Week 17 Rain finally arrives

After nearly 4 weeks of dry hot days and cold nights the rain has finally arrived, and for us this has been really useful. We've not had a lot of rain but the heavily mulched beds have soaked it up. Interestingly the older beds with little mulch on top are still looking cracked - just a bit darker. The importance of organic matter cannot be stressed enough.

So what have we been up to?

We've been a bit of a holding pattern as we wait for the warmer nights to come through, so we've potted on a number of our seedlings, and still hardening off, moving plants outside during the day and then back inside at night. The courgettes in the poly tunnel have a blanket on at night! We've a;lso been removing some of the covers of the still covered beds and removing some of the perrenial weeds.. Some of the beds have a heavy infestation of couch grass, which is going to be a challenge!

We've planted out more brassicas.. Purple Sprouting Broccoli ready for next March!

Using the permanent beds system we are able to transition from one crop to the next very easily, so as the lettuces have come out, we've added some more compost and then sown more of the salad leaves in their place. (1 hour later). As we harvest we make sure that we are weeding too, and any small or stunted crops are removed and either composted or fed to the hens! The crazy thing about this though is that we will be putting tomatoes in to these beds in about a month, so on some of the beds we maybe looking at getting 4 or 5 different crops in one year!

Sowing:

We've sown more lettuces in seed trays, additional sowings of rocket, mibuna, mizuna, Streaks and giant mustard.

Also sown our summer and winter squashes in our heated greenhouse, so that they'll be ready to get into the garden late May after hopefully we've seen the last of the frosts.

Harvesting:

This week we've had another big harvest of leaves for our veg boxes

60 lettuces

72 bouquettes of Chard

3kg Rocket

4kg of Mizuna

500g Purple Sprouting Broccoli

5 bunches of radishes

Still to harvest

For the shop on Friday: 2 kg Salad, 10 lettuces, Radishes some Kale (probably the last of the over wintered Kale) and maybe the last of the PSB