28th September

The last sowing of the year!!

This is Winter Density lettuce which I will prick out this week with a view to transplanting it to the field in late October.

I have an earlier crop which I will be transplanting in a couple of weeks. Hopefully these will be ready to harvest early November to replace the current crop of lettuce.

I also have some Winter Purslane which is still to be transplanted, and a load of garlic gloves that still need planting, then I'm done with getting stuff in the ground until the new year!

Actually, although the picture above is the last vegetable sowing of the year, I may continue with microgreens on a weekly basis. Here are some which will be ready for Friday:

I said that I may continue with these because I may not !

I have to grow a number of different types of microgreens to fulfil the "nutrition rich" mixure, and in total I sow 20 trays per week.

At one point, I was selling 20-25 portions of microgreens per week, which covered the cost of production and gave me a small profit. I figured that this would increase as sales increased.

However, it has gone the other way, and last week I only sold 3 portions online and 3 at the Lido on Saturday.

I will continue with these for a few weeks as I already have the seeds and compost etc, but it may not be feasible to continue.

With the vegetables, I believe that our challenge is to encourage people to buy from us rather than elsewhere.

However, with the microgreens, I believe we have to firstly sell the concept and then additionally sell the product.

As I say in the email, any feedback and opinions will be gratefully received.

I mentioned last week that I had decided to make an exception with maincrop potatoes, and buy some in from elsewhere to cover the period when we can't offer any of our own. My theory was firstly that we can't have a vegetable offering without potatoes, and secondly that if people have to go to the supermarket to buy their potatoes, then they may choose to get their other veg at the same time, rather than go to us.

The jury's out on that decision

My opinion is that they are nowhere near as good as ours, but they taste good once bits have been chopped off!

Again, any feedback would be welcome.

An update on our own potatoes is that we have a crop of both Charlotte and Bambino potatoes which are growing very well

I couldn't resist the temptation and pulled one today

Keys included to give a scale.

My plan shows these being ready from the week of 16th November. Gut feel says that we will have been feasting on these for a few weeks by then.

A positive at last eh!! 😊

It would be nice to only focus on positives, but I always said that if I was going to do a blog then I would do it honestly, with warts and all!

So this week, the mood is low as we are challenged with the following dilemma:

We have lots of lovely customers, who are ordering from us, or visiting the Lido on a periodic basis. How do we change that so that those lovely people are ordering and visiting on a regular rather than periodic basis.

Thoughts and opinions would be very welcome please

We even had tomatoes left over unsold this week. I have cut all these plants back, and cut down on the watering so they should continue to ripen nicely over the next few weeks, and they are tasting great.

It is sad to see them go to waste 😢

So apologies, the blog is more of a request for feedback rather than an update with lots of nice photos this week, but I will leave you with the first photos of our chicory which is full of promise and freshly weeded today 😃😃