I MADE A HUGE MISTAKE (In the No Dig Market Garden)

so sometimes things do not go quite to plan and I made a critical mistake in the bed preparation this year which is impacting the gardens in a time and economic way so I want to talk about that a bit today I'm feeling really heavy about it because it's quite a drastic error and then there's been some management poms since but there's also some things going really good and it's beautiful to have such green lush pastures after last year's drought so a few clips from around the farm the last days and then we'll talk about the problem and why it occurred and what we might do we have joined this fence to the caverns and technically we're grazing here but the cows just came up following us and they scared the Sheep but the Sheep didn't jump over the fence they ran past them so that's a good first step and you see they're bunched together they are quite defensive and they like having that round nearby and they definitely feel secure with him and the aim is just getting them used to each other as soon as we can so we can start grazing them as one unit cows are mostly interested in new forage which is here so they probably won't stress them too much so it's made bacon we have taken seed flask which is with the ribs but taken the actual bone out but very nice cuts with a good amount of meat fats 2 percent by weight with salt one and a half percent by weight with sugar and mixed with black pepper and we rubbed that into the skin there's a video you can find about this in full but we are gonna basically put this in the chiller now and then turn it every maybe in two days time we'll turn it and mix the order around rub back the brine onto the meat and then do that every day for a week then we'll smoke it it's gonna be awesome breakfast [Music] [Applause] okay we're gonna take you yet we gonna fix that the end up [Music] delivering Gustavus to deliver me a shirt on and everything something clean very good our Vika this restaurant and do customers storm has passed and now it's sunny again so just a 10-minute thunderstorm and it's a big day Wagner we're getting the turkeys out so the gobbler goes here yeah we're gonna take the turkeys out to the fields do you want to help me drive this out okay turkeys have been here only one day but we think they're fine okay just um they've seen grass Regnier jump chasing now let's just get them out and see what they want to do probably goalie okay so just a small batch just 32 turkeys and it's the first time we've done turkeys on our land this field is so wet and it got plugged by the cows when it forward while I was away in Germany in the spring so I want this decided to move the boiler chicks up to top field where it's a lot drier after all heavy rain we've been having interestingly you've had the Kings for ferrying mushrooms come up which again I wouldn't expect to happen until autumn and so we decided that we won't bring egg Mobile's in here very clay rich soil in the tops all here and it's characteristically always the wettest field so we're keeping turkeys in here this year boilers will go in top field and subsequently nut field and hopefully they will be able to manage the grass in here whilst allowing it to recover well from the beating it had in the early spring back is reinforcing boiler dolly even as a Quaker is it area will be done will drilling two holes into it nice and stable this is the old model wheel that we were using but these things go flat within a few months and then they just perish but we've always had it on one bolt like this which obviously with weight on it things are down we like it and the main things that it fits perfectly underly because this isn't protruding out past the angle this is what slides to boil the pen and lift it off the ground obviously was upside down right now it's not which is ideal because the grass has been laid down find these girls and boys and it's much dryer up here silty soil settling in nicely and the sheep are still extremely weary so what we've basically had to do is keep them in a separate pen next to the cows just familiar it's not super ideal these are some of the patches lame some of the lanes they don't drink much cheap often taking all their water from the grass but they've stayed in the pen today which is good and hopefully don't get familiar with the cows pretty soon we're working on basically a whole strip of this field every day so I think we've just resolved to move them like this for now it's getting used to it and learning the three lanes get a little bit bushy because Martin looks a little bit jumbled in here from the birds and then we'd protect the base so we can come in here clean this out very easily make harvesting easy and this is one of the beauties of these multiple pens that we've made as you can with a new piece in trouble is we're using 45 by 28 mill tumor which is extremely light yet takes it wait but it's nice that you can basically fold out a new piece whack it in good to go and just staple this back down so we'll get these up this afternoon and then birds come out in a few days come home look at the birds so we have mesh doors [Music] that's a beautiful most so dominique is a sailor and she's that little turkeys punching and finding the wrists I expect they'll all be up on there they seem to have settled in Nice always drag their look at today's grads beautiful okay so plan today is open the Sheep out into a double net still give them access to the RAM but they are clueless they have a little panic here it gives them access to the cows calves of guts a pretty good amount of forage that should do for the day and just keeping them a bit side by side and we need to keep marching through this field the grass is up this is the area that was just moss when we came here so it's pretty transformed but it's a different species complex it was basically moss and ladies man's on this one then we came here and that has changed I'm listening measurement courses on and this is smoke from Norway potatoes with homemade pesto salad pasta raisin and with events so things are pretty good in the tunnel Tomatoes first flowers appearing and they've been strung up lots of good lettuce coming along so I have a lot of lettuce ready for next week we've cut out all of these greens now we'll get regrowth on them and some spring onions coming along so things looking pretty good in here there's flea beetle and there's moths as well so I have to keep a steady eye on things cucumbers coming along yep so when we made these beds I made a video ten thousand wheelbarrows we were moving 60 ton of compost around and we're using this wood based composter is very low in nutrition and it's just full of organic matter which we wanted to put down because of the drought last year knowing that we might be vulnerable to that and then we put on maybe put on hundreds of liters of the woody compost and then maybe just 200 150 200 liters of compost made with peat moss boiler manure and kyrenia and that's obviously a lot more fertility but the critical error we made was piling up wheelbarrows of the woody material and then just shaking out the the stronger compost on top and then raking the whole thing into beds but that was the critical error we should have put down the set put compost very evenly and raked them out and then added the other and waited out because what's happened as you can see on this bed of beets is we have you know really small plants are just suffering from lack of nutrition and then really nice plans coming along and we're seeing this across a lot of beds and it's it's gonna cause us problems so why did that come well it was one of these tricky situations where trying to manage a teams bonding and formation and well-being and basically we'd set the target on when we wanted to get the bed formation done by cuz there's obviously a bunch of other jobs around the farm not in the gardens and some of us were not you know scheduled to be in the guns and so what I decided to do is set a deadline for when we make the beds and to keep morale up in hot heavy work days I decided that it would save us approximately a day to just lump the beds together now I thoroughly regretting that decision now but it was a decision made for what I felt would be of most benefit to the team to achieve this task we've been set that looked like an unachievable task at the beginning but then steadily throughout the week we were getting closer and closer and we got it done but it's it's gonna pay off now for the rest of the season there's another example of patchy beat so we're getting quite a lot of beds with patchy growth the worst of it is over here you'll see it in the spring onions for example and so we have onions developing well and onions that haven't really grown since they were put in now it's definitely gonna impact just financially because this is the time when we're starting to get boxes out we do have a lot of nice veg to those turnips developing we've got multi stone hackerized and we've got lots of mesclun coming up and lots of salad developing the tunnels looking good but major problem with carrots and carrots just have not been germinating well this is the first year we've used pelleted carrots and they've been a nightmare so we are basically making some hard calls now and scrapping a bunch of beds and putting in some new seedings because we're typically got thousands of carrots per bed so that kicks us to months and of schedule so it's a bit of a disaster on that level I'm sure every grower has little you know beds that become disasters every year but that's that's been tough and a bit rough to not be able to put full attention on two things one thing that's also been contributing to some problem is just not having regular enough monitoring in the garden now having interns here and being so focused with getting people orientated and into educational roles with some responsibilities takes a massive amount of focus and we haven't had interns here last season so it's you know it's been a massive and quite overwhelming beginning this season for me in that way but it has meant that the garden team have been in at the deep end and without so much constant feedback and monitoring for myself and that's that's got its drawbacks too and I think the monitoring of the crops you know everything's under roll cover it's it's really the job of a market gardener to get out early in the morning go look around every single word and really anticipate problems coming and responding to them as quickly as possible now everyone's working hard and it's you know things happen and that's that's where it is and we all learning from that so that's that's beneficial but it's it's so important their lesson to take from it for the viewers is you know this is the priority of a market gonna is to go and observing all the time for looking for pests looking for plans boating looking at watering something that's been really critical with the young paper pot transplants as well as direct students is they must be kept so carefully they must be moist all the time and I think partly the germination of carrots has just been letting them dry out at times and it's you know that's something that I need to monitor is happening so that someone else is monitoring that at time so that's that's something you know to improve on and it's something that I need to really be meticulous in managing even if it's me managing someone else who's doing that so lots of things to learn in this process and that's why we're all here I guess we have some nice beds coming up too of carrots but much less than we would have normally so we're a little bit behind because of the cold snap that we suffered just after we started transplanting stuff out we didn't lose crops I think we lost one bed of beans in the fast that we had everything else was doing fine but it's we're a little bit behind other years if I look back at photos and videos from last year for example we're you know way behind with things like broccoli coming up here normally would be quite big plants by now so that's been one thing with the paper pot transplant is you're putting out such young plants they're very vulnerable and it's been working great in subsequent plantings there's some nice beans gone in here but I as I said in a video previously I think something I would always do is the earliest crops in the year put them out as in our old trays in the 64 some 1 4 4 s we've got a much bigger cell and you can get a much bigger transplant that's resilient certainly at the start and end of the year so paper pots gotta be used in the middle of the season here I think it's it's too risky with the weather early in the year so you know that's part of the risk we took by putting everything over to paper pot it's a little bit of a shame but that's the way it goes also and we'll survive it's just a bit disappointing and a little dis motivating demotivating when you you know you've been working hard and then things don't go as well as they should and it's the first year we've had these major errors and production in the gardens we've been having you know such beautiful gardens but yeah that patchiness is it's gonna cost us something we've got more chard it's a little bit patchy here and beds of lettuces coming on that they're looking they're looking ok but a little bit behind where we expect to be at this time let's have a look in this so God's here for example a bed of onions that's a lot more regular but some patchiness again in these beds and lettuce and bok choy coming on which is doing okay considering they flea beetles been a major issue this year but we got some nice beans because of the wet weather we're seeing a lot more slugs and snails but we had some real nice MIT Sooners and salad mixes leaving the farm and soon we'll be putting out spring onions and we've got some nice kale developing under here let's have a little look under there but but quite low on kale it's a pretty staple crop for us and that's partly because of we've even had flea beetle problems with the kale which we never normally have some of the squash in the tunnel is a little bit behind this is probably half the size of plants where this time last year and that's partly from the cold snap because it's not a lot we could do about that that's just the way it goes some barley mixture is there so a bit of a slow start and things will pick up but it's requires a little bit of different management now well you know one thing we've been doing is going through and just culling beds that are not performing as they should do and for example we've got pretty scrappy beds of fennel and most of the carrot beds are just really under seeded and that's partly with this palette is see we've always had fantastic carrots so there's gonna be some serious culling that puts us back in our schedule but there's always going to be some decent veg that we can pull out to make the week's subscriptions and because we're not selling vegetable boxes we're selling a tricot which is more of a market style it gives us the flexibility to you know compile boxes of what we actually have so there's less pressure in that way but it's certainly gonna wipe out you know a decent percentage of the revenue from the garden this year which is yeah there's nothing we can do about that at this point in this cold short climate it's them first boxes in the year that really you know the start get in the season really sets up the entire season so it's it's a big blow and trying to keep you know feeling light about it because there's plenty of other things going on at the farm that we need to deal with too but it's yeah I thought it's a valuable thing to share because it's not always that things go perfectly and we've been really blessed by the people that we've had here and how well it has always gone but sometimes that's not the case let's go and have a look at some other crops so this is some multi stone Hakurei and you can see we put in several in each shell there's still a little time to go with them but that's a really nice lots more radish on its way and we've got some manager at it again and we've got some of the outside squashes some fennel lots a lettuce chard and a lot of peas we're gonna have to apply a range of strategies to see you know pull it back into speed but I think it's really important to to share some of the things that don't go right even though it's a little heartbreaking it's you know it's a reality if if farming always went right then I guess many more people would be doing it it's a challenging thing but first time we've had major challenges in the gardens but we must keep our heads up and keep responding that's all we need to do to keep steering things back on track and it might be that we scale up on micros and things like that to help alleviate some of the pressure but I think you know we're maybe ten days or two weeks behind on some of the crops and things like carrots that have been a bit drastic we'll be a couple of months behind on which is you know that's a big shame but that's we're ghosts but very happy to have all this beautiful lush green grass and a lot of rain so we've been just really enjoying seeing the pasture popping up and the cows are happy with their bull skansen and then the Sheep you're getting more relaxed every day well looking forward to more longer sunny days we've been getting some nice Sun again the temperatures have gone up to more stage temperatures now but lots of rain interspersed and some pretty crazy thunderstorms just noticing the fungi down here something that's really common with no big beds is to get this proliferation of fungi that you might not see in your till beds we've got to keep our heads up now and keep focus there's lots we can do to help remedy this situation whenever we're turning beds over obviously we can you know better evenly distribute things like pillow chicken manure will help just to even out the fertility we're gonna have fire firts compost teas things that we can put on as liquid nutrients to help the situation then and that's what we can do let's keep responding and so we'll be making videos throughout the season so we'll see what happens in the end because there's so much that we can be thankful and grateful for we've got beautiful crops in here and we've got many beautiful crops outside just some of them are not up to our typical standards so it's you know it's a little disappointing but that's life that's farming you know but so much life happening on the farm now we got a beautiful team here with interns from all over the globe from Canada to Europe and it's just yeah I'm really enjoying having a lot of people and birds back on the ground and ecosystems pumping and thriving it's really amazing to see the grassland and the insect life really in prosperous health after last year and just seeing how the neighbor's land recovers and how ours is functioning we've really been affirmed again just how much resilience were building into our land through careful planning and high animal impact and intensity okay folks that's it for today just having a bit of downtime and getting on with hot jobs that have been piling up has the interns and guests on holistic management training with vanish and looking forward to just catching up a few things before we jump into soil preparation weeks and get our trial bed started and we'll be updating and detailing what we're doing with those but hope you found that interesting just to you know reflect and share some of the things that are not going well which are often much more important than sharing the things that go well even if they're a little heartbreaking and feel a little timid putting them out but that's you know it's valuable stuff and you know most things go exceptionally well here and we've been blessed by that but sometimes little things happen that don't go to plan and this feels like one of the the biggest errors I've made in in judgment and so I thought it's really valuable to share that so thanks so much for watching our channel folks don't forget to click subscribe and like the video if you benefit from it and you can find out more in the links below see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 213,499

Rating: 4.7704268 out of 5

Keywords: ridgedale, market garden, no dig

Id: V5JvA2ZAuOk

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2019