Week 13 Wind, Rain, snow and heatwave

Not quite 4 seasons in a day but certainly a week. The recent winds created a lot of work, putting the tarpaulins back, re-covering the garlic and repairing the Polytunnel door which got blown in. But as I write this today, it is the second day of light winds and baking heat - the seedlings are loving it, as are the weeds! Docs arggghhhh!

So what have we been up to?

Planted out purple eyed seedling main crop potatoes, onion sets, transplanted 600+ leeks into cells. We start these off in the little pea shoot punnets and then once they've germinated we transplant them into 84 cell trays. We are trying a little experiment where we grow some in clumps of 3or 4 as per Charles Dowding and the others singularly which is how they would have been grown previously and going to see how our yields work out per bed.

Weeding seems to be the main job at the moment whilst we wait for the weather to become more predictable and warm. Trying to stay on top of it!

Harvesting

We harvested quite a bit of salad and Purple Sprouting last week and so giving the plants a mini rest this week, though having said that we have had some great radishes. Some of these will make it into the boxes this week for some lucky customers.

What's growing?

Exciting news is that our strawberries have started flowering already, so hopefully we'll have our first strawberries in a couple of weeks. We grow these in tubs and bring them into the polytunnel - check these out:

The next job is to work out how to get the leaky pipes all connected up to help with the watering.