The last month has seen us really get stuck into planting, especially in the tunnels and glasshouse. Last week we stripped the remaining salad mix from the glasshouse, threw down loads of well rotted manure, laid four beds of biolene biodegradable polythene over the top of a length of porous pipe to enable easy watering, and got our first batch of tomatoes planted. We have Gardener's delight and Diplom as usual, and are also trying out Pitenza as well which should be similar to Diplom but slightly bigger fruit and a greater disease resistance.

In mid april we got our first outdoor plantings in - the chard didn't look so bad when it got into the ground, and we now have plenty of earlyish brassicas growing well, the wet weather has encouraged a lot of weed seeds to germinate though, so busy times ahead. I also sowed seven beds of parsnips, five beds of mid-season carrots and some more spinach, and have already flame-weeded the carrots and parsnips killing off a huge number of tiny weeds. We've also managed to get two plantings of lettuce outdoors through Biolene, which, so far, haven't been touched by slugs.

Last week we cleared out a lot of old plants from our tunnels, the beetroot and spinach had bolted early due to the heat but we managed to salvage some of the crop before popping the rest onto the compost heap. Into the spinach's place we immediately planted two 20 metre beds of cucumbers - a mix of Akito, a 18cm mini/ridge variety, Styx a full length variety, and Stimora, a gherkin variety. These should hopefully be cropping towards the end of the month. We also planted a bed of lettuce in another tunnel, one of pak choi, fennel and kohl rabi, and one trial bed containing a mix of traditionally outdoor brassica crops - they'll either bolt prematurely or produce some lovely crops far quicker than outside, we'll see...

Our early tunnel crops of Climbing French Beans, Carrots, Potatoes, and Courgettes are all looking fantastic, I really must sort that camera out, they're well worth showing off, and we should be able to start havesting them all at the end of this month or early June, there are already some small courgettes showing on the plants but the fluctuation in temperature has made them put out some pretty dodgy shapes. Our big concern for these, as well as the French Beans and Cucumbers is Spider Mite, which nearly wiped out two tunnels of beans last year, despite us spending hundreds on predatory mites - I think due to the cold weather last May onwards the predators weren't particularly active, prefering warmer temperatures than their prey, and so we had to spray the plants with Savona, an insecticidal soap which is pretty harmless to even larger insects such as ladybirds, but did kill off the predatory mites that we'd introduced but managed to save the plants.

This coming week should see us getting even more planting done outside - we've thousands of Broccoli, Red, White and Savoy Cabbages, and Swede to get in, and then in a couple of weeks about six thousand sweetcorn, all tendersweet varieties again, and our daunting Onions and Leeks. There are around 12,000 Leek seedlings and a similar number of multi-sown Onion cells to plant, which we will put in through Biolene again this year after a very successful crop last year, the lack of weeding left us plenty of time to concentrate on weeding other things, mainly the carrots and parsnips which can get out of control easily.

We're also going to have to get round to sowing our Squash, a lot less than last year, but still about 500, which will mainly be some smaller butternut varieties bred by Tozer seeds specifically for the UK's short summer - traditional varieties tend to produce only a few large squashes on each plant which don't necessarily ripen quick enough for long term storage. We've got plenty of Runner Beans and Courgettes sown, and so should have plenty available towards the middle / end of the month for sale, and we're also doing our Tumbling Tomato hanging baskets again in a few weeks, in a far more attractive basket than previously.

The past few weeks have been chaotic. My brother Rowan who had been helping out loads went back to Germany (and shortly off to Australia) last week, so we made sure we worked him hard first. Despite the dry weather we planted out thousands of brassicas, lettuces, even more onions, set up three beds of canes and planted loads of climbing beans out, planted up three more tunnels, and hoed and weeded just about everything.
There is still masses left to do, the daunting number of leeks, celeriac, sprouts and sweetcorn that will need planting over the next fortnight, followed quickly by trying to bring the weeds under control among our second outdoor crop of carrots, and seven long beds of parsnips to start us off.
We've been very pleased with the crops we are managing to harvest this year, our lettuces have survived a lot better, we had our first pick from the broad beans this week and can expect a lot more next week of slightly better filled pods, having never had much success with overwintered onions we're very pleased to be pulling a couple of crates worth up a week. Quite a few are going to seed, but at this stage they're still lovely and tender and hopefully last weeks rain will slow this process down. The range of plants we've been taking to the market has gone down very well this year, it's great to see so many people having a go at growing at least something edible in their own garden.
It's not surprising that seeing as I was complaining just over a week ago about our soil being too dry to break down enough to plant out our sweetcorn that we should see a horrendous amount of rain fall. The ground soaked up as much as possible but our plans of getting on with the planting were ruined as we couldn't get the tractor on the land. Instead we got on with clearing out the tunnel of rocket which had gone to seed, cleared barrowloads of weeds from our tunnel of tiny carrots and got on with one of our least favourite jobs, weeding the first of our outdoor carrots. Eight hours later and we're nearly three quarters of the way through it but at least we're past the patch of thistles now.

I've bought a replacement camera, so here's some of the hundred or so photos I took on friday evening between showers, click on them to view the larger 800x600 versions. The thing I noticed the most while taking these pictures was the huge number and variety of bumblebees we have this year, it's great to see so many around as they are so necessary in helping pollinate a lot of crops.