10th August

Last week I had a wee walk through the Squash and pumpkin plants.

And they are already ready, last year we didn’t start to harvest them till the 22nd of August, so the crop is a wee bit further ahead this year.

It could be with the extra warm days we have been having this year followed by a couple of days of really heavy thunderstorm weather.

But this year we did also plant only one row of Courgette and squash plants on the bio degradable film,

The reason for this is that last year we had great growth in the plants, and we had planted two rows of plants on the bio degradable film, the same as we had always done.

But with the growth being so good in the plants, it was almost impossible to see the crop, so this year I decided to plant only one row on the bio degradable film.

Again the plants are huge this year, but we can actually walk through them and see what’s going on.

With the courgettes we have done the same, and harvesting has been much easier, and we are getting a really good crop.

A couple of weeks ago we had blocked five thousand Cauliflower seeds, five thousand Spring cabbage seeds and five thousand Rubi chard seeds.

These were all done so we could get the tunnel we re sheeted planted.

And these are all ready for planting, so this week we will get the tunnel fully planted, and these plants will hopefully sit over winter and be ready for harvesting around March next year.

Last week we also blocked another four thousand Purple sprouting plants, these will be going in behind the Cucumbers this year.

Usually the cucumbers would last till around the first frost, but this year they are a really poor crop and we will have them out by the end of August.

This year when I went to order my usual Marketmore Cucumber seeds, I couldn’t, everywhere had just gone into lockdown, and I couldn’t get through to the seeds company, so I had to order a different variety from a different company, the weather has been warm and everything planted as usual, so I’m putting it down to a different seed.

But it could just be the unsolved puzzle of farming, some years a crop that we sow and grow every year, just fails one year for no apparent reason.