June 27th

 I missed writing the newsletter last week.

My excuse is, Erin had a long weekend at Dalguise activity centre, it was for all her class of P7,S, and I was along as one of the responsible adults, think I had as much fun as the kids.

That’s them all of too high school after the summer holidays, and they had 3 days full of various activities from morning till night, amazing weekend and memories for them all, as they leave primary school.

One disaster we did have last week , was that we lost all of our chillies and cucumbers, over a two-day period.

They have been planted for over 4 weeks and were looking great.

But with the tunnels being roasting hot, I had all the doors of.

And one evening I seen a tractor sprayer coming out of the field next to us, it isn’t organic and the field had been sown with peas. These peas get sprayed with whatever it is almost weekly, but at the start it’s a weed killer, so the peas get off to a start before the weeds.

Well it had been windy, they should spay in the wind, because they have no control of where the fine mist goes, well two days later every plant was dead.

We have lost a whole tunnel to slugs before, but you can see the damage, and when we lift the ground cover, there are thousands of slugs under it, we use slug gone pellets now, but the slugs are still under the matting even with that.

So we had to lift the matting, and replant with another crop, funnily enough not a slug in sight, I have never ever seen that before.

So this year unfortunately there will be no Cucumbers or Chillies, that’s the first time I have ever had that, and its to late now to re sow.

If only they had said, I could have shut the tunnel doors, or if they had followed SEPA rules don’t spray in the wind, it will get everywhere.

On a plus side, we now have flowers on our courgette plants.

And the air seeder, I had bought second hand for Carrots and Parsnip sowing, that got damaged on delivery, I managed to sort.

We now have an acre of Carrots sown and a Half an acre of parsnips sown.

And the new camera guided weeding machine is working fantastic.

We do however still need to bed weed the seeds that we direct sow in the soil, Beetroot, Swede, Parsnips and Carrots, because they do come through at the same time as the weeds, unlike our friendly neighbour, we need to hand weed, where he can spray a whole filed on half an hour, where it would take us weeks, but the bed weeding is much easier as the weeder is getting most of it, in the Onions, leeks and brassicas I don’t think we will need to bed weed, but these go in as a plant, possibly we will do a row here and there if it is getting a bit weedy.