22nd July

This week we are going to start harvesting our own onions, with them being early, we will leave most of the leaf on, remember you can use the leaf for cooking, so don’t through it out.                                                               Last week we started bed weeding the onions again for the second time, and the weeds are massive, you wouldn’t think we had been thought them already, but we had to as we are away to start harvesting them.

Most of the crops always need bed weeded twice, and usually the second time round it isn’t too bad, but this year, when we bed weeded them at the start, the weather was colder than usual, now on our second bed weed the weather has been warm, but we have had constant, really heavy downpours for short spells most days, and the weeds have loved it, and they have grown really well, if only we could harvest weeds, we are very successful at growing them, and lots of varieties of them as well.

We have had one surprising crop failure this year, and that’s the Swede, at the start when we were going through with the brush weeder, I could just make out some here and there, but now there doesn’t seem to be any, I can only think we have had poor germination, they were direct sown at exactly the same time as the beetroot and they are huge.

So on Thursday I went through with the topper and topped all the weeds, then I put on the disc harrows and chopped up the ground, I will them re bedform the ground on Sunday, and I have already ordered a different variety of swede, so hopefully on Sunday I will re sow them again.

It is a wee bit to late in the season to be sowing these, but it’s worth try, because we wouldn’t be harvesting swede this year anyway with the crop failure, it is a unusual crop to fail as it’s always been good in the past.

So I will keep you up to date on the outcome of the new Swede seeds when I have sown them, so fingers crossed it works.