15th Junbe

This week was all about weeding, weeding and more weeding.

The leeks and onions are easy to get into with the weeding machines and the bed weeder, but the brassicas crops are a different matter.

The only crop the wildlife do not try and eat are the onions and leeks, so everything else needs covered with fleece, weeded then recovered again.

If the weather is good this is no problem.

But it has been a wee bit wet, we did eventually get the fleece of off the first two batches of brassicas this week, and the crops are looking great.

The first batches are red kale, green kale, and black kale, plus three varieties of cabbage, and swede and beetroot.

The plants are looking great but so are the weeds, and with it being so wet we could not get the fleece of when I wanted to a couple of weeks ago.

The plants and weeds were so big I could not get through with the front camera guided weeder I could only use the brush weeder.

The brush weeder is a wee bit like a road sweeper, with four brushes that spin round and brush the weeds out in between the rows of the plants, it makes a fantastic job, leaving just in between the plants to hand weed.

The front weeder gets much closer to the plants and has fingers that spin round they are plastic and bend they get right in between the plants and take extra weeds out, leaving even less for the bed weeder and hand weeding.

But they were clogging up so I could not use them with the weeds being so big.

Eventually we did manage to get the first two batches weeded and re fleeced.

We will be harvesting the spring cabbage and green kale in a couple of weeks.

I also had a wee surprise in the nest three batches of fleece needing to come off.

I went up to have a look at how bad the weeds were, I plan to get the fleece of and get them weeded before the weeds get too big.

Well under the first fleece we had planted purple sprouting broccoli just as a wee trial for the summer, well every plant has broccoli ready they are not big but look great.

We need to start harvesting this week before they flower, it will be interesting to see if they produce side shoots.

So, this is a crop that will be in your nets this week, but it was not planned, but a nice one to be putting in the nets so early in the year.