In last month’s blog I was talking about “The hungry gap” (the period where our winter crops are over and our main crops have not matured enough to harvest yet.) That period is coming to an end slowly now, and I am looking at the fields eagerly at the beginning of each week to see what’s new to offer our café and shop. It will take a month to get into full harvest, but it is now on the horizon.
Last month the big focus was on sowing seeds and growing them on ready to plant out. Now the big focus has switched to planting. Over the last couple of years, the weed burden has increased due to lack of labour for weeding, and this has meant that getting the beds ready for planting into is a lot more work now as we have been needing to dig out perennial weeds that have taken over many of the growing areas. Bindweed and creeping thistle are our main enemies. Beds can be turned over quickly using tractor implements but if used on beds that are infested with perennial weeds there is a good chance we will just break them up into smaller pieces which will then grow into more weeds. This means that we have been getting the digging forks out and really spending time removing the underground stems that the plants re-grow from.
As we tackle the weeds more regularly, they will diminish over time, and I am hoping in a couple of years the weed burden will have been reduced significantly.
Anyhow we have an awful lot of beds to get ready and plant as everything we sowed last month is now desperate to get out into the ground. Seedlings can only stay in their original cells for a short period of time before their roots fill up the space. We can pot them up into larger cells or small pots, but this takes time and resources so we would rather get them planted straight into the ground as soon as possible.
This month we planted celeriac, beetroot, broccoli, brussels sprouts and spring greens into our field and lettuce, spinach, kale, beetroot, New Zealand tree spinach, peas, runner beans, dwarf French beans and courgettes into our market garden. We also planted out tomatoes, peppers, chillies, aubergines and basil into our polytunnel and there is still a full glasshouse of little seedlings ready to go so it really is a crazy period here on the farm.
Now that we are getting into the warmer part of the year pests are on the increase. We sadly had a whole bed of beetroot eaten by voles last week, but also insect and bird predation are on the up. In the sowing glasshouse fungus gnats (sciarid fly) started getting out of hand. Their larvae live in the potting compost and feed on plant roots which can be damaging and in great numbers will result in the loss of the seedlings. We applied a sachet of nematodes which are tiny worms that swim around in the wet medium and predate their larvae. In other news squirrels ate all our strawberries and slugs polished off a bed of lettuce. This is a bit traumatizing, however as a grower one needs to just keep going and ignore these setbacks. Maybe we can do something a little differently next time that will make a difference? We grow a full range of crops so that if one does not do well there will be others we can sell. Having a diverse business strategy gives us resilience against individual failures.
The trick to growing is to not get down when things go wrong, but to keep sowing and planting. Eventually you will end up standing there with your arms full of delicious veg reaping the rewards of all the hard work!
Until next time.
Jude
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