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Great. We have just taken on a site which has a windbreak of 6-8ish year old biomass willow. It’s pretty effective now in winter keeping the worst of the gales off. We might try and top some of the trees to bring in more light. We have taken thousands of cuttings to create a similar windbreak at our other site.
I did wish that some of it was basket willow as we may have been able to sell that, whereas biomass willow is so brittle it can’t be woven at all. But some of the bigger trunks should make decent firewood for us(as biomass willow is of course bred for burning; whereas other willows burn too quickly). And we could potentially sell the cuttings to people who want to plant hedges, once we’re confident that they will sprout.
If you want a more varied hedge you could plant other hedge trees in the lee of the willow. We bought a fruiting hedge mix from Scotplants Direct and added to it with unwanted saplings from friends’ gardens and home grown fruit seedlings grown from pips.
I will use them every year, lots of obscure salads and very good quality. They are a very small company and take it all very seriously. Loads of info on their website and it’s done with love. They are involved in the campaign against the EU laws.
Franchi are the opposite, an enormous company, goodness knows how it’s produced but you do get MILLIONS of seeds in a packet so good for value!
here high in the pennines our garlic was fine (just a few yellowed leaves) throughout the cold of last winter & spring. snow and prolonged utterly freezing gales. it was doing great until in june i poisoned it with coal ash (thinking it was wood ash)!
my friends have one and i’m very impressed with their results. their tomatoes are delicious, as well as peppers, courgettes and all sorts of things. they also dehydrate things that are on sale in bulk in the shops. the dried end product has a really intense flavour, great for snacking, or putting in soups etc. i imagine it preserves a lot of the nutrients etc, at least for a while. i don’t know what make they have though.
our version of this – we had run out of undug beds by potato planting time, but we had a big area that we’d mulched with rotting hay. the hay was 6-10″s thick. we stuck potatoes in the middle of the hay layer, and put a row of well-rotted manure on top of the line of potatoes.
our yield was enormous! the plants were huge too. we planted very late (may) due to the mad spring, and we have just had to lift them as they were starting to get blight. but you could tell the plants were otherwise still going strong – loads of tiny potatoes on the roots – so if we’d been able to plant earlier, so as to have more growing time before the blight, the yields would have been colossal.
we hadn’t even got round to earthing them up – next year we will try using hay for this.
and slugs? our garden is VERY sluggy but despite hay mulch being an obvious habitat for them, they didn’t do very much damage to the potatoes. most of the crop is good enough for selling, and we’ll enjoy eating the damaged ones. we did find 2 big toads nestled in the hay though, so it’s clearly a good habitat for slug predators too!
all in all, very pleased with a high yield for absolutely minimal effort
i have been growing white lisbon spring onions and apache purple ones. i didn’t know you could leave them longer to bulb up. how big do they get and when do you harvest them if sown in late august?
incidentally the compost in my no-dig beds has been a bit too loose for the spring onions – they have grown well enough, but not straight, they are bent! same with some of the direct sown leeks. i guess i should be treading the compost down more before sowing?
it sounds like your garden is healthy and doing really well!