18th May

It’s been a busy week of planting.

We got all the different varieties of cabbages planted, a total of thirty five thousand, these we will start to harvest from around April, and the hardy winter Savoy’s will take us right into March next year, The problem with planting Brassicas crops, is that the wildlife think its feeding time at the zoo, so straight away we need to fleece them.

We also got all the fifty thousand mid-season Leeks planted.

The Courgettes were also needing planted, so it was time to try out the new courgette and Squash planter I made, I had to make a new one because I dismantled the machine, I had made for planting them and turned it into our bed weeder.

Luckily it worked really well, and I managed to plant the two thousand courgettes in 2hrs,  now it’s an easy one person job, in the past we had to do all the courgette and squash plants by hand, there was always three of us, and it was a back breaker of a job, and it could take almost two weeks to plant the eight thousand eight hundred that we have to plant.                                                                     Again they need fleeced straight away,  as they hate the cold and wind.

The self-propelled bed weeder I have been working on over the last few months, got its last test drive last week, each time I take it out, I end up bringing it in, and doing small tweaks to make it better.

But this last test drive with us all on it worked perfect, we now have a self-propelled bed weeder that only cost me £400, a new one was £21.000 and the second hand one I was looking at would have cost me £10.000.

This will now free up using the tractor every day for months, and will save us a load of diesel and one man, we had to have four people when we bed weeded before, three weeding and one in the tractor, now the one that used to be in the tractor can be doing more useful jobs.

This week we will need to get all the kale planted that’s twenty-five thousand plants, and one of the later variety of Leeks, there are thirty thousand of these.

Also we will need to plant the first batch of two thousand Squash plants, the Spaghetti squash, everyone’s favourite.

And the brush weeding has started out in the field, this will now be a weekly job. The weeds are back, but the brush weeder makes a great job of getting rid of the weeds.

Last week I posted on Facebook videos of all these machines I have mentioned, so you can have a look at them all working.