The Big Sowing Week

Sowing the seeds of the future has started this week with tomatoes, peppers, lettuce spring onions and parsley, spinach with lots more to follow.

This is the ritual that has now been going for almost half a century. The start of the growing year really is at this point, although it can still feel like mid-winter some days.

As the days get longer and the temperatures begin to rise, we get increasingly busy on the farm. The slumber of the short days begins to stir, and there is a little sign of life around fields and gardens. Winter does offer a brief respite from the almost relentless demands of the farm and our mission to grow as much as we can in what is really quite a short season – March to September.

Our propagation greenhouse, now over 100 years old, serves us well and will contribute toward raising over 30,000 plants that will ultimately go outside to the gardens or fields. As well as these nurtured and molly coddled babies, we also grow around 45,000 “peg plants”. These are grown in garden soil and transplanted to the field, where they will mature and become the food for late summer and winter cropping. The growing of these essential plants drives our whole farm cropping and over the course of the year we will be growing more than 100 different types of vegetables and of these types there will be several different varieties.

 

We have just received our seed potatoes for the coming season -1,250 kg of graded seed, grown to special health standards and checked by plant health at DEFRA and additionally certified as organically grown by the Soil Association. These will be placed in wooden trays for a month to allow them to “chit”. This breaks their dormancy and gets the shoots growing before they are planted into the field. This is our highest yielding crop and in an average year will produce in excess of 15 tonnes of very tasty potatoes.

We are indebted to those dedicated growers who produce our seeds for the future.