First of Tomatoes Transplanted

Hello Everyone,

Life on the farm is never dull or boring. It can at times be repetitive…..ask Lucy and Scarlet or Graham. They all have to carry out some form of repetition in their farm duties. Graham says he is still ok about moving compost, Lucy and Scarlet are fine about planting out the onions, apparently?! However they are feeling, they are doing a grand job….The Pond Field is now all ready for planting out the summer crops. The onions are nearly all out in this field and take up about a fifth of the growing area. The summer kales are planted out, under cover to keep them safe from the pesky pigeons.

We have not been able to plant much more outside due to the ground being frozen rock hard during the early part of the day (it is May now and the ground was still solid at the end of last week!). Even if we were able to plant out, the overnight frosts would have damaged the crop far to much. We are hoping to plant out from next week when the weather takes a huge turn towards warmer days and nights.

Thankfully, and a huge sigh of relief, we do have the polytunnels. We are starting to see empty beds as the crops are placed into the veg boxes. As you can see from the picture above, what were beds of cabbages, are now beds of (from left to right), courgettes, tomatoes and carrots. The carrots were direct sown a few weeks ago and are coming along a treat. The courgettes were planted out last week. Our main crop of courgette will be planted outside. Having some inside a polytunnel helps to ensure a good early crop…thus extending the growing season.

The middle bed is full of one of our favourite veggies (or is it a fruit?) to grow and eat….tomatoes!!!! There are three varieties shown…Bocati, Velocity and Gimli. Bocati is a bright red tomato of medium size. Velocity are the huge tomatoes which are as big as yer fist. They have a very “moreish” mediterranean flavour. Gimli is a round, shiny, salad tomato which tastes as sweet as!

We have soooooo many tomatoes, one hundred and fifty in the above tunnel with only another three hundred to plant out, we do not stake the vine with bamboo canes. We wrap each tomato plant around strings which are tied to a wire along the top of the tunnel. This we have been doing for a few years now, but we may have only just mastered the stringing technique. Here we go, yet another very repetitive job, but very satisfying when you see the lines of tomatoes standing to attention. We will wrap the tomatoes around the string as each plant grows. The smell of the vines as we move them around the string is a smell of summer in a polytunnel….gorgeous.

Here’s hoping for a fab crop of our delicious organic tomatoes this summer.

Thank you for your early orders.

Next week I will be telling you all about our new delivery transport facility, suffice to say we are very excited.

Till then have a good week,
Ann👩‍🌾