"Jaques d'Alltrades" wrote in message
...
The message
from "Pat Gardiner" contains these words:
snip
Did the piggy thing get sorted to your satisfaction?

A spot of detergent and some warm water ought to shift the algae from
your polytunnel. Don't use washing powder as it may contain borax, and
could drain down and brutalise what's growing inside.

And, providing you have a male and a female Chinese gooseberry, you
should get fruit. You should get fruit if you plant them outside, too.

Hi Tony.

To take the last point first. Yes, both male and female. Two male, eight
female. No fruit.

Funny you should mention pigs....this is all John Seymour's fault

I was very taken with his idea of using pigs to do the spring digging. So I
made 10 small paddocks, with good stock fences, all interconnecting and with
water and nice little pig sties. An electric wire runs along the inside to
stop the piggies digging under.

It was brilliant. As we moved the pig from paddock to paddock through the
year, I would trot along behind planting something....and when the piggies
got beck to the beginning they would have a lovely time clearing any rubbish
and doing some digging.

The stock fencing along the drive looked a bit bare, so I planted Kiwis five
years ago on the side furthest from the pigs actually on the driveway.
Looked nice. The only potential problem was one of my wife's zoo eating
them. The cow was the most likely hooligan, when she was brought up for
milking twice a day to the cow shed opposite. But I shout at the pair of
them - seems to work.

Anyway three years ago we lost our pigs to the swine fever cull and my wife
was so upset that I thought we would never have any more pigs (I should have
known better!)

So I decided to make good use of the paddocks. I could not just put a
polytunnel anywhere because polytunnels and my wife's animal keeping don't
mix. Either the chickens, sheep or cow would get in there.

I decided to turn the smallest paddock into a protected tunnel area. It is
fenced obviously and has water - ideal. So I put up a 30 ft tunnel on all
this nice piggy fertilised soil.

Except that never having had a tunnel before, I failed to allow enough space
around it - just 18 inches....so I put ground cover plastic down to control
the weeds.

So there you are I have a green tunnel, with no space to work and a herd of
unproductive Kiwis.

Something has got to give...and I don't like the look in the eye of my wife
or in that of her row of Tamworths. She already uses the tunnel to store
straw and hay in the winter, I can hardly get in the thing.

So I have to get the tunnel looking good and the Kiwis productive.

There is a good aerial photograph on
http://pages.britishlibrary.net/patg...otowalledg.htm You can see the
tunnel on the left
and the walled garden with its raised beds.

....and in answer to your question about sorting the piggy business out. No,
I'm still campaigning on animal health, you can read about it elsewhere on
the site, but it is off-topic for here.

Regards
Pat Gardiner
www.go-self-sufficient.com



--
Tony
tony·anson&zetnet·co·uk