Nice bright photos this time. Spring is well and truly here, and in true farmer fashion I'll start by complaining about the weather. The dry spell we're having, combined with the strong winds is starting to bake the saturated soil leaving a hard crust which is meaning the plants we have managed to get in already are struggling. I'll get the irrigation out next week if we haven't had rain. As you can see from the photo, we've potted on the tomatoes and they're growing fast - if anyone's interested in growing their own we will have a wide range of plants and transplants available throughout the spring, I may get a page set up on the internet, but right now I doubt it, so please just ask what we may have - Tomato (diplom, gardeners delight) £1 per pot available now. Later in the year we'll have courgettes, runner beans at £1 per pot, most brassicas available as the year progresses at 20p per plant, and leeks and onions at 10p per cell, all depending on germination of course.

The past three weeks have been manic, we've been trying to complete the winter jobs that we had started, been trying to get to grips with spring cultivations which are going well despite the fact that it feels like I've been repairing equipment all week, getting a few things planted out, loads more seeds including the celery (35,000 seeds per gram is fun), preparing beds for our recently arrived asparagus plants, and loads more I can't even remember right now.

We've had some fantastic cauliflowers over the past few weeks, and are getting our last cut from this variety this week. They're not as tight as the previous weeks, and the curds have more of a yellow tinge due to exposure to the sun but in my opinion the flavour is more intense. We have 3 more varieties to come which should cover a lot of the next 3 months. The purple sprouting is starting to really look good and we're hoping for another three weeks at least, although we're beginning to see quite a bit of whitefly, enjoying the warm weather.

Over the past year we have been checking out our options regarding plastic bags - we discussed switching to biodegradeable when our stocks ran out - but have come up with a better solution. After discussions with Viridor Waste we will be taking down our sorted plastic waste for recycling, so please feel free to return any of our clear plastic bags to us so we can store them until we have a van full. Please give them a rinse first, and if you have any other bags of the same grade plastic then we will accept them, anything else we may not - we're not totally sure on costs for other materials but are hoping to be able to recycle all our plastic waste.

Once again I'm amazed at how much we can get done in a short space of time.
We've pushed ahead with planting our outdoor lettuces, the garlic and shallots went in a little late and we've got some very healthy looking broad bean plants with more beds germinating to give us a long picking season when they finally start producing. We also managed to get all our potatoes planted last thursday, they went into quite damp soil over at Kenn Moor so should do well, providing we can keep the weeds and badgers off them, and for the long term we planted around 200 asparagus plants.

Unfortunately we've had to water everything in as we plant them at the moment, we try to water directly to the root of the plant rather than using a large boom sprayer. This is far more time consuming but means we're not fighting a flush of weeds, or wasting precious water on bare soil so the time taken is saved later.
I've got land ready for sowing our early carrots, beetroot, spinach and hopefully parsnips early next week, so everything is looking positive this year. Due to the dry weather I'm not worried about the same sort of slug damage we had last year, all those courgette plants eaten.... so hopefully any small seeds sown should survive.

We'll also be planting out a tunnel of courgettes, a tunnel of cucumbers and two tunnels of mixed peppers, tomatoes and aubergines, along with plenty more seeds over the next two weeks, so plenty more to keep us going, and with any luck some fresh new crops in around six weeks time.

Sadly we're now coming to the end of a lot of our crops, and as our land is quite heavy we're not able to get some of the very early crops that farms on sandy soil can achieve. This is balanced by the fact that our soil retains moisture well during the summer so we can get very good results later in the year.
As a result we're going to find ourselves buying in considerably more produce to supply the boxes over the next two months. The majority of this should still be UK, further south on sandy soil for the early new season, and further north where the cooler weather means crops aren't going to seed so quickly, plus a lot of glasshouse produced salads from Gloucestershire, which should keep us going.
Due to the warm winter it's likely we'll have to use EU carrots for a short while before the new UK season, but thanks to better storage we should be able to go straight from UK ware potatoes into the new season during May.

We're starting to see a lot of fruit coming from southern hemisphere countries as the European stocks run low, EU apples will probably run out pretty soon, so unfortunately we'll have to source from either Argentina or New Zealand for a while - these will have been shipped in which is a relatively unpolluting method of transport compared to air, and even road, although the huge distance doesn't make that a good thing. If you'd rather not have these when we start getting them then please let us know, we can either substitute with Bananas, or you can make up your own fruit bag via the website and can let us know if you want your options regularly via email.

Our own soft fruit is starting to look fantastic, the plants have really come on since last year when what little was produced was picked off by the birds, so hopefully this summer we'll be able to use this in the boxes.