Shorter days and briefer seasons

Planting, picking, weeding, and irrigating are all in full swing – making the next month our busiest, and the most critical determinant of a successful year.

Leeks, cabbages, caulis, kale, broccoli, radicchio, and lettuces, which will keep your boxes full from September right through to next May, must all be planted in the next four weeks. As the days shorten and temperatures drop in the autumn, growth rates slow – meaning that a day’s delay in planting now will delay maturity by a week in October, and by two weeks in December. Plant too early, and we have autumn gluts; a few days too late, and the chance of an economic yield is lost.

We do not expect anyone to work the 60-hour weeks that were the norm at busy times when I started farming – and, understandably, it would be hard to persuade our permanent team to do so. By contrast, the team who have joined us for the summer under the Seasonal Worker Scheme (including eight Kenyan agricultural students, and plenty of Europeans who return each year) are here to make and save money. They want the hours and, provided the weather holds, their long days and weekends will help us to get the plants in the ground on time, setting us up for the next nine months of harvesting and box packing.

In general, I lament that our industry has become so removed from the people we feed, and so dependent on migrant labour from low-wage economies (pay for the same work in Kenya would be less than £5/day). But in the short term, without that labour, an already diminished British horticultural industry would decline further.

We will pick our first Devon tomatoes this week, planted in early April. Each plant will produce around 2.7kg of fruit over their fleeting season, before slowing down in early October. This year, we are trialling grafted plants: the variety we chose for flavour, size, and so on is grafted onto a vigorous, disease-resistant variety. The plants cost twice as much, but the added vigour means that we can grow two stems from each, thereby halving the number of plants. Too often vigour and yield come at the cost of flavour, so we will be monitoring quality carefully.

Under glass heated to 20°C, they could have been planted in January, and picked from April to November – but growing tomatoes in the UK with artificial heat emits anything from two to 10 times more carbon than trucking them over from Spain. So, fill your boots with homegrown, low-carbon cherry tomatoes while their brief season lasts.