We are now coming towards the end of July, and I hope everyone has their recipe books out because we are in that time of year when all the crops are available and booming! It is exciting to see the shelves in our on-site honesty shop full to the brim with the great products we are growing on the farm.
Tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, cucumbers, Florence fennel. The flavours of summer are here and the list goes on! We do our main harvest for our shop and café on a Thursday, and it is a great feeling to stand back once harvest is done and see all the fantastic produce we are producing.
I often get people asking when will the tomatoes and cucumbers be ready? When you eat locally and seasonally you really do have to wait until this point of the year to taste the flavours of summer. Most veg takes months to grow and the range available in the supermarkets form abroad distorts people’s ideas of what it means to eat seasonally. Now that the main crops are ready, we should have them all through until the weather starts to turn cold in the late autumn (fingers crossed).
On the farm we are busy weeding the field scale vegetables which should hopefully be the last time we need to do this as they should now be able to outgrow the weeds around them. We have been cleaning out our storage containers which we will need to store all our root and storage crops. We have started harvesting potatoes and onions and one of the large jobs going forward will be to pick all the onions from the field and lay them out for drying before they go in the storage. As the weather is warm and dry, we can do this in the field. The drying is important if we want to store them to slowly sell to our café and in our shop through the winter. If the onions dry properly, we will be able to keep them until the end of March/April (fingers crossed again!)
The weather has cooled a bit since my last blog, but we are still spending a lot of time moving irrigation around our fields to keep the veg growing nicely. We give the plants around 10mm a week which is not a lot but is vital if they are to reach a good size and quality. We are extremely lucky to have a large reservoir we can get our water from.
We are now also getting to the time of year in which I have one eye on the autumn sowings with which we will fill our polytunnels over winter. We only just got into the main harvest time, but the production never stops. I have been making sure we have everything we need to start sowing next month. Our propagation glasshouse is getting a good clean and is being reorganised now that most of the seedlings have gone out.
To finish I want to urge everyone to go out and get some of the fantastic tastes of summer from our shop because it is all now here and waiting to be cooked and dished up. Seasonally grown organic veg tastes the best, get it while it is hot!
Speak soon, Jude.
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