Food from the Fields
Sowing Drill in rows about 20 inches (51 cm) apart, or broadcast, but drilling gives a better yield and if you have a precision drill you can save seed. Sow from two to four pounds (0.9 -1.8 kg) of seed per acre. Drill most kales early in April, although drill Marrowstem in May so that it does not get too woody. Thin and hoe in rows and you will get a heavier crop, particularly of Marrowstem kale. Kale likes plenty of manure. Harvesting You can fold kale off in the winter. It is more used for folding to cows than to sheep - it is a marvellous winter feed for milking cows. Let the cows on to it a strip at a time behind an electric fence. Or you can cut it with a sickle and cart it to feed to cows indoors. Use Marrowstem first and leave hardier kales like Hungry-gap until after the New Year. After you have cut, or grazed off, a field of kale the pigs will enjoy digging up the roots. Alternatively you can just plough in. RAPE Rape is like a swede but has no bulb forms. It is good for folding to sheep or dairy cows. It canbe sown (generally broadcast - not drilled) in April for grazing off in August, or can be sown as a "catch crop" after an early cereal harvest to be grazed off in the winter but then it won't be a very heavy crop. Rape is too hot a taste for humans, so you can't eat it as a vegetable, although a little might flavour a stew. C O W CABBAGES These are very similar to ordinary cabbages. Establish them like kale, or if you have plenty of labour you can grow them in a seed bed and transplant them out by hand in the summer. This has the advantage that you can put them in after, say, peas or beans or early potatoes, and thus get two crops in a year: a big consideration for the smallholder. You can get a very heavy crop but remember cow cabbages like good land and plenty of manure. You can clamp cabbages. All the above brassica crops are subject to club-root, and must not be grown too often on the same land. Cow cabbages make splendid human food too, and are fine for sauerkraut (see p. 187). MUSTARD There are two species: Brassica alba and Brassica juncea, white and black mustard. They can be grown mixed with rape for grazing off with sheep; or grown alone for the same purpose; or grown as a green manure to be ploughed into the land to do it good; or harvested for seed, which you can grind, mix with a little white wheat flour and moisten as required to produce the mustard that goes so well with sausages. Remember that mustard is cabbage-tribe though, and is therefore no good for resting the land from club-root. I would never grow it as green manure for that reason. It is not frost-hardy.
Cleaning crops It must be understood that all the above crops, excepting rape and mustard when these are broadcast and not drilled in rows, are cleaning crops, and thus of great value for your husbandry. Being grown in rows it is possible to horse-hoe and hand-hoe, and this gives the husbandman a real chance to get rid of weeds. So, although you may think that the growing of these row crops is very hard work, remember that it is hard work that benefits even7 other crop that you grow, and I would suggest that you should grow a crop in every four years of your arable rotation. POTATOES Where potatoes grow well they can be, with wheat, one of the mainstays of your diet, and if you have enough of them you will never starve. They are our best source of storable vitamin C, but most of this is in the skins so don't peel them. You can even mash them without peeling them. Seed potatoes For practical purposes, and unless we are trying to produce a new variety of spud and therefore wish to propagate from true seed, potatoes are always grown from potatoes. In other words we simply plant the potatoes themselves. This is known as vegetative reproduction, and all the potatoes in the world from one variety are actually the same plant. They aren't just related to each other: they are each other. We can keep our own "seed" therefore, from one year to the next, but there is a catch here. The potato is a plant from the High Andes, and grown at sea level in normal climates it is heir to various insect-borne virus diseases. After we have planted our potato "seed" (tubers) year after year for several "generations" there will be a build-up of virus infections and our potatoes will lose in vitality. Hence we must buy seed potatoes from people who grow it at high altitudes, or on wind-swept sea-islands, or in other places where the aphids do not live that spread these diseases. An altitude of over 800 ft (244 m) is enough in Britain for growing seed potatoes: in India most seed comes from Himachayal Pradesh, from altitudes of over 6000 ft (1829 m). The cost of seed potatoes now is enormous, and anybody who has land over 800 ft (244 m) would be well advised to use some of it for growing seed. In any case, many more of us ought to save the smallest of our tubers for "oncegrown seed" or even "twice-grown seed". After we have carried on our own stock for three years, however, it will probably pay to import fresh seed from seed-growing areas rather than risk the spread of disease. EARLY POTATOES Potatoes that grow quickly and are eaten straight from the ground and not stored are called "early potatoes'.' To grow them you should chit, or sprout, them. They should be laid 85