28th May

We finished of planting the Sweetcorn at the beginning of last week, and now that's all the field fully planted out, we had started planting this year two and a half weeks later than last year. the cold weather over the winter had slowed all the plants up, but we actually have finished planting a couple of days earlier than we did last year. This was because we managing to plant the Courgette and Pumpkins much faster with the new machines I had made for laying the mulch film and the machine for planting.
So now we are onto the weeding of the fields, we now have the planting equipment of off the tractor and the brush weeder on. (iv posted a video of it working on our facebook page) The brassicas crops are all covered in fleece to protect them from pigeons, so we have to take it all of by hand before getting in with the weeder which is a wee bit of work. So I made a attachment for the front of the tractor arms that can move the fleece over as we move forward brush weeding,and it worked really well. But we still need to pull it back over by hand at the end to cover it again, I don't think I’ll be able to overcome that.
We now have half of the brassicas brush weeded, and by the end of this week I would hope to have everything brush weeded so we can then get the bed weeder on and start hand weeding in between the plants.
The Swede and Beetroot which were direct sown in the field last Thursday the 18th started poking their leaves through the soil five days after getting sown, which is pretty quick. I managed to get someone in to sow them as don't have a machine for that job, but he couldn’t sow the Carrots, so at the end of the week I sowed the carrots with a wee hand sowing barrow we use in the tunnels.
Now into the tunnels everything is growing fast, with the 20 degrees heat outside this tunnels are roasting hot, and need constant watering, which helps the weeds, so every day is a weeding day in the tunnels, along with harvesting as the crops shoot on with the heat then re planting again.