We’ve had some promising
glimpses of Summer during June, but not as many as we would like! The
onions and garlic have grown very well this season, the second early potatoes
were a bit slow but ready to harvest now and all our leafy greens are available
again now (chards, spinach and kales).
The courgette and sweetcorn plants are looking good and have enjoyed this
last week of warmth and we finally started planting our squash plants last week,
once we got a few consecutive dry days and most of them are in the ground now
hoping for a sunny summer, (aren’t we all!).
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| Potatoes in flower, the real thing is beautiful, not done justice by my photography! |
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| Potato flowers |
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Looking down over Wye, our early transplanted leeks growing in very chalky soils,
a lot less weeds here than in many of our crops this year |
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Onions that have been weeded lots!!
Al least some of the weeds are pretty. |
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| Red onions |
Weeds, weeds,
weeds - We’ve been thinking back to last year’s exceptionally dry/hot
spring and remembering how little hand weeding we had to do - reverse that this year, Martin does the bulk
of the weeding himself using a tractor mounted steerage hoe, finger-weeder, and
ridger as well as some pre-emergence and inter-row flame weeding. But any weeds
that escape all that have to be hoed or hand-pulled, and there have been a lot of them this season. You get to know
your weeds when you’re on your hands and knees in a bed of carrot or spinach,
and categorise them as you go along, there’s the ‘good’ weeds such as
fat-hen (pulls out easily, as long as it
doesn’t get too big), fumitory (looks pretty), red dead-nettle (the bees love
it) and then there are the ’nasties’ – nettles and thistles, for obvious
reasons. There’s no going out in the fields in shorts and sandals on an organic
farm!
