovers and flog them with their household effects. Use your discretion and maybe re-pot with new compost after a short period in isolation.

TIMELY ADVICE

Order your seeds early from catalogues.

Keep pollinating insects in mind when ordering flower seeds (see here).