22nd May

The good weather held up all week, and we were planting every day.

We now have all the brassicas, early and late leeks planted, and next week hopefully, weather permitting, by Wednesday, we should get the eighty thousand onions planted.

That will be just over three hundred and fifty thousand plants planted.

The rest of the seeds we direct sow.

Last week I direct sowed the Parsnips, beetroot, Chioggia beetroot, cylindrical beetroot, Golden beetroot. And Milan turnips.

We still need to sow the swede, and carrots, and lastly plant the ten thousand squash plants.

As soon as the onions are planted, we will sow the swede, we will need to fleece them straight away to protect the seeds from the invisible swede fly that eats the seeds.

And in the first week of June, we will sow the carrots, again missing the invisible carrot fly.

One problem we had was with the two thousand Uchi kuri squash seeds, the mice had an overnight party.

So, I brought pallets in and made a bench, and put them all up on that, the same as we have in the small tunnel which has worked perfect.

But they must have had Harnesses and climbing ropes, because the next morning more were eaten.

So, the next day we moved plants around, anything that has germinated in the small tunnel we moved over to the big tunnel, and put the uchi kuri in the small tunnel.

It has worked out perfect. Now they have all germinated, and we should be planting them by the end of May.

The other wildlife problem we had earlier in the week, was birdlife.

I had not fleeced the brassicas, because there was grass seed getting sown out and about in other farms, usually that keeps the birds busy.

But two days in and the hoodie crows were in pulling the plants out to get the grubs underneath, and their best mates the pigeons were in nibbling away.

So we had to re plant some , and pull fleece on.

Funnily enough, we were ok until the farmers around started spraying their newly sown grass seeds.