Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Hard as it is to NOT write about pygmy goat kids today, we must however remind both ourselves and you, that there is quite a lot else happening on the smallholding at the moment... although we can not resist posting at least one photo today. This is Raisin who is currently competing with Mushroom as to who can look the cutest. We think they are BOTH winning!! Have a look at our new Photo Story of the kids and see what you think! (Video coming soon too...)
And so to the polytunnel, still ripped but as mentioned last month we are 'making do' and so now catching up with our planting. There will be some plants we WON'T grow this year because of the damage; the main ones being the brassicas (cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage etc) as we know full well that the butterflies will come straight in through the holes in the polythene, lay their eggs and the only things we will then be feeding will be the caterpillars!
Garlic (pictured), onions, potatoes, beans, peas, carrots, parsnips, leeks, salad leaves, radishes... all these plus a few more WILL be planted and in the case of the potatoes and garlic already have been.
We had an interesting discussion tonight about the benefits and drawbacks in keeping your own seeds and bulbs to grow new plants the following year. We COULD for example have kept one or two of our own garlic bulbs from last summer/autumn and then used the individual cloves to grow new bulbs this spring. It would have saved us money and we liked the variety of garlic we grew BUT we could not have guaranteed they were disease-free which is what buying in new bulbs for planting will do. Once we introduce diseases into our soil (that might for example come from moulds that grew on our bulbs), it is VERY hard to get rid of them. On the whole therefore, buying in new is often the best start to the new growing year!!