A very hectic couple of weeks. We've finished planting up another four of our tunnels: in the ground now are hundreds of cucumbers, courgettes, tomatoes, aubergines and a mix of peppers, and we've also been very busy outdoors. Last week saw us planting around 2500 Swede, 1200 Calabrese, 1000 Spring Greens and 500 Summer Cabbages. Unfortunately due to the lack of rain we've had to water in everything as we plant them. We use a 1500 litre trailed water bowser with a pump and a couple of hoses so we can water directly to the base of plants rather than using a boom sprayer which also waters all the bare space around them and is much more wasteful, although our method takes a lot longer.

We trialled for the first time last year Biolene, a biodegradeable black 'polythene' sheet made from non-GM corn starch. This acted as a fantastic mulch, both keeping weeds down to a minimum, boosing soil temperature by several degrees and helping maintain soil moisture. Our trials were with squashes and beans and we were very pleased with the results. We decided to use this in some of the tunnels this year, we're seeing a lot of bind-weed which is very difficult to control by hand weeding. The resulting tunnels look very good, we sowed clover on the pathways between the Biolene to keep down weeds and provide more nitrogen for following crops. We've combined this with using porus pipe under the Biolene so any watering is very effective and stays in the soil rather than evaporating.
Outdoors we are also trying Biolene on some of the crops we failed with last year, mainly our early brassicas which we never found time to weed or water in adequately. This didn't take as long as expected to lay, punch holes through and plant and we're looking forward to seeing the results as the plants grow.

We're hoping to see some more rain over the coming week which will enable us to give the ground a quick cultivate to break it up into a fantastic tilth and get ourselves ready for another month of frantic planting. We're still a little way away from seeing some of our new season crops in the boxes, although the chard and cauliflowers should keep us going for another couple of months. We're not far off having tunnel grown courgettes and hopefully some more french beans and in a month there should be some broad beans from outdoors.

We're pretty much past all danger of frost, the latest we've experienced previously is today's date, and it's certainly not looking likely with the weather we've been having. We had around 6 inches of rain in three days last week, so much for me complaining about having to water plants in...

Over the past fortnight we managed to get most of our glasshouse planted up with a mix of cherry (Gardener's Delight) and standard (Diplom) tomotoes and once again we're trying some melons along the edge. We've put down some porus pipe so that we'll be able to water them more efficiently than last year and so we should actually get some melons from the plants. We use the porus pipe in the tunnels and under our runner beans outdoors as it is a very good way of watering the plants, especially under the biodegradeable polythene as there is pretty much no evaporation due to sunlight so the water stays by the plants roots.

We finally planted a bed of sweet peas and another of lettuce, the first bed of which we'll begin harvesting next week, and have prepared beds for our courgettes and runner beans which are growing well in pots in the glasshouse at the moment. We'll probably plant these out either next week or the week after depending on the weather - last year we had constant rain which encouraged slugs who demolished all 200 plants meaning we had to re-sow the lot. The soil association does now allow us to use Feramol slug bait, but we have to get a derogation to use it, we're not, but if we do get a repeat of last year then I may well change my mind.

The main job for the coming week is to begin planting our maincrop onions and our Brussels Sprouts. The onions this year will be going in by hand through the biodegradeable polythene (Biolene) which we have layed by machine as well as punching three rows of holes through it by a basic home made piece of kit, around six inches apart, while the Sprouts will be planted using our module transplanter in two rows at around 20 inches as they can grow pretty massive. We're able to keep these well weeded without too much hand hoeing so don't bother using the Biolene, which is the same for most of the quick growing leafy brassicas.

Our polytunnels are looking great, and we're likely to see the first of our own cucumbers and courgettes over the next few weeks, while there are already some pretty good sized tomatoes on the plants as well.

There I go with my big mouth. While we should be avoiding a frost this coming week the temperature is once again forecast to be dipping to 5 C around here, and in other parts of the country even lower. This could cause big problems for some growers who will have got a lot of more tender crops planted outside already.

We pushed ahead this week and have already planted all but four trays of onions, that's around 12,000 cells of 2-4 plants each, so around 35,000 onions, all planted by hand. We also, yes we found time for other things, planted 1300 or so Brussel Sprout plants using the module planter, 500 cells of Chard and around 400 of Fennel. While we got on with this Rosey set to and planted out nearly 200 courgette plants - we're using our favourite variety Kojac again as it has less spines making it easier to harvest without damaging the courgettes, as well as trying a new variety called Romanesco which is meant to have a very good flavour. We also set up the runner bean canes on Tuesday, and so are just waiting until next week for the beans to build up a good root system so we can plant them out.

A couple of failures this month - our early sweetcorn and about half of our 900 squash pots have failed to germinate, we sowed them just before the weather turned cold and wet a fortnight ago and left them outside as we didn't have the space in the glasshouse. A lot of the seeds (80% of the sweetcorn) simply rotted so we're sorting out replacement seed and will just be a bit later getting some of them in the ground. Shame, I was really hoping we'd manage to get an earlier crop of sweetcorn to extend the season as I was so pleased with the varieties we'd chosen last year.