8th June

Let's start with my highlight of the week.

We figured that the early potatoes should be ready by now, and pulled one to take a look

That was such a brilliant feeling to see the healthy potatoes underneath!!

We like to ensure that our customers are getting good quality, and about 3 hours later we had the taste control session. A bit of mint and shed loads of butter....

The next picture of the leftovers speaks for itself. They were absolutely blooming marvellous!

So we have a variety called Colleen which are the potatoes in the picture, and they are the first earlies. We have also grown Charlotte potatoes as second earlies. They are also ready, and we were surprised at how large some of the potatoes were. They also tasted great!

We do try any new veg before they go on sale, but otherwise tend to only eat what is left over after a market. I will be taking loads of these along to the Lido on Saturday, hopefully too many 😉

Regular readers will be thinking "blimey, this isn't like Dave to be so upbeat and positive". Don't worry, reversion to normal self is about to start...

When we moved to Saltdean three years ago, one of the things we were wanting was a view, especially one of the the sea. For me, I love the weather and watching good and bad and especially ugly weather moving across the sea.

But, with my veggie grower hat on; man alive, have we had too much weather lately?! In the last few weeks we've had frost, heatwave, wind, hail and rain!

If that wasn't enough, we have also had bugs and pests to deal with!

So on with the bad news section..

We had two and a half beds of green sprouting broccoli, and sold just two portions before it bolted in the heat 🤦‍♂️

That will soon be on the compost heap, and I will replace with a different broccoli, but I took a big gamble using 2½ beds with this one as it was really good last year

I got one and a half beds planted up with the replacement this week, and will get some more in the ground over the next few days.

Fortunately the purple sprouting is looking very promising, and should be 2-3 weeks away. We've got loads of that.

When we were harvesting for deliveries on Friday, at one point, I was picking beetroot, and Issy was harvesting our Cavolo Nero which was our new product for the week. She called me over, and as I got nearer I could see that she was really upset. The crop that was looking brilliant a few days before had been nibbled all over. We know that our customers would rather have a few holes in the leaves than a layer of carcinogenic pesticides, but these now looked ugly so we took the call to refund the orders and I will cut them right back and get some nematodes down to naturally deal with the flea beetle rascals!

The cauliflowers that we picked on Friday were great, But two days later, we see that some mice or voles have also thought the same, and tucked in.

Fortunately we have another crop not far behind.

But we move on from the issues, and I have previously mentioned (ok moaned about) being so busy that I need to prioritise. This week the priority has been getting transplants in the ground because I am about a week behind.

On Sunday, I got to the field, determined to focus on the job in hand, but the wind had decided to add some chores....

Plus 3 of the nettings were off

Oh, and the polytunnel cover was coming off

Three hours later, I got back to the plantings that I wanted to focus on

This week we have transplanted:

79 Broccoli

333 leek clumps

40 Dwarf french beans

215 Beetroot

67 Courgette (I'll take the same photo in a couple of weeks because it is amazing how quickly these grow

and 160 lettuce (photo taken before planting, aren't they beauties!!)

I need to spend quite a bit of time in the polytunnel this week as the toms and cucumbers are waiting in the wings, and won't be long at all. I'll take some photos for Monday next week