23rd June

This week we took the fleece of off the squash plants; they are looking good but very weedy.

Usually, we plant them through biodegradable mulch film, which helps keep the weed down.

But this year we had three tunnels to re sheet after the winter storms.

We had enough polythene left to re sheet two tunnels.

But didn’t have enough to re sheet the ninety-meter cosy tunnel, so I had to buy polythene.

Polythene is not that cheap, so we decided not to buy biodegradable mulch film this year to keep cost down.

The plants have come on just as good as they would have done getting planted through the mulch film, we did cover them with fleece as soon as they were planted.

But it is weedy.

My brush weeder and camera guided weeder are set up for rows of three plants.

It was easy enough to change the camera guided weeder for a single row of plants, but not as easy to change the brushes of the brush weeder.

There are four sets of brushes set at twenty inches apart, so they can go up the beds with a space for the three rows of plants.

The two middle sets of brushes I needed to slacken the bold then slide the brushes to make just one gap in the centre for the squash plants to go through.

Easy enough, but I need to lie under the machine unscrew the bolt then try and push the brushes along a bar, the brushes are full of dirt and weed, I had to put sunglasses on to stop the dirt going into my eyes, and hour it took, and by the time I was finished I looked like a panda bear, when I took my sunglasses off.

With it all set up it done a great job, we could then get in with the brush weeder and just weed around each plant.

We only just made a start so this week we will get all the squash plants bed weeded.

If this works well, we might stop using the mulch film, this will save money on buying mulch film and the time laying it, but we do need to spend a wee bit more time weeding.

In the tunnels it is now the almost daily job of tying up cucumbers and de side shooting them.

Also, the climbing French beans are almost the hight of the tunnel and are now in flower.

Won’t be long until we are harvesting them, everything in the tunnels is coming of fast with this heat we have been having.

This week we are going to block of more seeds, fifteen thousand over winter cauliflower,

Twenty thousand purple sprouting broccoli, seven thousand kohl rabi, these are for the field.

And for the tunnels we will block of five thousand lettuce seed, five thousand spinach and lastly five thousand ruby chard.