The Market Garden at Greenslate Farm
First seasons sowing at Greenslate Farm. Roger sowing Onions into soil blocks then putting them into a Garden Sensation Vitopod to get them germinating. (A big thank you to Mellow Yellow in Mawdesley for giving us a good deal).
Meanwhile Reg has been busy adding panels to fill in gaps of the poly tunnel which will help things warm up a bit sooner, hopefully.
Quite a productive day in the end. Rhiannon helped me finish off emptying the poly tunnel hotbed, then some of the building crew helped me assemble a new work bench with the remains of the hotbed. Some of the Care Farm students helped move the seed compost into place. Finally Chris and Dan put a temporary electricity feed into the greenhouse so we can get propagating some seeds.
A great day for teamwork on the growing side of the farm.
Early next week we can start sowing seeds in earnest and get some of this Greenslate produce under way.
It has also been a day of ‘Permafrost’ up here on Billinge Hill and no mud pies were made in the Mud Pie Kitchen; it was all frozen over.
Neil
The first job of the day will be to finish off clearing out this old hotbed. I was hoping to find it full of lush well rotted compost but it has all dried out and become ‘mummified’ instead. It should at least get me warmed up on this bitterly cold morning.
The compost has arrived, so as soon as we have our seeding area sorted we can get on with sowing some of this years crops.
Moorland Gold is an Organic approved compost that I have been using for a few years now. It is made from peat washed off the Pennine Moors into local rivers so doesn’t have the negative environmental impact that ‘extracted’ compost does.
Welcome to the Greenslate Grower blog, a web site that will record the growth (literally) of the Greenslate Community Farm Market Garden starting in January 2017. It’s cold and damp outside at the moment and there is lots of planning and designing to do if we are to fill the shop and cafe with lots of fresh fruit and veg this season.
Please subscribe to this page if you want to follow our progress. There will be frequent updates as the seeds are sown, the land is worked and the crops are harvested. So if you want to follow our progress please subscribe to our site and you will get updates emailed to you as they occur.
Neil Hickson, the Greenslate Grower