7th September

One of the smelliest jobs on the farm is spreading the waste veg.

We have a small one tonne dung spreader, we don’t us this for spreading the hen pen at the start of the year, because it would take us forever.

But we put all the waste veg from the pack shed in it,  It takes a few months before it is full and by then it’s proper rotten and very smelly.

Then we spread it in areas of the field that we have been harvesting out of , and spread it there.

So last week it was full, and nicely rotten and very smelly, great feeding for the ground, and the area that I was going to spread it was where we had been harvesting the summer savoy cabbages.

This part of the field will have loads of good feeding in it for next year.                                            

When the cabbages are ready, they are huge, and have a lot of outer leaves, but we only harvest the centre, we would never get them in the nets if we cut the whole cabbage, and the outer leaves aren’t usually that good any way. So they all get left in the field to rot away then eventually get ploughed in.

So this part of the field has four thousand cabbage leaves in it, rotting away already, and with the waste veg going in there also, it will be a great part for the leeks for next year.

One other veg that we leave a lot of outer leaves in the field as we are harvesting is the Leeks.

Each week we harvest around two thousand leeks, we pull the leeks by hand, one at a time, when we pull them we cut the roots and the very tip off,  then pull of usually a couple of outer leaves, than that’s the leek ready, all this is also left behind in the field, so at the end of each week all you can see is a sea of leek leaves, again this rots away, and will get waste veg spread on top of it, all good for next year’s crops.

Last week the self-propelled bed weeder I had made at the start of the year, finally got parked up in the shed, the bed weeding id done.

Thankfully my project of making one,  worked out, we did have a couple of teething problems at the start, and had to bring it in for some extra welding and shifting things around, but it eventually worked perfect, and done just over four months of bed weeding.

This saved using the John Deere which used to pull along a bed weeder, and could use up to fifty litres of diesel each week, plus a person driving it.

There are self-propelled bed weeders out there, so I didn’t come up with the idea, but they are expensive. Second hand ones are £10,000, so I pretty much copied one, and spent a few months over the winter grinding and welding metal.