July 2012, news and pics

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!).

Potatoes in flower, the real thing is beautiful, not done justice by my photography!

Potato flowers

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

Onions that have been weeded lots!!
Al least some of the weeds are pretty.

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!