Manure Pile Covered, A Winter Veg Harvest

Covering the manure pile, a winter vegetable harvest and parsnips in to the store.

We’ve finally got the massive muck pile covered. I’d ordered a tarpaulin from Ebay but it didn’t arrive. Knowing things can take longer in the post than expected I waited near a week past the expected delivery date. Then I contacted the seller and politely asked if he had a tracking number or could just tell me who was delivering it. No reply. After giving him a week I raised it with Ebay and had to wait again.

The manure pile covered in a tarpaulin.

The thing is, I didn’t want to buy from elsewhere and end up with two tarpaulins. Anyway, my money was refunded, ordered from another seller and three days later, the tarpaulin arrived.

My son-in-law was drafted in and the heap was stacked tighter with layers of cardboard to add carbon. At this time of year we’ve not a lot else to add to the pile. The tarpaulin was placed over and weighted down with rocks and old pallets against the wind. Now the nutrients will not be washed out by the rain.

Covering the heap should help it heat a little and encourage microbial action and our hard working worms break it down. As the year moves on, we’ll use some for the potatoes and later on in the large compost heaps.

Too Much Muck?

14 cubic metres might seem a massive amount of muck, that’s because it is. It is enough to layer a third of a standard 10 rod allotment 17 cms (6.5 ins) deep. With soil in reasonable heart, a third of that is sufficient to keep things growing well.

Most of our growing areas are now in good heart but potatoes and brassicas are hard to over-feed. The same goes for sweetcorn, a difficult crop outside here in any case due to the weather. I’ve offered our neighbours some of the muck pile as well.

The real benefit of manures and composts is how they improve the soil structure and microbial life. Unlike chemical fertilisers that provide limited and quite short-term benefits, the benefits of composts and manures last for years.

Our soil is the basis of all growing. It’s so obvious, the better the soil the better the plants. Beyond gardeners, I think improving the soil is something becoming more and more important to farmers. We can’t just treat it as some sort of medium to hold the plants in place as we pour on the chemicals. Fertilisers have their place but they’re not the be all and end all.

Winter Veg

Something special about being able to cook a meal from your own efforts.

The head chef decided to cook a stew and requested some vegetables. The red cabbage didn’t go in but it needed harvesting. It could keep for weeks in the fridge but we’ll use it much faster than that.

I cleared the remaining calabrese stalks from one of the raised beds and noticed there was a third flush of small florets. They ended up in a stir fry, a bonus veggie. The store cupboard in the shed provided onions and potatoes in addition to the parsnip, leeks, carrots and a small swede.

Parsnips

The remaining parsnips have been harvested and just popped in a potato sack in the store. They’ll keep well enough like that for how long they’ll last before we eat them. Read in one of my old gardening books about just drawing a trench and laying the parsnips in, covered with a few inches of soil. I can see how they would be easy to harvest in bad weather, but I’d have thought they would be more likely to re-grow.