More stuff in the ground, our runner beans were planted last friday, once again I've failed to calculate the number of plants we needed, we wound up only planting one of our structures and have direct sowed beans under the other. Not sure what happened there but they'll catch up quick and give us a little succession of cropping although I always find that staggering our planting of runner beans never makes a difference to when they finish cropping. Since then they have grown very strongly, alongside our courgettes - in the end I only had to replace about 20 plants following the slugs attack.

We sowed another 3 beds of spinach, and are going to get stuck in planting our late leeks today, which is taking up more space than I'd planned for, even doing three rows per bed through the biolene. We should wind up with a fantastic yield of leeks this year if all goes well, the soil is warm and damp just how they like it. Other crops are looking great, our tunnels are starting to yield some great produce, I've a few other plans for them for next year to get maximum use from them but we've got 6 out of the 10 planted up at the moment with another sowing of cucumbers due this week and then 2 more will be used for a late crop of climbing french beans. We'll then attempt to get some more brassicas in the ground later in the week - red and white autumn cabbage as well as savoy are all ready for planting, as well as what managed to germinate from our early sweetcorn sowing, about 25% made it this far.

Yesterday was spent sowing seeds into module trays - we have now sown our other two varieties of sweetcorn along with loads of cauliflowers, and yet more lettuce, so hopefully this will all be ready for planting later in the month.

My camera is playing up at the moment, pictures keep coming out with blue lines across them, so I'm not managing to get many useful ones. I'll keep trying, but may wind up having to get a new camera, the poor things are really put through their paces out in the fields with me.

As well as lots of harvesting we also managed to get loads of cabbage planted - around 1000-1300 each of Red [Huzaro], White [Impuls] and Savoy [Cantassa] and due to the closer spacing this year we've found that we have a bit of extra space. I gave Chris at Wessex plants (where we get a lot of our plants from) a call and have arranged some more to fill out this space, along with some extra squash plants as we've experienced a very poor germination from ours. We also planted out two beds of sweetcorn to give us that early crop hopefully.

Today was spent getting the first of our Celeriac [Ibis], and some Celery [Tall Utah], planted, and also sowing five beds of Beetroot, mainly standard red [Bolivar] but also some with red and white rings throughout it's root [Chioggia] which tastes slightly sweeter and the colour doesn't run making it a good salad beetroot.

Following a lovely hot week, this week has been a washout. Some of our early potatoes are once again under water which is killing them off, and the warm damp weather has encouraged all the overwintered slug eggs to hatch at once causing huge amounts of damage. Our swede, which are bulking up nicely already, have been badly damaged, and we've lost a lot of young lettuce plants which hopefully won't leave us short in a few weeks.

On a better note, we've started cropping a lot more of our own produce this week and on the whole everything is growing very well. It looks like we'll see our first outdoor courgettes next week, and the runner beans are climbing very fast. The bulk of our planting is in now so we're looking at plenty of weeding over the next few weeks, the usefullness of the Biolene biodegradeable polythene will become apparent soon, as last year we spent days hoeing the onions and leeks, at least twice, and hand weeding as well. This should leave us enough time to keep everything else well enough weeded, leading to stronger crops.

Thankfully we were missed by the worst of the rain which hit the country over the past week, although our gauge still shows over 40 mm and it's hidden amongst some tall plants so isn't that accurate. Once again we have some of our potatoes standing in water, which is resulting in them gradually dying off, but most of them are further up the slope and look like they're bulking up nicely. Everything else seems to be surviving, but as the ground is so wet we're struggling to get onto it to deal with the weeds - it's far too wet for using the spring-tine cultivator to scuffle between the plants, and even hand hoeing doesn't work as the hoes get gummed up within a few seconds of use and just smear the mud.

On a better note, we're actually seeing some soft fruit this year before the birds get stuck in, gooseberries are going in the fruit bags, with blackcurrants coming over the next few weeks hopefully, and I'll be adding raspberries to the extras list although they'll be limited quantities as the plants are still struggling to get established.

Back to broad beans for a few weeks, but this time they're our own, and are delicious and tender, and we should be on to a fresh batch of spring greens and small summer cabbages by next week as well as starting our own calabrese. We've got further ahead with planting, another tunnel of climbing french beans went in, sadly this is for Autumn cropping as we seem to be getting there fast, and some more dwarf french beans and sugar snap peas went in outside. If we're lucky we'll see the first of these in about a months time, and the outdoor courgettes are suddenly producing so we'll be seeing them in the boxes as a regular feature either next week or the week after, while the runner beans aren't doing quite so well it's looking likely we'll have one of our best years so long as we get some sunshine sometime soon.

Unfortunately a box of calabrese went into the boxes last week which shouldn't have, they were pretty slimey, so apologies if yours was one of them, please let us know so we can pop something into your box to compensate.

Visitors to Box Bush shop at Rowntrees garden centre may see some of our mini-cucumbers appearing on the shelves, and we're hoping to be able to supply a few other things over the summer, especially as half our box scheme customers seem to pop off on holiday the moment everything in the boxes is our own. Miles was telling me that someone had been in critising us for not putting local produce in the boxes, but I can only assume they mean one of the national box schemes and just got the name wrong - we not only grow most of the produce you'll see in the boxes on our land here in Claverham, but where we do have to buy in to supplement (usually potatoes and carrots as our land isn't good for growing these) we do try to source within our neighbouring counties as a priority to further afield, although that's not always possible. I feel that we're very open about where the produce we supply comes from, unlike every other box scheme I keep an eye on, none show the country of origin for everything offered, especially on their 'extras' list. By law we have to state country of origin for all produce, which I try to keep updated on the website. I'll climb off my soapbox now.