6th May

What a change with a bit of heat one week makes.

By the end of last week, we had all the brassica’s plants out of the tunnel.

A total of twenty-nine thousand plants, all sitting outside getting hardened off.

We still have twenty-five thousand brassicas still to plant, but these are late season plants.

Six thousand are already blocked, the rest we will do over June and July.

With the plants out, I spent all Sunday bed forming ground, and finished of what we needed to plant on Monday.

With everything getting off to a later start than usual this year, I was going to start planting as soon as I could.

But Monday night brought in heavy rain, leaving everything back to the usual soaking wet.

Tuesday morning it was too wet to plant.

But the rain had stopped, and it was sunny and windy, great field drying weather.

So, Tuesday was spent taking all the fleece out to the field, we need to fleece all our brassicas plants, because if we do not, its like feeding time at the zoo for all the wildlife, they all love brassicas plants.

Funnily enough, a lot of farmers near us grow Broccoli in huge scale, and never a bit of fleece in sight, obviously they do not like the taste of the spray that they use. But we would lose our whole crop.

By the end of Tuesday, we had all the boxes filled with plants ready to start planting.

Wednesday morning and it was still dry, and we started planting.

Usually, we have three people on the planter, and I am in the tractor and replacing the empty trays with full ones.

But there was only me and Rab, luckily the tractor stays in the bed formed beds, so we started planting.

By Thursday at 11am we had all the twenty-nine thousand brassicas planted and fleeced.

Now we are back on track.

Next week we will start blocking the squash plants, this year we are only doing four thousand.

We are also going to get the two hundred and fifty cucumbers planted.

And we will take all the Leeks and onions out of the tunnel to harden of.

Going to be a busy week.