23rd September

 It’s always seemed strange that when the season is coming near a end, and the weather is getting cooler, that the Cucumbers and Chillies take on a huge growth spurt.

The Chillies especially go mad at this time of the year, the branches on the bushes even start to break with the amount and size of the Chillies on them. And the plants look really healthy.

The Cucumber plants are starting to die off, with the leaves dying away, but they are producing loads of Cucumbers.

Although once we have harvested the Cucumbers and chillies, that are there, that will be time for taking the plants out, and getting the tunnel all set for winter.

Out in the field, the Leeks have been really hard to harvest, the ground had been wet for a while, but this last two weeks its dried up, and been pretty warm, but it has made the ground go like concrete. So when we tried to pull the leeks out, they were snapping at the base, this didn’t look very good.

So this week I attached the grubber to the tractor.

This implement is pretty big and is used for grubbing up the ground, before ploughing.

But my theory was that if I got a grubber leg at each side of a row of leeks, and set the grubber deep, it would loosen the soil, but if I got it wrong it would destroy the leeks.

There wasn’t much room for error, and this implement is so big and heavy that I hadn’t even considered it before, but we were making a mess of pulling leeks, and it was pretty hard going, we hand pull and dress around 500 leeks every morning.

So I got the grubber all set, and kept the speed slow, it worked a treat, because there wasn’t any room to move,  it did smash up any leeks that were leaning over to the side, but there weren’t enough getting ruined to make us think we should stop.and they were much easier to then lift and dress.

But this week it should be easier as it’s Sunday night and pouring of rain right now as I’m writing this, so it should slacken up the soil just a wee bit.