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Monday 30 July 2012

A few pics from July 2012

The courgettes and sweetcorn have been enjoying the end of July heat-wave


Another month to fill out and these cobs will be ready to harvest, come on sun!


But only a few days for this courgette to be ready!


Good to see some weed free crops at last, (although I don't get to see my husband and weed-free crops, it's one or the other!)
the wet spring/summer has meant lots of weeding this year


And rainbow chard looking lovely too!


Looks like a lovely patch of wild flowers full of bees and other wildlife,
 but it's actually 2 beds of carrots that didn't get weeded (can't win them all)

Brassicas in 'Prescott' field
 (these fields used to be part of Wye College farm, and 3 of the fields are named after former principals,
as well as John, there's also  'Holmes' and 'Lucas')
These plants survived the wireworm, sadly many of the squash plants didn't.



Tuesday 3 July 2012

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!