It’s now June and Summer is here with a bang. I am currently hiding in our cool office writing this to escape the midday heat.
On the farm the hot weather is extremely tricky as we need to harvest bits and pieces nearly every day. It only takes around 15 minutes in the heat for whatever we have harvested to wilt and become unsellable so we have been starting early at around five or six in the morning so we can bring in the days harvest before it gets too hot which this week has been around 9am!
I am starting to get into the routine of waking early working up to around twelve then having a few hours off then going back to work around seven for a couple more hours.
The trick to keeping the crops going in the heat is to stay on top of the watering. We have been watering the beds in advance of them drying out and this has been working well. We are very lucky here on the farm to have a large reservoir that we can use to water our field scale veg otherwise things could be getting very expensive. Our watering system is just a row of sprinklers that must be moved every couple of hours, so this is pretty time consuming but keeps the plants alive.
In my last blog I was talking about planting the crops out and this is going well. We have nearly filled up our fields with everything now. Now that this heat wave has hit, we will take a break from the planting as it would be a mistake to plant out the tiny plug plants into the hot weather. We still have leeks, kale, green sprouting broccoli and chard to go into the big field and more lettuce, spinach and other salad bits to go out into the small field. We will wait until the heat dissipates next week.
We have been out weeding the fields with our tractor equipment this month as the weeds have shot up everywhere. Now that we have the bulk of the planting done, we will be able to spend more time getting the weeds under control. The tractor weeding equipment is called a steerage hoe and is essentially a large bank of blades that the tractor pulls behind it through the field. There are three gaps in the blades that the three rows of crops pass through, so they don’t get chopped off. It is someone’s job to walk behind the steerage hoe holding a handle that guides it left and right which is important as the field is bumpy and the hoe could easily move onto the crop rows. Weeding the field like this saves huge amounts of time compared to weeding by hand.
Now that we are properly into summer the crops, we have available for sale is increasing weekly. It won’t be long until we are harvesting our own new potatoes and picking tomatoes, so I am very excited and looking forward to the weeks ahead!
Speak soon
Jude
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