The garden this summer
EMMA HAMS
The summer is flying by and we have already started to get the first harvests off the fields like onions, potatoes and squash. The spring was very late this year and because of that the season outside of the tunnels has felt very short. However, summer is not over yet and hopefully we’ve got a nice autumn ahead of us. There are still lots of beautiful crops in the tunnels that need ripening like tomatoes, peppers and chillies.
At the moment, we are trying to balance keeping up with the weeds as well as getting the field crops in. The morning harvest list gets longer and longer! After a gap, we are starting to pick salad bags again from this week onwards.
Some crops have done well this summer. It’s been a great year for berries and, along with help from customers, we picked lots of blackcurrants and raspberries, with kilos and kilos going into both the shop and dairy. The cucumbers have done very well and we now have a bounty of tomatoes.
We planted a wider variety of flowers both in the tunnels and fields, and as well as bringing a greater number of pollinators to the garden, hundreds of bouquets have also made their way into the Farm Shop.
If you wander through the tunnels, you’ll see that the propagator is filling up with seedlings for autumn and winter harvests. This time of year is often called the ‘second spring’, so when the summer crops are done there will plenty to fill the tunnels.
