… in the human breast.’ So wrote Alexander Pope in his 1733–34 poem, ‘An Essay on Man’. You must be fundamentally optimistic to sow a seed – so, despite our reputation, and beneath all the gruffness, growers are mostly optimists. My father spent 50 years driving my mother mad with his eternal claims of ‘Darling, I really think we’re getting there’, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
After six gloriously dry, bright weeks, Easter brought over three inches of rain – enough to get early crops off to a flying start. A quick call around to growers this morning was startlingly optimistic: ‘It always rains when we need it’, ‘The best spring salad leaves in 20 years at Riverford’, ‘The strongest plants ever from the nursery’… The biggest difference compared to last spring may be the quality of light we have had. Growth has not been luxuriant or very fast, but the crops look robust, healthy, and full of promise. Or perhaps the brightness above is leaving us prone to irrational optimism; we seem conditioned as a species to assume that whatever we are currently experiencing will go on forever, be that good or bad.
The first outdoor-sown lettuces and salad leaves are two weeks from harvest. In the meantime, we have some great crops arriving from our farm in the French Vendée, and the ‘best ever’ spring crop of salad leaves from our polytunnels. Over the next two weeks, the tunnel team will be busy harvesting, cleaning, composting, and replanting with tomatoes, then peppers and chillies, and finally cucumbers.
The last of the leeks, cauliflowers, and spring greens planted last summer will be harvested this week, leaving us reliant on the French farm to bridge the UK’s Hungry Gap – until those ‘strong’ spring-planted crops deliver on their promise, with harvesting starting in mid-May. This is the first year for a while that has rewarded the bold growers who planted early under fleece crop covers. These are fantastic in the bright, cool weather that has predominated for the last month; they work less well in the damp, dull springs that are more common. Even the first frost-tender courgettes have survived some cool mornings and are doing well under cover. We may be picking them before the end of May.
For those tiring of the optimistic newsletters, I am sure I will find something to be miserable about soon. But for now, all is thriving.
Photo by Emma Stoner; taken for Veg&Table magazine (pre-order issue 02 now).
Our News from the Farm posts come from Riverford. They are the digital versions of the printed letters which go out to customers, every week via Riverford’s veg boxes. Guy Singh-Watson’s weekly newsletters connect people to the farm with refreshingly honest accounts of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food, and the occasional rant about farming, ethical and business issues he feels strongly about.
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