Farming for Self-Sufficiency

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What happens if you—like most of us—do not spray? You will get blight. In a spell of warm, damp weather, when 'blight warnings' are given out over the wireless, small black spots will begin to form on your potato foliage. Gradually the whole of the tops of your potatoes will go black, and rot away. Now if you do not touch those potatoes for a month, the blight spores may not go down and infect the potatoes. Leave the tubers underground, undisturbed, and they may not be infected with blight. Lift them when you need them to eat, or at any rate not before the deepest frosts of the winter are imminent, when the ground will become too hard for you to lift them at all. Your tubers will then not have blight. But you will have a much smaller yield of tubers than you would have had if you had been a good farmer and sprayed and not had blight at all. Some strains of spuds are more blight-resistant than others, but all will get it.

Here in Wales we are inclined to leave our potatoes in the ground until we want them, digging them as we need them, until at least after Christmas. In Suffolk, where there was intense frost, we used to get them out in fine weather in October or November, leave them on the ground for a day or two to dry out, and then clamp them. Clamping consists in making a long pyramidal heap of them, covering them with straw or dry bracken about six inches thick, and covering the straw or bracken with earth, which you then tamp down with the back of the spade. You should leave little 'chimneys' of straw or bracken sticking up through the earth along the ridge to allow for ventilation, and little 'doors' of it down at ground level for the same reason. The straw will keep the frost out and the potatoes will keep well until you want them: provided the actual tubers themselves have not been infected with blight spores. If you leave the spuds a month after the haulms (tops) are completely rotted from blight, your potatoes should not rot in storage. The sight of a nice long clamp of spuds near your house is a satisfying one, and it makes you feel that you will probably survive the winter.

TURNIPS, SWEDES, MANGOLDS, BEETS

Turnips and Swedes are brassica (like cabbages, mustard and kohlrabi), and biennials. The latter words means they live for two years making a big bulbous root the first year and producing flower and seed the second. We harvest them when they have made their swollen root the first year. Mangolds are like much larger turnips. They do not have the nutritive value of turnips but give much heavier crops. Agricultural chemists are apt to sneer at marigolds and say they are 'all water', but farmers reply 'maybe—but what water!' For marigolds, water or no, seem to produce a benefit in cattle that eat them out of all proportion to their chemical analysis. Sugar beet is smaller than mangold (marigolds may give up to forty tons an acre of crop in ideal conditions) and is used for sugar production. To make sugar yourself, chop the beet up as small as you can, boil the pulp, run the water off, and boil the water away, first, mixing lime with it and passing carbon dioxide through the solution. Unrefined sugar will be left as crystals. Fodder beet looks just like sugar beet but is grown for stock feeding. It is a most excellent fodder crop for cattle, pigs, sheep or even horses. It is high in protein.

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