1st November

Summer seasonal workers has always been an entertaining time of the year.                     Entertaining, as we, and many other farms, are always scratching our heads, and wondering  will we get enough staff to help with the planting and bed weeding season.

We have been using local teenage kids from our village for the last two years, because the problem has been that tricky.

But it is summer holidays, which means holidays, leaving us short staffed.

The problem here is that the bed weeder can only work with three people.

So we did not get nearly as much weeded as we should have.

There are a few automatic weeding machines out there, but they are very expensive £60,000 pounds, and they aren’t very good with leeks and onions.

But I have eventually found an automatic weeding machine that will do all the crops, and even more lucky the rep is local, and a farm very close, by that has been using this machine for the past three years.

The machine goes on the front of the tractor and is camera guided.  A camera on the front of the machine detects the plants and guides the implement.  So we can get very close to the plants, closer than we could even get with the Brush weeder, it also has things called finger weeders these weed in between the plants.

With this machine I will be able to work the crops on a weekly basis on my own day and night seven days a week.

Hopefully solving or helping seasonal staff problems.

And its is less than a third of the cost of the previous machines I was looking at.

I placed the order for this machine last week, along with all of our Leeks, Onions, and Brassicas seeds.

The Seeds have already arrived, and the main reason I ordered the machine and seeds so early, is that all year, there has been a massive problem in getting anything on time, the delays have been horrendous, and all the excuses, and explanations we get, are Covid and Brexit, and I can’t see it getting any better.

So I now order anything we need months in advance, so hopefully it arrives on time.

I did pay the price earlier this year, for not ordering early enough with our Slug gone pellets for the cucumbers, it eventually arrived in September, I had Ordered eight 10 litre pails in February thinking I would get it in April.

But I did use Vermiculite instead, and it was amazing, so I think it was a very good delay in the end,