12th July

Last week was a week of harvesting and weeding.

We now have my home made bed weeder out in the field, and it will be in here working for the next couple of months, with three people on board hand weeding away.

The only problem with last weeks bed weeding is that the ground was wet.

Usually I go through the beds with the grubber on the tractor and do the beds in front of the bed weeder, this weeds in between the rows of veg that are going to get hand weeded, and reduces the amount of weeds needing pulled.

But the ground was too wet so I couldn’t get in with the tractor, being wet does make the weeding easier as the pull out easier, but there are more weeds.

For any one that doesn’t know about the bed weeder, it is a frame that has three beds on it, and you lie face down and bed weed away all day, so basically im paying staff to lie down whilst listening to the radio, pulling the odd weed here and there, the only the odd weed bit is mostly a forest of weeds.

We used to have a bed weeder on the back of the tractor, but there was always someone sitting in the tractor making sure it was straight.

You would think that would be a nice cooshty job, but it can be over 20 degrees outside the old tractor doesn’t have air con, and each 130 metre row takes 35 minutes, so if you are in the tractor for the whole day it gets a wee bit boring to say the least, and you could be in the tractor every day for three months.

So I did see self propelled bed weeders a couple of years ago, no tractor needed three beds on a frame with a steering wheel and a small petrol engine to drive it.

The problem came when I saw the price, second hand ones were ten thousand pounds.

So over the winter months I grinded,  welded, bolted and eventually made my own for four hundred pounds, mostly with old stuff we had lying around.

This is the second year of it working.

Last week we managed the get all the neeps, onions and beetroot bed weeded and half of the leeks.

Hopefully this week we will have all off the early leeks weeded, then we need to take the fleece of off the brassicas and weed them, then quickly cover them with nett because the pigeons will be watching.