The Cottage Smallholder

A  few weeks ago I had lunch with an old friend. She confided that she wanted to learn how to play the piano. Somewhere in the area (a deep black hole in the short part of the L in our sitting room), I had tossed an M Audio O2 mini slim keyboard and the Charanga Read More »

I miss Mrs Boss. Somehow that small grubby bantam got under my skin. When I let the hens out each morning I miss her skippy feathered feet and her enthusiasm for the morning corn. All our flock are precious but Mrs Boss was special. Her tendency to go broody drove us nuts in the early years. Read More »

When I moved into the cottage sixteen years ago I was greeted at the end of the first month by hundreds of bluebells. I was thrilled, as most are, by the smaller wild British varieties of bluebells that I remembered from woodland walks as a child. These are prettier than the large ones that grow Read More »

Danny is enjoying tending his potato bed. At the moment it just is tweaking the drip feed watering system from our water butts so that his seed potatoes are perfectly irrigated every day. Somehow he managed to nick the first and strongest spur of drip pipe for his bed. Needless to say the spur that Read More »

For years it has hurt me to throw away the green outer leaves of the cauliflower. I have simmered them for the chickens in the past but mainly they are added to our kitchen compost bin. Having had the tip from John Coe – that all the leaves on the sprouting broccoli plant are edible Read More »

I have written about species tulips before . I like growing ordinary tulips but have fallen wantonly in love with species tulips. Our local squirrel has adjusted our planting plans and has buried small groups all over the garden. And they are now slowly spreading. When I first moved to the cottage I planted over Read More »

For the past five years John Coe has supplied us with sprouting broccoli plants. The purple variety gives a bigger, longer harvest. But nothing can beat the sweetness of white sprouting broccoli. This is the Premier Cru of sprouting broccoli. It is generally not available from the shops as the plants are smaller, the yield Read More »

I’d cut down the rose bushes to large stumps and wheeled away about ten borrow loads of rose branches and quite a lot of bindweed roots. John Coe cast an eye over the warzone border covered with hefty skeletal stumps. “I can see what you mean. With this and the new potato border you will Read More »

Last night we planted the seed potatoes in Danny’s new border. He wanted slightly bigger spacing than I imagined so we only needed 50 seed potatoes. The last ten were halved spuds with eyes in both sections. Then I wandered into the greenhouse and discovered that we had ten teeny seed spuds left in the Read More »

This has been a weekend of feverish digging and preparation. The new potato bed has such wonderful soil that we have ripped up half the rose walk to have a similar sized bed beside the spuds. This will be the brassica bed this year – cauliflower, calabrese, Brussels sprouts and sprouting broccoli. Although we won’t harvest Read More »