20th September

Out in the fields this week its been the dirty job of lifting all the ground cover matting that we put down for planting the Courgette, Pumpkin and sweetcorn crops, This helps to retain the heat in the soil and we plant the plants through this and it keeps them really cosy ant the start of their life in the field, there is around 2 acres of this, on conventional farming they can go in straight away with a lifting machine that rolls ill the ground cover onto reels, we also have this machine but we also have weeds in abundance, so we need to pull all the weeds out by hand otherwise the matting would just rip and we couldn’t use it again, with the sweetcorn we can use the topper on the auld Fergie to chop the crop down then again we need to take all the weed and chopped sweetcorn of by hand then its the easy job of rolling it all up (the weeds grow through the same hole that we have made to plant the courgette, pumpkins and sweetcorn through).
When this is all eventually lifted, and on the reels it'll be time to get the plough back on and get it all ploughed, its good to get the ploughing done before the winter gets grip, It's good to get the fresh ploughed ground frosted and hopefully this kills of the new weed seeds that are sitting waiting to come up in the spring, problem is we seem to have winter hardy weeds and this doesn't work we always have loads of weeds, but we all love bed weeding so much so it helps to keep us busy after all the planting is done.
Last week I was talking about the Pack Choy seeds we have blocked, This is the first time we have tried to do these seeds before the winter arrives in the hope that I can get them planted and get them nice and early next year, they can stand cooler climates, but Scottish cooler climates is a another thing, they have been in the hot box tunnel and have been sitting it out in a lot of mornings of hard frost, and they are looking braw and now have four leaves, We always bring on cabbage, Purple sprouting broccoli and broad beans over the winter but not Pack choy if it does work this will be a braw veg at the time of the year when there isn't a lot of variety going around.