20th May

Last week the weather was nice and dry and we managed to get all the brassicas plants planted, and fleeced, the fleece has two jobs, one is to help the plants get off to a good start, by giving them extra heat to help keep them cosy at night and protected from the elements, and secondly to protect them from our ever present pesky pigeons that love brassicas plants, they could destroy all our brassicas plants over a weekend, if they were left to it.

Once the plants are a wee bit bigger the pigeons leave them alone because usually the Barley fields are their next target, and they seem to be way more tasty.

The other job we managed to get done was to brush weed the onion and leeks we have already planted, the brush weeder is like a road sweeper, with spaces for the rows of plants to go through, if you go onto Bellfields facebook page I have posted a video of it working, this is a machine that goes on the tractor and the brushes brush the heads of the weeds away and leave nice clean weed free beds, and behind the brushes are things called finger weeders, these rotate round in between the plants, and hopefully pulling out the weeds in between the plants.

After all the field work Rab started blocking the ten thousand courgette and Squash seeds, and I planted the two hundred and fifty Cucumbers,

This week is forecast to be showery, and the field is already wet, so I don’t think it will dry out, so we have lots of tunnel work.

So the plan for this week is to get Milan turnips, Rubi chard and Fennel planted in the tunnels, and get them all weeded, because when it dries out we need to get the one hundred and ten thousand late leeks planted, and brush weed the field again.