June gave us plenty of weather, a few days that felt like late Autumn, some warmish days with cool nights, a week of heat and back to cool and wet at the start of July. The squash transplanting was finished before the hot week, helping those plants grow away before the rooks started pulling them up! The leek transplanting was finally finished on 4 July, ready to get watered in by the rain forecast for the day after. The leek plants usually need a ‘hair-cut’ with a pair of shears before planting so that they don’t get stuck in the transplanter!
We took delivery of ‘green manure’ seeds to sow in the remainder of last year’s vegetable growing areas. We mostly use a mix from Cotswold’s seeds which contains red clover, crimson clover, vetch and rye grass, which adds nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil as well as organic matter. And it is great for pollinators when in flower, as well as looking very pretty.
Last week’s heat benefitted the courgettes, and we picked the first of these for markets at the end of June, many more to come through July and August.
Rooks are such clever birds but they can do a lot of damage to our crops. They’ve surprised us this year, pulling up spring onions that are already a good enough size to harvest, and have done a lot of damage already. They have pulled up onion sets in previous years, but at a much smaller size. We are having to use the banger type bird-scarers to try and prevent much more losses but this is difficult as the area we are growing them in this year in between woods with a permissive path and a public access track, and also has a public footpath going diagonally through it, so we have to be particularly careful where we place them.
The week of heat at the end of June meant lots of successful weed control, with tractor mounted weeders, hoes and some hand weeding on carrot beds. The beetroot beds need hand weeding now, and there’s always more weeds to keep on top of as we keep transplanting and sowing late crops. Our final block of spinach, kale and chard is just being sown into trays now, and should enable us to keep harvesting it until spring 2025!
The wildlife pond was fairly busy last week, as expected in a hot, dry week. There were a few pictures of a buzzard, not happy to share the pond with 2 magpies! And happily, another picture of a visiting Turtle Dove, which is what prompted us to put the two small ponds in several years ago.
