27th July

Last week I was saying we were having problems with cutting lettuce and oriental mix for our salad bags.

The heat wave that we have all been basking in and thoroughly enjoying over the last month or so has been fantastic, but in the tunnels, it has been like a furnace, resulting in our salad bag crops shooting, leaving us with nothing to cut for our salad bags.

We had blocked more lettuce, when we seen the lettuce have issues, and this week we will be back onto harvesting salad bags.

We had blocked lettuce seeds weekly, and now the tunnels are re filled with lettuces at different stages, we are going to block more every fortnight, with the thought we might only get one cut if the sustained heat comes back, so fingers crossed we shouldn’t have another break in our salad bag harvesting.

So far it has been a great summer, and we have finally had some showers that have gave the crops in the field a well needed drink.

With it being so warm the last thing you think about is winter crops, we have crops already planted that are for over wintering, but we still need to do the purple sprouting and over winter cauliflower.

These seeds arrived in this week ten thousand purple sprouting two different varieties and the same for the winter cauliflower plus five thousand Romanesco cauliflower.

These seeds get blocked usually at the end of July / August and get planted at the end of August where they will get established and ready for sitting over the winter and should be ready for harvesting after March next year, when we plant these, we will also direct sow broad beans.

At the end of August, we will block our last big batch of over winter crops, spring cabbage and beetroot for the tunnels, the beetroot was a trial last winter and worked fantastic, the spring cabbage we have always planted in the tunnels for over winter and we usually get a nice early crop from them.