The Market Garden at Greenslate Farm
This is a bit of a ‘moment’ for me, the first germinating seeds for this season at Greenslate. We are trying onions in seed blocks and they are bobbing their heads up a week after sowing.
Have you done a jam jar soil test?The soil at Greenslate contains more sand than I expected with nearly 50% content in this sample that I took from the market garden area.
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.
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