26th April

Well the broad beans aren’t hiding any more, last week they popped up, and we could see where they were, when we were brush weeding them.                                                        luckily the cold frosty morning we had after sowing them hadn’t frosted them, which I was beginning to think that they had been.

The Chioggia beetroot and the Milan turnips, which I had sown the week after the broad beans still haven’t germinated, but hopefully with the soil temperature slowly getting warmer, we should start to see them soon.

Last week my seed order of golden Milan turnips arrived, and I managed to get them direct sown out in the field.

With the warmer weather the tunnels have been getting pretty hot during the day, and it’s been bringing on all the seeds that we have blocked.

So last week we had to take out all the brassicas’ crops, and get them hardened of in preparation for getting them planted.

We take them out of the tunnels for at least one week, this gets them used to the outside temperatures and weather, before planting, and hopefully helping them get of to a better start when we plant them in the field.

With the plants now coming out of the tunnels, it’s time for bed forming.

Bed forming the ground is done by a machine that goes on the back of the tractor this works the ground, and leaves a really smooth seventy-two-inch bed, and this is what we plant the plants on.

It’s a very slow job each bed is around two hundred and twenty meters long, and takes around six minutes to do.

We usually need to do around fifty beds for the brassicas and around two hundred for the leeks and onions, and that’s not all the crops.

So this job does take a fair bit of time and goes on for a couple of months, but not every day.

With being organic we can’t spray for weeds, so I try and only bedform enough ground for the next days planting, this way hopefully the weeds can’t get a head start on the plants that we are planting.