January 2024

New Year

Mid winter always comes quite suddenly, with a surge in deliveries and the last of the years crops being sold for Christmas & before the hardest weather arrives. A couple of welcome weeks of rest gives enough time to reflect and plan for the next years growing, buy seeds for next season, have a good clean and tidy up before it all starts over again.

Seeds

Buying seeds is one of the fun parts of growing veg. A quick stock take of remaining seeds, searching through the tubs and deciding which ones are too old to risk using & which will be good for next year. Old seeds are often blended & broadcast with green manures or can be mixed with new ones in the seeder if spacing needs increased between plants.

One of the main organic seed companies folded last summer, so probably the biggest & best source of UK grown & 'open pollinated' vegetable varieties has disappeared. Many varieties that were grown here for years & suited the relatively challenging conditions are unavailable. Combined with brexit & the import difficulties that has caused for other seed companies, then it's a less than ideal year for organic seed buying.

Non-organic seed can be used with permission, if organic seed is unavailable of a variety that has certain desired traits but the low intensity & marginal growing conditions here are more suited to traditional varieties that are usually available as organic seed. It kind of feels like using organic seed will encourage it's production and wider availability in future years too.

Tamar Seeds is supplying most of the veg seeds for 2024 & another relatively new company called Vital Seeds has stepped into the breech left by Seed Co-ops demise. Vital Seeds seem to be the only organic source of varieties like Superschmelz Kohlrabi, Red Russian kale & others, so very grateful to still have those mainstays. Real Seeds sell a fair bit of organic seed in among their offering from micro seed producers, including some curiosities that are on the way like rat tail pod radish, purple mange tout peas, Siberian watermelon & 'Collective Farm Woman' cantaloupe melon from Ukraine (melons that grow in Wales so maybe ok in a polytunnel here), 'Nigels ourdoor chilli', etc!

Seed saving.

Seed saving is a specialism in itself, but some crops are so easy that if there's any spare time & space then it's simply enough to do. This year there's home saved broad bean seed & in the salads dept. there's red orache which is problematic if trying to grow in seed trays but comes up everywhere if left to flower & produce seed, which is then scattered in roughly the right place for next years crop. Claytonia is the same and is probably the most common weed after chickweed in the tunnels - it grows everywhere. Poppies, calendula & dill are the same and rarely planted deliberately, Watercress and american land cress are also from home saved seed & germinated well after being sown in the 12C July temperatures, which actually favours them.

Crop plans for 2024

It's easy to grow a ton of veg for summer, so almost everything is home grown July to September. Polytunnels extend the season for some crops so there's salad & greens almost year round but most common veg crops need specialised harvest and storage conditions if there's going to be a winter supply. Larger farms can do these crops well and relatively cheaply, but there'll be more outdoor season extending crops growing here like swede, squash & more brussels sprouts for use before Christmas. Everything seems to suffer from the weather too much after then, even the so called January King cabbages have rotted by their claimed month of fame.

Sheep

January 1st saw the sheep get their first feed of the winter. The autumn grass is eaten down & they need to keep in good condition through to lambing time in early May. Concentrate feeds are too expensive now, the price doubled a couple of years ago and hasn't dropped since, so last winter the ewes got hay and did well on it until the new grass growth started again in April. Their lambs were about the right size too, so this winter they're getting big bale haylage as daily summer showers didn't give the grass time to dry for hay so it got baled and wrapped in plastic instead.

November 2023

There's a new website & ordering system!

In the beginning there were 8 customers and a notebook, then a spreadsheet, then the first dedicated software called 'Buckybox', followed by 'Boxmaster' & now onto 'Growing Good'.

One big change for you, the customer, is having more control over box contents, so the system will cleverly swap out your dislikes for something else and if you want to fine tune that decision then feel free to manually change it to something else (before the ordering deadline of course).

Another change: all delivery areas will be weekly rather than a mix of fortnightly and weekly.

The veg box options will stay similar for a couple of weeks while we adjust to all the newness, but look out for some big changes in the veg box menu coming early - mid December.

The 2023 season started hot and dry followed by a cool showery type of summer, which seemed to suit most of the traditional outdoor crops and less so for the heat lovers like cucumbers and tomatoes. Every year is different, and despite the constant summer showers it's only in the past few weeks that the ponds have filled up from near empty, the burns, ditches and drains are gurgling again after being quiet for a very long time.