This is a great sunny afternoon for running the seven point spring tine harrow through the newly ploughed ground. By bringing any couch grass roots to the surface they will dry out nicely and hopefully die off.
Hard hot dusty work though.
Lambs Doing Lamb Stuff
The eight lambs born at Greenslate Community Farm only a couple of weeks ago are becoming real stars. They form small gangs who go running and jumping around the field together. Their mothers then come chasing after them trying to split them up back into their little family groups again; kids eh.
One Kind of Friday Feeling
Walking into a poly tunnel stuffed with fantastic crops that we started from seed lifts your heart first thing in the morning. Knowing it has been done without nasty chemicals makes it all the better.
First Week of April
Bees Are Buzzin
It warmed up again today, reaching a dizzying height of 20°C in the poly tunnel. A bumble bee made an appearance and was busy with some broad beans which have overwintered in there and flowering nicely.
The lettuce we planted a couple of weeks ago are starting to look like lettuce with their second set of leaves broadening out, but they are a few weeks away from being planted out.
We managed to finish off the rotavating in the poly tunnel yesterday and the soil came up to an amazintg ’tilth’ considering it hab been really badly compacted only a few hours before.
We are hoping that these tomato seedlings will fill the place and give us a bountiful crop over the summer.
Poly Tunnel Clearing
Now number two poly tunnel is clear we can get down to sorting the soil out. The ground is compacted like concrete so it will need some work to get it back to a growing medium. We are broad-forking it then working it over with the rotavator. I will be well pleased if we can finish it today.
Thanks Ian for forking some of it yesterday.
More Growing Space
Now the chickens are allowed back in the open we are taking over poly tunnel number 2. The chickens have left us plenty of manure amongst the straw litter, but too much to rotavate in so we are using the opportunity to try out the new two wheel tractor with the trailer attachment. It might not look much but it can shift nearly half a tonne at a time so it will be useful for carting stuff around the place.
We had a good team helping us load it all up and it will makebsome good compost.
The next job is to break up the panned earth and get the rotavator turning the ground over.
Finally, we will have to change the cover as the white plastic we have at the moment won’t let enough light through for growing veg.
Winter is Back
We were jolted back into winter again with hail the size of dried peas down the back of the neck this morning. Most things we have planted so far wont’t be affected by this and should be fine.
The Kohl Rabi we sowed last week has germinated well and is nearly ready to transplant on to the next stage in the larger soil blocks. The Greenhouse Sensation Vitapod propagators are doing an amazing job and we are really starting to churn out seedlings with the help of this brilliant device.
Not everything needs a propagator to start germinating, these beetroot (below) have managed just fine by being covered by black plastic until they just started to break the surface. This kept the moisture in and helped warm the compost on days that the sun did shine. To be fare though, it was much warmer in the glasshouse last week when they did germinate than it is today.
Some more wintery pictures from this morning.
Glasshouse Repairs
Storm Doris took its toll on the glasshouse so we had to do some swift repairs this morning.
Garlic Planting
It’s not too late to put some garlic in the ground so I thought that we would add to our stock today. So, hopefully by July we should have plenty for the shop and perhaps the cafe can serve Billinge Garlic Bread as a speciality.
Roger got a picture of me doing a bit of work just to prove that I do some. The peril of taking the pictures is that I am rarely on any and it looks like I make all the volunteers do all the work.
Neil
