28th July

Last week we got the over winter Cauliflower and purple sprouting broccoli planted.

Twenty thousand plants in total, and a wee batch of three thousand five hundred kohl rabi.

The kohl rabi will be ready around October, but the cauliflower and purple sprouting will not be ready until December onwards.

We do already have another two batches of Kohl rabi planted the first batch should be ready for harvesting in a couple of weeks and the second batch around four weeks later.

Everything in the field is now ready for harvesting or not far away.

The leeks and onions we are going to start harvesting them now but won’t be in everyone’s nets just yet.

The field courgettes are now producing huge amounts daily, so we will be taking the tunnel ones out in the next week or two and re panting another crop in behind them.

The kale crops are now looking amazing, they always start the year looking poor, but after we have taken a few leaves of off each plant for the deliveries, the plants then shoot on and look great.

I had written a few weeks ago about a trial of blocking beetroot and swede seeds.

We have always direct sown these seeds into the field; this is normal practice everywhere.

But with being organic we have a problem that other farmers don’t have.

Weeds, with our other field crops we bring the plants on before we plant them, these plants then have a huge head start over the weeds and we can get in soon with the weeding machines, and this then makes bed weeding easy.

But with direct sown seeds, they are starting their life at the same time as the weed seeds.

This makes it very hard to get in with the weeding machines, and even harder for bed weeding.

We usually bed weed each crop twice, the leeks and onions four times, and that is usually enough.

But the direct sown crops are a nightmare from the start, and I have lost count of the number of times we have been through hand weeding them.

So, I decided to break all the rules, and we blocked some beetroot and swede seeds.

Not a lot just enough for one two-hundred-and-fifty-meter row in the field just over three thousand five hundred seeds in total.

They came on great in the seed trays, and this week we planted them in the field the same way as we plant all our other crops. And we now have individual beetroot and swede plant planted at I will be able to get in and weed them with the machines quickly as I can see plants, and for bed weeding the plants will be much bigger than the weeds and we should only need to weed them a couple of times.

If they do come on well, and I can’t see why they shouldn’t we will be doing it this way from now on.

I will keep you all updated on their progress.