Wet Wet Wet

No not the 1980s pop group but the state of the Go Local Food fields. The wet is holding up getting on with the outside work.

At least the damp ground made for easy work on the first day when new work share Jamie (a lady – not a gentleman) was given the task of taking out the brussels sprout stalks which had nothing left to harvest on them easy.

Plans for the weekend included taking out tractor first with the harrow, then the plough, then rotovator and then membrane laying machine in order to get some areas of the bottom field ready for planting out. With the weather as has been (more wet and windy than dry and sunny), Go Local Food is still waiting for the local farmer to come in and plough the top field.

Despite the weather a new load of compost has been delivered. Grower Ian says that the last delivery had a pH reading of about 5 which is on the acid end of the scale. As Go Local Food is not aiming to grow acid loving plants such as azaleas and rhododendrons, lime has had to be added. Our vegetable crops are such that we would like a pH reading of somewhere around 6.5 – 7. Maybe the newest load will not be so acid (could be that a lot of pine and conifer hedging where people were cutting back hedges in the autumn was part of the make up of the compost for the last load).

A couple of rows of carrots have been planted in the outside raised bed along with scattered turnips and covered with the window frames that have been stacked for the purpose. As it has been a bit on the windy side these have been very firmly secured. Other carrots have been sown among the lambs lettuce in one of the poly tunnels in the hopes that these will do better than the lambs lettuce.