27th October

Our growing season this year has been fantastic.

It was along hot summer with not a lot of rain, usually the lack of rain causes problems.

But we did get the occasional shower over night just at the right times.

The onions and leeks have been amazing again this year.

We cut the onions back by twenty thousand last year, usually we do one hundred and twenty thousand, but they cannot take the frost, and we don’t have a fancy shed that we could store onions for the whole season.

So, we just pick the onions daily which means you are getting them as fresh as if you have picked them from your own back garden.

We are getting near the end of them, and I think we will have finished them by the end of November, which should be perfect timing before the hard frosts start.

So, this year we will have harvested our own onions for eight months of the year.

We start blocking them again at the end of January.

The leeks we cut back again on the early variety, these again don’t like the frost.

So just the same as the onions we cut them back from one hundred and twenty thousand to one hundred thousand, and we will be harvesting the again until the end of November, then we will be onto the one hundred thousand winter leeks, these can take the frost, and we should be harvesting them right through until April.

The main crop that has suffered this year is the purple sprouting broccoli.

Like I said before they have only grown about knee hight and started producing a couple of weeks ago.

These should go to over waist hight, and we don’t ever harvest them until February or March.

And last year we were harvesting around twenty crates a day for over a month.

This year we were lucky to get twenty crates a week.

But surprisingly the over winter cauliflower that we sow and plant the same time as the broccoli looks like it is the same as last year, and we should still be harvesting that at the usual time.

So that is a strange one, you would think both over winter crops would be affected the same.