5th June

With the great weather last week again, we got ready for planting the squash plants.

But before I could start on the squash plants, I had to get the Carrots direct sown,

These are now planted, this job does not take that long, as the seeds are direct sown using a machine.

With the carrots in, I then had to put the machine on for laying the bio degradable mulch film.                                                                                        

A couple of years ago, I had looked at buying a machine for doing this, but they cost thousand and there is pretty much nothing to them.

So, I had an old frame a set of wheels and four old ploughs, pretty much all that the machine is.

So, I made one for £200 and this is the Third year I have used it.

We plant through the bio degradable mulch film for two reasons, one it helps retain the soil temperature, squash plants love the heat, and second, they are really hard to weed, firstly they have hollow stems and break really easily, and they grow huge, so we could never get a machine through them, and there are ten thousand plants, it would take forever to weed them by hand.

And with the bio degradable mulch film on, after we have planted the squash plants, we can then fleece them and leave the fleece on until they are ready for harvesting, the plants also hate the wind, so the fleece helps to protect them.

And one main thing the fleece helps, especially as soon as they are planted, is to stop the hoodie crows from getting in.

These birds will come in right after we leave, and pull all the plants out just to get to the grubs under them.

One year we had thought, there are no crows they should be fine.

Next morning, we had over two thousand plants pulled out.

So, on Wednesday morning I started paying the mulch film.

And by Friday we had eight thousand squash planted.

We will finish them this week, with only two thousand left to plant, that should only take an afternoon, then its back on the bed weeding.