Sign up for the five latest stories, once a week.
It feels good to see some crops in the ground. A spell of dry, cold weather at the beginning of the month allowed us to create perfect seed beds for planting cabbage, lettuce, spinach, beetroot, kohl rabi, carrots and potatoes. The soil was perfect, but the air frigid, so the plants were covered with fleece to keep off the east wind (it will still have been a cruel shock after being mollycoddled in a 20°C greenhouse). Most plants are looking OK and, after a little shivering, are starting to grow well.
As we continue to struggle with our new website, I have run off to France to bury my head in chilli plants and pretend it is not happening. It’s getting pretty tedious for all concerned: you, our customers, our local vegmen and ladies who deliver your boxes, our customer service team, and our IT department who are working 24/7 to keep the show afloat while trying to fix it. I have never felt so inadequate in the face of a challenge. I did offer my help, but the last thing they need is the ineffectual flapping of the technically illiterate.
A cool May has restrained the flowering urges of our purple sprouting broccoli, leeks and cauliflower, giving us the bonus of an extra two to three weeks’ picking. With the barns empty and the last of 2012’s crops ploughed over, we can finally say our annus horribilis is over. Hurrah! I haven’t been happier to see a plough in a field since I ploughed in my first disastrous strawberry crop back in the 80s. I remember whooping from the tractor seat.
As the lettuce and spinach season starts in Devon, we are clearing up the last stragglers on our farm in France and are busy harvesting cabbage, kohl rabi and the first courgettes. When the first female courgette flowers opened two weeks ago there was not enough pollen about (weirdly the male flowers seem to open a little later) and not enough pollinating insects to carry it to female flowers. Poor pollination produces aborted or misshapen fruit, which must be picked off by hand to divert the plant’s efforts into filling better fruit.
Farmers don’t respond well to being told what to do; especially if those doing the telling are outsiders with no demonstrable understanding of their farm. What brings about change is seeing good crops grown by somebody like them. In my early days of veg growing, I was repeatedly told that organic farming “would never feed the world”. I wanted to see for myself, so I spent two months in East Africa, visiting farming friends and a few charities in Kenya.
Issue 12: Fairness and five years.
Find out more about Wicked Leeks and our publisher, organic veg box company Riverford.