Arcadia Organics

News archives: July 2007

July 13 2007 [Click photos for larger images.]

The past few weeks have been horrendous, hence I've not put in an update for a while. We're struggling against masses of slugs and other pests who've survived the mild winter and are loving this wet warm weather and are destroying a lot of hard work. Even more annoying is the pigeons who are stripping brassica plants as soon as we put them out in the field and are now ignoring scarecrows and anything else we're using to try to deter them. We've also seen some of our potatoes and carrots covered by water, which has caused a lot to rot and speeded up the occurance of blight amongst the potatoes.

There are however farmers who have lost everything due to the heavy rainfall further north, so we're likely to see a shortage of UK produce later in the year, especially during the late winter months when stored potatoes and carrots will run out early. Sadly for most of these farmers there will be little in the way of government help, and it's unlikely that their insurance will cover the losses, so yet more farmers will go out of business.

This past week we've managed to get some late carrots sown, so hopefully we'll have our own from late September which will make up for those which are under water at them moment, and we've also put in loads more brassicas with the theory that the pigeons can't eat them all, surely.

The french beans in the tunnels have finally got over the red spider mite infestation and are producing some fantastic yields, but unfortunately the heavy rain last week has led to a lot of the tunnels flooding - one actually had a stream running through it, which has killed off about a third of the plants in each tunnel, and the final batch of broad beans outdoors are about ready for harvesting. They're amazing, standing at four and a half feet tall, with a heavy crop of delicious green beans on each plant.

We've been making some fantastic sweet cucumber pickle from our surplus cucumbers, and although we haven't got the symbol on it yet, it is made to organic specifications, it is now available at £2.50 for a 280gm jar.

The top left photo was taken just before cultivating a section of ground which had been left covered in weeds. Some stunning colours, including spurge which can cause nasty burns, but looks amazing, it really shows that weeds don't have to be ugly.

July 27 2007 [Click photos for larger images.]



!!! Some things are growing very well, the parsnips look the best they have for years, and now we've finally weeded the carrots the top end of the field (out of the water) is looking pretty good, so we'll at least have some of our own carrots this year (the early sowing failed completely - poor germination and slugs, and the late sowing from a fortnight ago doesn't look promising). While we've not seen the awful flooding that many people have up in herefordshire and gloucestershire, we're not having one of our better years. It's a shame, the year started out so positively with the glorious weather in April, we were well ahead with our planting and are finally seeing some of those crops producing well. Now though I'm really worried about the autumn and winter crops, a lot of them which are in already are doing well - I mentioned parsnips, and the swede and most of the cabbages are growing strongly if a little slower than usual. We should be planting our kales and purple sprouting broccoli out next week if the ground can dry out enough, and the cauliflowers which did so well last year went in a fortnight ago to feed the growing slug population. Potatoes may well be an issue this winter, ours have been devastated by blight, they were fine until last week when the beautiful wednesday and thursday created such muggy weather that the small amount of blight damage turned into wholesale destruction and we're now looking at brown stems. We do use tuber resistant varieties so we're hoping that the potatoes themselves won't rot, especially when we bring them in to store, but with such bad blight there's no guarantee. Please don't be surprised if both quantity and quality suffer in the boxes later on this year, we'll do our best but I really don't know what gaps we'll have in our own produce and whether we can get other good quality local produce to fill them, even if we do get a change in the weather. Fingers crossed.