16th July

Spring Onions was one of the new crops I decided to try and grow this year, every year I try out two to three different crops and sometimes it's a complete failure. I In January I ordered twenty thousand Spring onion seeds and Rab blocked them, then when they were ready we planted them, and they have grown fantastic, which is surprising because they have had virtually zero rain to help them on their way, so in this weeks netts you are all getting some to try out.
One other crop that is doing very well this year are the Raspberries, we aren't going to put them in the netts as they aren't a veg and would make the netts seem very small, but you can place a order for a punnet or two, they are tasting fantastic we obviously have to do taste tests as we pick them.
A couple of crop failures this year looks like it's going to be the Beetroot and Neeps these crops get direct sown in the field as seeds, but after they were sown they were basking in glorious sunshine and 25 plus degrees for weeks and they haven't had a drop of rain, so they haven't germinated very well, but the weeds seem to be thriving.
This week I'm back to work after having two weeks with Calum and Erin, which has been great, with the weather being so good every day we managed to get outside in the fresh air and do something every day, we had the wet suits on and were Body boarding in the sea, mountain biking, climbing and on the last day even fitted in some Skiing (on a dry ski slope).
So for this weeks work it's time we got the fleece of off the Pumpkin crops to have a look at what they are like, I'm pretty sure the Squashes will be filling out great with all the heat, this year we have grown a couple of new varieties, I'll post some photos of them next week if they are looking good. The cucumbers will need tied up and side shoots done again, this job usually takes a couple of hours a day, and by the time I’ve done the last row I'm back to the first row again, they grow pretty fast.
As I'm on about Cucumbers, I tried a new variety of Cucumber this year which is called Flamenco it’s a standard long variety, we have always only grown the small ridge type, well the Flamenco Cucumber started producing two weeks before the ridge variety and they produce way more cucumbers on each plant, so far they look really good.