11th November

This week we had our delivery of one hundred and twenty tonne of compost for the field.

And our order was placed for four tonne of blocking compost.

And it has been very warm for this time of the year, the crops in the tunnels are coming on great.

We are going to harvest the Pak choy earlier than planed as they are starting to get nibbled by beasties that should be away for the season.

The field compost will get spread I the field as soon as we have finished harvesting the last of the veg.

Usually the leeks last the longest, last year they went into the beginning of April.

Then it’s a full-on job of getting the compost spread, field ploughed, and I start bed forming the ground for planting which starts around the end of April.

The blocking compost will arrive in January, and we will start with the leeks and onions and the rest of the season’s seeds follow on from there.

Every year we always try out something new to help improve our growing or just a new crop.

It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it is a great success.

It can be adapting a machine we have to do a better job or a new job, new seeds, or a different seed various things always pop into my head at this time of the year.

Next year I have had an idea for the field which we will try out.

Always in the field we have a constant battle with wildlife.

At the start of planting, we are at war with pigeons, crows, rabbits and deer.

Last year we moved away from fleece to a very close woven net.

This net we can move around if it is wet, so we can start weeding.

The fleece if wet would rip if we were pulling it off, so we always had to wait until it was dry, this could waste a full day.

Also, deer love to walk over the fleece through the night, and the weight of them would leave holes all across the fleece that they have walked across, then if the wind came would rip the fleece.

The woven net is easy to take of wet or dry, and the deer don’t make holes in it, and the plan was to keep it on until the end of August to keep the butterflies of the brassicas.

It worked well, but with the summer being a bit cooler than usual and the autumn warmer than usual, the butterfly came in later than usual, they changed their holidays at the farm to September.

By September we have the fleece of, usually the winds can start to get stronger, and we could have fleece blowing everywhere.

So, this year’s trial is growing one full bed of flowers in every sixth bed, Nasturtium and Limnanthes are seemingly butterfly and bee’s favourite.

Both are great pollinators and encourage hover flies which eat aphids, and both are in flower from early summer through to late Autum.

We might try out some other varieties and have cut flowers available for order.

We can get a very lot of damage mainly in cabbage with white butterfly laying their eggs, so the theory is that the head for the sweet flowers and leave the brassicas alone.