27th April

Ye ha finally we started planting the field, three weeks later than last year.

But on looking back in our book that we keep our seed records, which we keep for years, this year we started at the same dates we always did years ago, the last few years have been warmer earlier, with warmer winters, meaning an earlier start to planting.

We got thirty-five thousand plants planted this week.

All the early cabbages, five varieties, black kale, green kale, and red kale, plus a bonus this year, we planted beetroot and swede plants.

As I have said in previous newsletters, we were trailing blocking the beetroot and swede seeds rather than direct sowing them in the field which is the normal way.

Direct sowing is always reliant on good soil temperatures and soil moisture to help get the seeds germinated, but the weeds start any time, which makes weeding a really hard time-consuming job, plus there is a wee beastie that eats swede seed.

I did do a wee trial last year, so I was pretty sure it would work, so last week we planted five thousand swede plants and five thousand beetroot plants, these already have four leaves and well established plus the spacing is exact between each plant, where it is far more random direct sowing with the germination rates varying.

We will do four more batches of beetroot and swede throughout the season, so this should keep us going through the entire year.

The plan for this week is to starting planting our early leeks, onions, and late leeks, this will take a couple of weeks there are two hundred and ten thousand to plant,  we have harvesting to do first thing in the morning before we can start to plant.

Once we have these planted there are more brassicas to plant, then we will be doing smaller batches for the over winter crops right up until August.

In the tunnels we planted three thousand kohl rabi and more spinach, we always find the kohl rabi grows far better in the tunnels than it does outside.

So, the main jobs for right now are harvest and plant, plant, and plant more.