Well, it finally stopped raining (some of the time anyway) so we've got all our potatoes planted now, and all of our onion sets in as well as transplanting kale, spinach, chard, parsley, lettuce and more into the fields. Some of the early direct seeding of carrots and salad hasn't done so well, mainly eaten by snails or rabbits! But we will keep trying!!
Martin has started tractor-mounted weed contraol on potatoes and kale, and the team have already had to do some hoeing in-between plants.
The changeover in the small polytunnels and glasshousese has been slow this year as we've been harvesting the indoor salad as long as possible, waiting for some outdoor salad to be ready. But we now have parsley, nasturtiums, basil and cucumbers planted, with tomatoes and chilli peppers well ready to be planted out.
This will be our 4th year of putting out supplementary feeding for Turtle Doves (TDs) and we started scattering the seed weekly at the end of April. We've not heard any purring of TDs yet but did get a very grainy picture of one amongst the stock doves and pigeons on the wildlife camera at the start of May. And it’s great to see the swallows back, flitting between puddles and nest building/renovating. There's at least one pair of wrens nesting in the big shed (as usual), not sure where yet, but not in the old hard hat that provided a nest space one year! There's often one or two red kites flying above the Crundale fields, which are always lovely to see.