7th June

At long last we have all the leeks planted.

At this time last year we had already started bed weeding, so that just shows how far behind we are.

And on Wednesday I managed to get the Beetroot and Neeps direct sown, at long last, these seeds get direct sown straight into the ground with an auld vintage seed machine.

After sowing these we need to fleece the Neeps, as there is an invisible wee beastie that eats the seed, the fleece does stop that happening.

The only field crop now left to be planted, are the ten thousand squash plants, these we should manage to plant in about three days.

The only thing that slows up the planting is that we have to finish planting one hour before we finish work, and fleece them, this is because the crows come in through the night and early morning and pull the plants out, looking for food below them.

Last year we thought we might get away with it, as there weren’t many crows about during the day.

But they were obviously sitting in their trees watching and phoning their mates, feast time tonight, these silly buggers think we aren’t about and not fleeced, and right enough when we arrived in the morning, they had pulled out most of what we hadn’t fleeced, so we spent the first part of the next morning re planting what we had already planted.

One job I did get done this week was to go over all the Onions and Leeks that have been planted with our new weeding machine.

We bought a set of new harrows this year, mainly for the leek and onions crops, these we usually spent over two months bed weeding throughout the summer.

This machine has a load of tynes almost like a crass rake, and I can set it up so that as it goes through the leeks and onions and pulls out the new weed and this shouldn’t  harm the leek or onions as I go through them.

I have used it twice already, and in practice I should go over the crop on a weekly basis.

It won’t eliminate the need for bed weeding. But along with the brush weeder, we will hopefully only need to bed weed these crops just the once, possibly twice, which is way better than in the past years.