Spring is in the air and a new growing season is underway. March is the time we get the field ready for the first new outdoor plantings in April.
As I write this the last of winter outdoor crops have been harvested from the field and are finished. The last bed of leeks has been picked and trimmed. We’ve gleaned one final pick from the kale before it started to flower. The oriental winter salad in the polytunnels is the very last of the overwinter harvest. It crops most heavily in March as the light levels and the day length increases., but that too will be done by the end of this month so we can then use the polytunnels for some quick turn-around crops in April and May (lettuce, bunched turnips, radishes) prior to the main summer plantings of tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies and herbs.Out in the fields, the biggest signal that spring has truly arrived will be when the ground has been ploughed and is ready for the new plantings. Our usual plan is to plough in the second half of March, two to three weeks before the first new outdoor crops are planted in the first or second week of April. Though like everything else in farming, this is at the mercy of the weather. The ground needs to be dry enough to take tractor cultivation without damaging the soil, so a particularly wet March will delay the ploughing and push the first plantings further back into April. We’ve experimented with trying to sow and plant outdoors earlier into April and March, but from experience it’s just too much of a gamble. More often than not we’ve either lost most of those earlier plantings to a late cold spell of weather, or else the ground was still so wet we couldn’t plant them at all.
That said, this winter was generally drier than average, the rainfall in December and January was about half what we’d usually see. It was also colder, there were many more hard frosts than we’ve had for quite a few years. After a succession of mild and wet winters in the three proceeding years where we barely saw any frosts, it was welcome to have what felt more like a 'proper winter’. I’m hoping this will have had some benefit in knocking back the prolific population of slugs and other pests.
Alongside the work on the land there’s plenty of plant raising to be done each week. Nearly all of the crops that we grow here are started from seed in module trays in our propagation polytunnel, before being transplanted into the field when they are strong enough to fend for themselves outdoors. The first things in the sowing calendar are the tomatoes and chillies which I sowed back in early February on heated beds, these take the longest to grow from seed and won’t be ready to transplant until May. Through February and March we are then sowing trays of shallots, celery, salad onions, a succession of lettuces and salad, and the first of the brassicas (summer cabbages, kales and kohl rabi).
The other big news is that the construction of our new polytunnel is almost complete. We had to wait for several weeks for a day when the winds dropped enough to be able to do it, but we have finished putting the plastic skin on. We were just in the nick of time before the 60mph winds of Storm Doris hit us the following week. We were very lucky to have help from lots of our regular volunteers that day (a very big thank you to the hard-working Thursday crew!). Fitting a 300m2 roll of plastic onto the hoops, fixing it down and stretching it tight can be a long and tricky job but many hands made light work of it. This is our fourth large polytunnel at the farm and the extra area of protected cropping is invaluable for a small operation like ours. It gives us more options for what we can grow through all seasons of the year and allows us to expand our production of crops like tomatoes, chillies, cucumbers, herbs and salad leaves that benefit from a protected environment.
- John English
Head Grower
