Dark days, bright leaves, seeds and compost

We're doing a little Christmas mini tour to give you a flavor of Homeacres at this lovely time of year, solstice, midwinter. Although it doesn't feel like it. It's been quite warm actually. Well, mild, mild nice. Not too much frost. There was a bit of ice this morning and it's gone. And we had a bit of brightness. So that's also what I thought it'd be a nice chance to show you a few things here. But I'm doing this compost trial of different compost in these boxes. It's a very nice way to grow salad. You line the box with newspaper, bit of paper, fill it with compost and put in plants. These went in in October and I've picked them once so far. Different compost. So this one is not doing so brilliantly at the moment. That's homemade compost, Homeacres compost. I think it might come good as we go into the spring because these will keep going right the way through the winter. This one that's doing best at the moment is fresh mushroom compost. Impressive, eh? So that's, I think, got good structure from the bits of straw still in there. And this one's even doing all right. That's pure green waste compost. These are 100% compost, nothing else added. No feeds or anything. And I keep a note of what I'm harvesting and photos through the whole season of winter. And so we're doing that anyway. We're picking winter salads all the time. Like peas for shoots in nut tray. And peas, by the way, are very frost-hardy. So I've sown some more peas there. Again, we're doing a compost trial with that one. And I've sown some sweet peas as well. You can sow sweet peas now and it's a really good one. And on that note, I am doing a seed selection collection on offer through Premier Seeds Direct. They approached me in the summer and I hadn't used their seeds much. I know they're one of many seed companies, but having got to know them, I'm really impressed with what they do. And their seeds germinate really well, they're good value. So we've assembled some monthly collections and you can buy them as my recommendations for each month as you go through the year. Good seeds to sow on the basis of the advice on my sowing timeline, on my website and in my calendar. So it's just like a nice, simple way that you can get ahold of those correct seeds for the season. And there's another announcement I have to make actually about a different collaboration and that's coming up on the 26th, Boxing Day, when I'll be telling you more. It'll be in a Brussels Sprout video where Nicola also gives you some nice recipes. And today's a big salad picking day for Christmas here. Adam and Taryn are busy in there. You can see the before and after on either side of the middle and how this is the fourth time of picking these leaves. The plants are producing phenomenally considering the low light levels. We're 51 degrees north here. The day length is eight hours between sunrise and sunset. Although we haven't had much frost, it doesn't mean that warm. And then even the outdoor salads, they're like corn salad, lamb's lettuce, doing all right. Again, that's had one pick. So we go through and cut the biggest one wherever they are and the rest then grow on. And these Claytonia winter purslane, that's one cut over the top and then they will regrow. So this is a beautifully hardy salad. Here's Minty come to say hello. I have a confession on Minty. I managed to shut her in the cabin. She followed me in the cabin up there and we lost her for a day. And it's like, oh, that was such a relief to find her. I think she's feeling a bit extra playful as a result. Then the garlic is looking nice. Now we can see it more as the mustard has been killed by frost. We've had minus four degrees. It was just enough for that. Over here though, there's a bit of a, well, problem. There's always problems. How bad are they is more the question. This is rabbits eating, digging up the beans to eat the seeds. And you can see that there's a certain number have been lost. Thing about broad beans is though, they do swell out a lot and they make new stems as they grow. So when you get them in before winter like that, and that's just about a good size for winter, they've got the chance to bulk out a lot. So it can look like you've got big gaps, but don't worry too much. I think often I found that you get a nice stand of broad beans anyway. Here you can see we've been spreading compost. So that's recently applied, mostly homemade compost, quite lumpy, totally fine. It can be like that. Break up the lumps, certainly no bigger than that, but the weather over winter will soften it. And in fact, that's a bed that was spread a couple of weeks earlier and you can see how it's also gone down. It always looks more when you first put it on. You might think you're putting on a lot. I reckon inch, two and a half centimeters, that's sort of the depth that it measures to once it's settled down. This is open because it's gonna be picked. I'm gonna need to get stuck in here. I can see there's, we have a big order today for salad and I'll just finish on the lovely note of these outdoor cabbages, which are getting eaten again, pigeons, pecking around the edge, but not too bad. But I find that Savoy cabbage, they don't eat too much. And so we're looking forward to eating them over the next month or so, these ones, and the beetroot too. There's a lovely variety here. Is it? Yes, it's hard to tell in this weather. This is Cheltenham green top because the tops have gone quite pale. Yeah, that's snapped off. But you can see it's quite a long beetroot. If you can get this one, it's got a beautiful flavor. It's slightly softer and milder compared to the more big round ones. And these, they resist frost partly because they're in the ground a bit more. So I'm not rushing to harvest them. The level of frost we have here is, we might go down to minus five. They just about take that. And I hope you have a lovely festive period. See you on the 26th.