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7 June 2008
Potatoes, we've planted over twice the area of last year, hopefully we'll be able to borrow Leigh Court Farm's harvester again.. Winter cabbages growing strongly, at this stage last year they'd barely grown since we planted them out. 20 beds of various sweetcorn planted using the module transplanter.

 

A lot has changed in a week, the heavy rains have left us and the ground had dried up just enough to get the tractor on it enabling me to rotavate enough for us to really get stuck into this month's planting.
We started off on Wednesday morning with planting our sweetcorn, around 6000 plants of three varieties to take us hopefully from late July through to October. These were planted in two rows per bed at around 30cm x 60cm using the module transplanter and they went into the damp soil very well, far better than last years attempt. We also used the module transplanter to put in our sprouts, we covered as many as possible with our large sheet of mesh in the hope that we'll keep the pigeons off enough for the plants to get established as they seem to love young sprout plants.
The afternoon saw us laying out loads of biolene for planting our leeks and squashes through, very good timing as this should hold in most of the water we've seen over the past week giving the plants a very strong start.

Thursday was the day we hadn't been looking forward to, the prospect of hand planting 14000 leeks was pretty daunting, but amazingly, not only did we manage to plant very nearly half of them, but we also found time to stick in a couple of trays of fennel, our very sick looking celery, some more summer cabbages and caulis, and around 1000 lettuces. A very productive, but exhausting day indeed.

 
More Rocket potatoes growing outdoors, they're very quick to produce tubers so hopefully we'll move straight to these once the tunnel crop is finished. Celery, we took a risk and planted these in April and despite a few frosts they've survived so we should see an early crop this year. A young white cabbage, this should produce a decent size head by November, when we'll hopefully harvest them all to store indoors protected from frost.

Nice straight rows of sweetcorn. We've chosen the same tendersweet varieties from Tozer seeds as last year. Delicious.

Sprouts, we've managed to cover about half of them, at the cost of uncovering some swede, but with sprouts on offer the pigeons will ignore most other crops. The sweetcorn from another angle, we've laid some biolene in seperator beds to plant squash through and help us remember which variety is which.
Steve planting leeks, Rosey was pulling them out of the module trays and dropping them down for us to push into the ground. A couple of beds of leeks in the foreground, and the onions, small, but well established in the background. We're trying a wider mixture of leeks this year, Almera for Sep-Nov, Zermatt for Nov-Jan, Atlanta for Jan-Mar and Bandit for the very late crop up until May.
19 June 2008
Our sweet peas in the glasshouse, the whole place smells fantastic. Loads of lettuces getting to a decent size. First pick from the climbing french beans, a huge success compared with last year's spider mite infested crop.


We finished getting the leeks planted last week after a hard push, then two beds of celeriac, and then found time to lay some biolene and plant the squash through it, as well as yet more lettuce and a few other things. It was great to get a few showers afterwards to water in everything we'd planted so, hopefully we should see some good crops later in the year.

This has left most of the planting done for this month - we've still got loads of space put aside for cauliflower, kales and purple sprouting broccoli in July - so this week we had to get on with trying to rescue our mid season carrots and the parsnips from the weeds. This is one of the worst jobs we wind up doing, it just doesn't feel constructive at all, unlike planting, but without it we wouldn't get anything out of these crops. On wednesday we managed to weed all five beds of the carrots, which we immediately covered with mesh to keep the carrot root fly away, one of our major pests, and then this morning we got through three of the seven beds of parsnips before getting some more lettuce, some pak choi, and our forcing chicory planted. As the over-wintered onions have now collapsed we found the odd half hour to pull these out of the ground to let them dry off for storage on the ground, then it's on to harvesting for the market tomorrow.
Azur Star Kohl Rabi, it's mild turnip taste, and crunchy texture make this a great salad item. After harvesting way too many oversize courgettes last week we've been picking them every other day to get the best sizes. It's a shame they only last a few days, but what a fantastic smell.
The cucumbers have been very slow this year, and aren't looking happy but we're starting to get a few from the plants. The tomatoes in the glasshouse are growing well and are now setting a second truss of fruit. Still small, but it won't be long before these tomatoes are fully grown and ripe. Can't wait.
Some fennel planted through biolene, we're hopefully harvesting our first planting in a few weeks. The squash. We found that only punching one hole in the biolene didn't let enough rain through, so we're trying more. The onions are laid on the surface to dry out so we can store them for a few months until our spring planted ones are ready.
Some lovely looking cabbages coming on well. With loads more in the field. Our mid-season carrots, happily covered with mesh to keep the carrot fly off. The beds on the right show what we were up against with the weeds. We should have caught them earlier but planting was more important.