Description:

With food prices in the shops on the rise and incomes heading decisively the other way, you could be forgiven for thinking that “growing your own” might be a good idea. The first two articles in this series tried to map out a route from a scruffy patch of land to some of the best eating imaginable. It’s been a very small scale map so far. This soft focus isn’t just the author’s laziness, but also reflects the task itself, which is very much a doing thing rather than a taught thing.

 

But shouldn’t farming be left to the experts? Some might say that extensive experience and resources are essential. I’d suggest that the lack of these things never stopped anyone becoming a half-decent parent! Similarly, small-scale farming relies far more on compassion, intuition and plenty of hard work rather than text books and technical qualifications. The small family farm is a historically tried-and-tested formula for abundance and resilience. It’s in our natures.

 

 

What to grow?

 

A circle doesn’t have an obviously good starting point but, as described last month, farm animals are the little dynamos of productivity at the heart of growing things and thus deserve priority. One day hyperstagflation might mean something, so it’s reassuring that the meanest land can always provide you with plenty of home-grown pork, duck and goose for the freezer. Add eggs aplenty from your laying hens and a bit of milk from your goats and you have the backbone (and various other body parts) of a very good diet.

 

The trick is to get these things to your plate without losing an arm and a leg money-wise. Fortunately happy farm animals willingly go forth and multiply. There aren’t many things in life that are free, so the reproductive capacity of your own farm animals represents a great budgetary advantage. But even with a dozen piglets in the barn, you’re not quite ready to laugh in the face of economic adversity just yet.

 

Despite a fair amount of right to roam, those growing animals will still need a handful or two of good grain every day. Goats need hay. And there’s a whole roomful of proprietary feeds in your local farm shop. That stuff could deliver you right back into the cruel hands of commodity price inflation.

 

So, after the animals themselves, I’d suggest the next most important priority – even before growing fruit and vegetables for the family - is growing things to supplement your animals’ diet with. I wish I’d done it sooner! Fortunately we live in a region which still knows one end of a mangel-wurzel from another and every garden store will stock – in a neglected corner - large boxes of seed marked ‘les fourrages’. You’ll never see a happier pig than one with its chops around a betterave jaune. Your goats will munch luzerne very happily and eat less of that expensive hay – most of which ends up on the floor anyway.

 

Not just greens and beans

 

With all that animal protein in store, or running around outside, you’re very unlikely to starve. But man cannot live on pork pie alone (sadly) so enhancing your food security vegetable-wise is probably a good plan for you, and for your arteries. Trying to make meals out of your land all year round invites a subtly different emphasis than, say, vegetable gardening on an allotment. It becomes a complex, but fascinating, study in seasonal possibilities.

 

Actually, make that non-seasonal possibilities. When you rely on your land to eat, the focus of activity tends to stray away from the familiar mid-May to mid-October harvest time, when a supply of vegetables isn’t exactly rocket science, to the other six, long months when – frankly - it can definitely feel that way. The hunt for fresh green things to eat in, say, deepest darkest December will lead away from the mainstream of leisure gardening and back into the dusty pages of pre-1940’s text books.

 

If you choose to follow this neglected path, you’ll develop a healthy interest in perennial and biennial vegetables. They store the energy of the last year in their big roots and offer up edible shoots very early in this one. Salsify, seakale, witloof chicory, good king Henry are just a few of them, and they all merit restoration to the centre of the vegetable growing plan.

 

The ability to sit in the ground, or in store, until needed is another attractive quality offered by some vegetables. Familiar root vegetables do this, of course, but so do less Tesco-friendly things like Hamburg parsley, scorzonera and bulbous chervil. A further cold season contribution is made by winter squash and dried French beans – and without compromising the freezer space available for the mortal remains of your animals. Nor do they involve you in pickling, salting and other related dark arts.

 

When the dreaded Hungry Gap opens up, super-hardy winter vegetables could become your new best friends. Kales, Brussels sprouts and cabbages can be delicious straight from the garden. No, really! Especially if you feed the usual suspects to the animals and major instead in the best varieties for your own consumption: cavolo nero, rubine and couve tronchuda respectively, in case you were wondering…

 

Back in the mainstream of the growing season it can begin to feel like a bit of a numbers game. Just how many onions does one family eat in a year? Enough to make planting onion sets seem like an epic and monolithic chore. I think diversity is the remedy here. The onion family also includes leeks, shallots, salad onions, welsh onions and bunching onions all of which, given a bit of creativity in the kitchen, could dilute reliance on yellow bulb onions.

 

Under cover

 

The other major outlet for vegetable gardening ingenuity can be filed under ‘extending the season’.

 

Thus far I’ve tried to avoid recommending any significant capital outlay. But the potential contribution to subsistence made by a large polytunnel of good construction makes buying one hard to resist. Unless you regard a 20€ lettuce as a viable proposition, I wouldn’t suggest it will ever make financial sense. But it does offer an invaluable ability to provide early and late crops, particularly salad, when all else outside would certainly fail. The main difficulty with polytunnels in Brittany is finding a site which means it is sheltered, but not too shaded. An open site will surely mean an airborne polytunnel during the next storm. Very inconvenient.

 

You could also make something like a greenhouse by adding sufficient translucent sections to one of your outbuildings. This has the additional advantage of better insulation inherent in the fabric of the building and will provide a suitable environment to get things going inside before they have to face the slings and arrows of outrageous Breton weather outside!   

 

 

*

 

So, if you plan to subsist from your garden, the vegetable patch will end up looking a bit different from a standard plot. Odd, half-forgotten things will appear between the rows of spuds and beans – and I’m not referring to the gardeners. But, in times like these, an emphasis on year-round eating will pay dividends far-exceeding the efforts required in its re-imagining. Next month I’ll offer some thoughts about fruit and herbs and also some tips to tackle that unhelpful local phenomenon – weed Armageddon!

 

February

 

…is the last of the get-ahead months in the garden. Once Nature wakes up properly at the end of the month, hoe-ing, mowing and sowing will soak up any surplus energies and extra daylight hours. A flood of new growth will swamp any efforts to tidy up out there next month, so best get on with it now.

 

You can sow seeds indoors less tentatively than in January, almost safe in the knowledge that the plants will enjoy a future unhindered by hard frost. Attention can turn from the present palette of green crops to a rainbow assortment of chillies, tomatoes and aubergines which all start here, as long as you possess a propagator. Without any artificial heat many of the brassica and beetroot families can get going in the greenhouse now: we’re talking about those kales, cabbages and sprouts again, plus chards, beets and sorrel. 

 

Back outside, and the grass begins to grow - ok that’s a mixed blessing – and annual weeds start to appear. That sounds terrible. But these things are the harbingers of the growing season. Those potatoes can stop hanging about in egg boxes and start to go into the ground, so long as you’re prepared with some frost protection once they come through. Broad beans, onions and shallots won’t care either way and can go straight to soil now.

 

If you fancy your own parsnips in August, you’ll need to get them sown at the end of this month. I ‘chit’ mine before sowing outside by sprinkling the seeds on damp tissue paper and waiting until they sprout. They can then be carefully transplanted into the soil. It’s not as faffy as it sounds and means the notoriously slow parsnip seedlings appear within just a few days.

 

Finally, it’s the last chance to plant those bare-rooted fruit trees and bushes. In any circumstance, a more worthwhile investment of time and money is hard to imagine.

 

 

More about Max Akroyd

 

About eight years ago Max Akroyd gave up the boardroom, sports cars and the rest to look 

after his first child and his fiveallotments. Five years later he moved with his wife and family 

to Brittany. He now has five children, various farm animals and six acres to look after... 

You can catch up with day-to-day developments on his smallholding at the Rural Idiocy? blog. 

 

Max and his family also welcome guest to their Gite; Kerveguen

 

 

Like this story? Why not use the Guide2Brittany RSS feed and receive updates as soon as they are posted? Or join Guide2Brittany as a member and receive a regular newsletter.

 

 

Check out Guide2Brittany for Brittany property, Brittany accommodation, Brittany events, Brittany news and classifieds in Brittany.