8th June

My home-made self-propelled bed weeder, has been out in the field working all this week.

And so far, it’s been working really well.

The most impressive thing about it, is that we don’t need a tractor now to pull along a bed weeder.

Every other year, we would have to take the John Deere of off the bed weeder, then pull up the fleece with the fleece roller machine, then brush weed in between the rows with another machine, before we could go back onto the weeding.

This year I have been brush weeding, and at the same time the  weeder is working away, with the men on it hand weeding in between the plants.

We have now bed weeded all of the onions, and the early season leeks, they were very small plants, with the lack of rain and hot temperatures, . and pretty hard to weed,

Next week we will start bed weeding the brassicas crops, they were covered with fleece as soon as we planted them, and the plants are looking great but so are the weeds.

So I will take the fleece of, and brush weed ahead of the boy’s bed weeding, hopefully doing it this way the weeds won’t get out of control then be a really hard bed weed.

The weather as we all know is very changeable.                                                                                                                     And May this year has been one of the hottest and driest since 2018.                                                                                                   And we planted all of the courgettes, Spaghetti squash, uchi kuri squash around a fortnight ago, and they were planted in temperatures around 20 degrees but got on evening of heavy rain, which helped them get a start.

But the Crown Prince squash were planted in the same temperature,  they then got three days of temperatures over 25 and by Wednesday last week they were looking a wee bit dried up and dead.

It doesn’t help that they are planted through bio degradable mulch film then fleeced, which increases the temperature.

But we need to use both, first the bio degradable mulch film keeps the temperature up if it gets cooler and controls the weeds, these crops are really hard to weed as their stems break really easy.

And if we didn’t cover with fleece, the first thing that would happen, is the crows come in and pull all the plants up looking for grubs under them.,                                                                                                              This happened when we planted the courgettes. I hadn’t finished planting them and decided I would pull the fleece over the next day, when I had them all in.                                                                                                     Well the crows came in at night, and pulled half of them out, so we spent the next morning on our hands and knees re planting them again, and if it gets windy and cold, which it does the fleece protects the plants.

We had to plant the Pumpkins in the temperatures over 25, but they eventually got the heavy rain at the end of the week and are looking.

So hopefully the crown prince might make it, I’ll let you know.