11th May

 Its been a nice long spell of warm dry weather and we are up to date on the planting.

We are actually ahead of last year at this point with the planting in the field.

So far we have all the white and red onions planted eighty thousand, all the early leeks sixty thousand, and half an acre of Beetroot and half an acre of neeps which were direct sown last week.

Also last week after we had finished planting the leeks we planted 1 acre of broad beans.

We are going to plant another 2 acre of broad beans in a couple of weeks time, these will mostly be for the part of the field that is going into set aside for the year.

The great thing about broad beans is that they don’t take any feeding out of the ground, but the fix nitrogen in the soil for next year, and when I plough them in the stalks help the soil structure for the following crops.

In the tunnels they are now all fully planted, apart from one which we are going to get ready for the Cucumbers going in, but they will be a couple of weeks yet.

Last week I took all the different varieties of cabbage for the year out of the tunnel, to get them hardened of before planting next week.

We have six different types which will keep us going from around June right through with the savoy cabbages to hopefully April, a total of thirty thousand.

So next week we are planning on planting all the cabbages, sixty thousand mid season leeks and the two thousand courgette plants, weather permitting.

After we have planted those, we will only be left with Kale and Squash plants in large numbers to plant out in the field, so then it will be the start of bed weeding, and planting small amounts. Apart from the tunnels which are a constant harvest then replant.

The self propelled bed weeder I talked about building about a couple of months ago, is now made and I have had three test drives, and everything seems to be working well.

A second hand one was going to cost £10,000 I managed to build mine for £400, if you go onto our facebook page I have posted a video of it.