Hi everyone! I am writing this to you fresh back from my family holiday visiting my brother in Northumberland. As growers we don’t get to go on holiday through the majority of spring and summer as that is purely business time and the moment to work hard growing the vegetables. Now that the summer is drawing to a close and the madness of the growing season has died down it is time for us to have a much-needed break from the plants. When I was an apprentice on an organic farm years ago (Abbey Home farm in the Cotswolds with The Organic Farm shop. Check them out!) we were told on signing up that we would not be allowed to take more than a day’s holiday between the beginning of April and the end of July which is commonplace for growers. If you want to take long summer vacations forget it the farm needs you during those months!
Now that I am back there is a real feeling of the summer ending and winter approaching. We have been sowing lots of the crops that will take us through the winter in our polytunnel. These are mostly salad and leaf crops and include: salad mustards, spring onions, kale, spinaches, chards, radishes, pak choi, Chinese cabbage, endives, lettuce and radicchio. It will still be a few weeks before they are planted out but we start sowing them now.
The summer crops in our market garden and polytunnel are finishing so we have started turning the beds over so get some quick crops like radishes and some crops that will keep growing late into the year like spinaches and chards in while we still have time. The cut off for autumn sowings are (weather depending) the first couple of weeks in September. There are exceptions of course but, in my book, sowings done after that date usually don’t get going before the weather turns cold. This has been a bit of a freak year, so anything is possible but I’m still sticking to what I know.
Since I last posted we have pulled out all our onions, laid them out in the hot sun to dry and subsequently once dry brought them into our storage containers where they will slowly be sold over winter. We would have also dug up our potatoes for storage too, but the ground is still too dry to run our root lifter through it. There is finally rain forecast for tomorrow so fingers crossed it actually comes and we can proceed with the harvest. In the meantime, we have been digging them out as needed using forks, but this is slow and labour intensive. My volunteers will be happy to see the back of digging them up by hand!
Finally let’s all give ourselves a pat on the back for getting through this year’s weather and the insane heat. Everyone no matter what job you do will have felt the strain. We were lucky that we have our reservoir to use on the fields and polytunnel. Other growers I know were really having to work hard to keep their crops from dying and it has been a tough year.
Let September bring the rains!! Speak soon. Jude
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