Birthday Boy Bob

Hello Everyone,

How are you all doing? Good, I hope.

Firstly, thank you for being understanding last week while we brought forward the delivery days. Bob and I did have a great day with the family at the Test Match. As if by request, England won and that is what the grandsons will remember of their first day at the cricket. A perfect pressie for Bob, who is also quite flabbergasted at the lovely messages for his birthday. Your ‘delivery boy’ is now ‘my old man’.

We did have an issue all week. By bringing forward the delivery day we spent the week being discombobulated, we could not get the days right in our head, we were always thinking it was a day ahead. But it does make for a very long weekend which means that we feel that we can complete twice as much work as somehow we feel we have found an extra day!

Before the weekend truly begins the list of jobs completed last week:

Everyone always has ‘stuff’ they do not need nor want, so last week we were able to recycle lots of our stuff. A local farmer has taken the last of our pig sties and general animal husbandry stuff. We have just been storing this for no reason. This farmer has pigs for his own use and it is great to be able to put our old stuff to his good use.

Other perfectly good stuff went to the Mart for a local farmers auction. More of our stuff will be put to good use.

The stuff which is of absolutely of no use is gradually being taken to be recycled at the tip. We feel soooo much better having a Summer Clean. Next will be the barn, but this will be when we have another free weekend. That maybe never!

The Tomatoes have all had a trim and a tuck. They, once again, got out of hand with a growth spurt of side shoots and leaves. Now that they are tidy we can see the many Tomatoes which are ripening quickly now there is more light hitting the fruit.

The Cucumbers have fallen down - twice!! We have been using jute as netting for the Beans and Cucumbers to climb up. This should make it easier to compost the remains once the plant is spent. Unfortunately, the string jute snaps with the weight plus maybe the excess heat has rendered the jute to become flimsy. Either way we have spent quite a bit of time re-securing the Cucumbers this week and the Beans in the past few weeks. We will consider the plans for next year's climbers…do we still use jute, which is compostable or do we think of something else which will be a stronger net? Can I just say though, our Cucumbers and  Beans have been tasty as well as prolific.

We are still flipping the outside beds. The Onions and Shallots are now all curing in the greenhouse. This has created space for Turnips to be directly sown into these beds. More Purple Sprouting Broccoli and the Winter Kales have been planted out. The remaining selection of Brassicas will be planted out this weekend. These are all in the outside growing beds of the Pond Field.

The polytunnels have also had beds flipped and they are ready for planting into. We will be putting the Lettuces and an assortment of the Brassicas in these beds and they ought to be ready before the outside beds. This will extend the length of time these vegetables will be available during the late Autumn and early Winter season.

The Tomatoes, Aubergines and Peppers have all had a good and constant feed. We use Organic Seaweed as our feed. It is not the most pleasant of smells, in fact most good feeds for the crops are smelly, but they do give the veggies a good boost.

So, along with harvesting, prepping, packing and delivering to you, our lovely customers, plus the restaurants it has been quite a busy old week. But, we did it in quick time, had a day off and now about to start all over again in another week.

You all enjoy your week and take care,

Ann