Summer is blooming

Hello everyone, 

Bob and I hope you have all enjoyed the long bank holiday celebrations. The weather has generally been good…perfect for market gardeners and farmers. We hope you were able to get outside and maybe do a little of your own garden or sample the delights of the outdoors. Gardens are coming into their own right now. They are, literally, blooming marvellous. The colours and scents are a shear delight. 

The farm is also blooming. So much grows and blooms really quickly from now until the end of the summer months. The amount of work, which needs to be carried out, far out does the time which we have available. We seem to be chasing our tail at times. There is soooo much to be planted out, sown, watered, tended, fed, moved around and watered yet again! Thank goodness for that daily list!

Bob compiles a ‘to do’ list each and every day. The list does not seem to get smaller each day, but, it is great to see lots of ticks by the end of the day. Neither Bob or myself can complete a day without a list. It is not as if we do not know what needs to be done or that we need a reminder of our duties. However, the ticked list helps with our feeling of achievement.

It would seem that there is a huge chance that we will have lots of little ones on the farm. Kate is about to have piglets. Plus the ducks maybe about to have some ducklings. The female is sitting on some eggs in an area not accessible to us but definitely in an area our little critters may disturb. Mother Nature will take its course and we can only wait and see. We do have a great number of moor hen chicks scampering between all the fields. Very cute. The birds are all playing and fluttering everywhere. In fact, while we work in the fields the birds are really noisy. I prefer the songs from the birds over the radio any day. We wake up to the morning chorus and go to bed with our owls. Such a perfect noise.

The new growing area in the Orchard Field is just about complete with compost. And, not surprisingly, all beds are full of crops. In fact all the beds throughout the farm, are more or less full. We are in need of more space for the crops yet to go out! The overwintering onions will be coming out, ready for the boxes this week. This will free up space which we need for more summer crops. It is amazing how we have created and filled an acre of land with our organic goodies and we feel that we need more space. We have easily grown (sorry about the pun) into the land we have available. However, we have decided that this is the amount of land we need and we need no more!

Being in the Orchard Field, we should not forget the Orchard itself. This year the blossom on the fruit trees was amazing. The result being, what we hope will be an enormous bumper crop of plums, pears and apples. The fruit from the cherry trees will no doubt be consumed by the birds. It would be great if we were even more organised to cover the cherry trees and salvage the fruit. This may have to go on the ‘to do’ list. 

Well, the list will need some ticks on it, so, I will crack on… 

Have a good week,

Ann👩‍🌾