The Cottage Smallholder

Photo: Broad Beans 2009

“I gave him some purple sprouting broccoli plants and told him to net them. A week later he rang me to say that the pigeons had eaten the lot.”
John Coe peered at me, eyebrows raised over his coffee cup.
“And then he had the nerve to ask for replacements! No chance. I’d cared for those small plants for months.”

If you give away plants you have to let go of them there and then, and not get upset if you see dried out husks still in their pots a couple of months later. This only happens occasionally. It’s generally with new gardeners who are fuelled with ebullient enthusiasm and still trying to match their space and time with their dreams.

When we dug the first two borders in our kitchen garden one autumn, I had bought 26 packs of seeds by Christmas. Finally I succumbed to a bout of flu and lay in bed under a large pile of vegetable gardening books and the seed packets. Within a day I twigged that I just didn’t have enough space to plant the seeds that I had bought. Even if we had the borders that we have now, I couldn’t accommodate 26 packets of seeds. But those seed packets gave me hours of pleasure that winter. Planning and dreaming. And the bursting borders that I imagined were better than any ‘real’ borders that I have ever seen at the cottage since then.

We give away quite a few plants from the kitchen garden each year. It’s fun to see friends’ faces light up when we deliver them. But generally now I double check whether people really want them and also give a few simple pointers to get the best out of the plants. Never assume that a friend knows how to care for the plants.

Last weekend Seraphina adopted runner beans and tomato plants. Tonight she popped in to collect some sturdy strawberry plants that I had discovered on the plant stand at the church fete. She is planning to raise some fruit and veg in large black rubber ‘tree pots’ at the end of her garden.

She’s got the pots, the compost and the plants. But I know that the watering could be her Waterloo. So I’m going to fix some guttering on her shed to feed the water butt in the new vegetable area. Otherwise she has to walk back and forth with watering cans filled from the kitchen tap –a good fifty yards there and back. I’ve also suggested investing in a hose – even if it’s just to fill the water butt during dry spells.

Apparently ,the palaver of watering crops is the main reason why people give up on raising fruit and vegetables. I’d love to fix up a water butt watering system for Seraphina but at the moment she’ll have none of this. A drip feed system conserves water and is a version of the systems used in Indonesia, Africa and India.

Mains sprinklers can waste gallons of water as a lot evaporates before it sinks in to the earth. You can use mains water directly into your drip feed watering system. All you need to buy is a diffuser to knock back the force of water before it enters the drip feed pipes.

We run the water butt drip feed system in our kitchen garden and hopefully I’ll set it up in the greenhouse this weekend – it’s crazy not to if you want to conserve water. Even if you fill your butts with mains water, the drip feed system optimises the effect of every drop. Plants watered by this method  develop strong roots and have a better chance of surviving dry conditions. By autumn, Seraphina could be coming home from work and opening the tap on the water butt for half an hour. Easy, lazy watering for busy people who want to conserve water and give their crops the best possible chance to thrive.