12th August

This week we lifted the fleece of off the savoy cabbage and kale.

The savoy cabbages are not as big as we would have liked, but they are better than the spring cabbage we had harvested a couple of weeks ago.

These two crops were the first that we planted, and they were the ones that were sitting in the cold wet ground earlier in the season.

We planted six thousand in total, three thousand spring cabbage and three thousand Savoy.

We only harvested two thousand six hundred cabbages out of all of these.

So, this year’s disaster was the two batches of early cabbages.

The green and red kale we planted a couple of weeks later right beside the Savoy cabbages and they are looking great, and so are all the other crops we planted as plants.

Last years disaster was all the squash plants, and that was with the complete opposite weather from early in the season this year.

Last year the temperatures were over twenty every day, and zero rain.

This year the temperatures were hovering around ten degrees and lots of rain.

April, May and into June are the key months for planting and getting the plants established.

And one thing we can not control is the weather, and each year is interesting.

Our next job I am planning, is to take all the field fleece/netting of off the brassica’s plants in the field, then get through with the weeder, and give them a last weed.

I had planned to keep it on until August.                                                                             

August is when the white butterfly arrives for a visit, we get invaded and they come in their millions, eat the leaves then lay their eggs in the heart of the crops.

They can ruin a crop, they hate red cabbage, but everything else they love.

But this year it looks like we might not be getting any, up to now I have not seen one single white butterfly.

This usually happens when we do not have such a good summer.

So, it does have its plus points.