On Saturday we were lucky enough to have a group of 26 young people from The Challenge volunteering on the farm, which allowed us to blast through lots of work – thank you to all of them. We’ve finished planting our winter brassicas, so that should help fill part of the growing year’s ‘hungry gap’.
We’ve also started to bring in the shallots for drying – we’ve made quite a dent in the task of harvesting these, laying out 183kg – and that’s just the start, perhaps just a quarter of the total we expect to reap. It’s been a fantastic shallot harvest, and getting them dried as we’re doing now means we should be able to keep supplying customers with them through to November or December.
This week’s rain has been very welcome – it’s softened up the ground to allow us rotavate, so thank you, Thor, for your bounty. It’s also meant it’s a good week to get under cover in the polytunnels, so we did some work defoliating (removing leaves) from some tomatoes, which helps guard against being lumbered with a big blight problem.
It’s not long now, in fact, until we finish harvesting this year’s tomato crop – we’ll be planting oriental brassicas in their place, so you’ve got some lovely warming stir fries to look forward to if that’s your thing. Giving your dinner a spicy zing is just the thing to keep out autumn and winter chills.