26th June

The weather has been a bit better for the plants this week.

At long last we have had some rain, and with the heat the plants are coming on great, all the brassicas are looking fantastic, we have been over them with the weeding machine twice and the bed weeder twice.

I have been through the leeks and onions with the weeding machine four times now and it is doing a great job, with only a wee bit needing weeded by hand with the bed weeder, by this week we will have been over them twice with the bed weeder, they are also looking very clean.

The beetroot I had direct sown had not germinated with the long hot dry spell, so I re bed formed and direct sowed more, these should come on this time. we had nice rain the very next day after I had sowed them.

The carrot beds I am now seeing carrots, but not a lot.

I cannot sow more carrots, one it is a bit too late in the season now, and second the seeds are very expensive.

In the courgette and squash field, we have lost almost 80% of them, again because we never had any rain and over 20 degrees for over two months, luckily, we have two hundred and fifty courgettes planted in a tunnel, and we are harvesting some from there, but there is not enough for everyone.

So, I ordered one thousand courgette and one thousand Uchi Kuri seeds, the seed price of them is cheap enough for a trial.

The trail was we lifted the fleece where we had the squash and courgette plants planted, and we replaced the dead plants with a seed, with the biodegradable mulch film already down and fleece on. It was perfectly set up for a trial.

I think it is defiantly too late for them to grow big enough to start producing a crop.

But if they do grow well, I might consider putting seeds straight into the soil rather than blocking the seeds then planting them, this would save a lot of compost and time.

I have considered doing this in the past, because they germinate and grow so quick.

But it is a risk, so I kept doing it the way we have always done.

So there might be a silver lining in the huge loss of our squash and courgette plants.

Only time will tell.

As we are approaching holiday times, could we just ask where possible that you let us know as soon as you can for any holiday dates, it is just that for the first time in 10 years Jacqui is having a week off on the 1st week of July, now Audrey and David are still here, so all as normal, but just to help it would be good to know in advance.