Our main weed this year is kale which has self seeded everywhere. We have saved plenty of seed for sowing and there are enough little plants to start a kale farm. Occasionally one appears in a helpful location, most of them are being pulled up though. I’ve just collected pods from last years dazzling blue kale, hopefully before it self seeded everywhere. The kale from our own seed is growing particularly well, I planted it earlier than is sensible and it hasn’t minded at all.
The net tunnel is much improved on last year although it’s still the weediest location on the croft. The net tunnel is the one area where I’ve done proper “no-dig.” This method works perfectly well for getting plants to grow but I think it’s weedier. Even our hot composter doesn’t kill weed seeds. For those who aren’t up on trendy gardening methods, “no-dig” involves spreading compost or manure on the soil surface rather than digging it in. One of the advantages of this method is meant to be weed suppression. The soil underneath is undisturbed so weed seeds aren’t brought to the surface and any weed seeds in the compost are supposed to have been killed off by the temps in the compost bin. That’s the theory anyway. On our croft the opposite seems to be true. A bit of ploughing always knocks back the weeds and a nice spell in a hot composter really gets the weeds off to a good start!
Everything has really taken off in the last week – the French beans are nearly at the top of their strings, the courgettes plants are enormous and all the potatoes are up. There are little baby tomatoes in the Polycrub. I think French beans will be on the menu in a few weeks. The first batch are Cobra green beans. I’ve also planted yellow and purple beans. Last year the French beans were a casualty of the vole menace. The early ones were OK but by September the evil furry creatures had chewed through almost every French bean stem they could find. I also had a bit of a problem with red spider mite in the Autumn. This year there are a lot of actual spiders in the Polycrub, I’m hoping they might enjoy a diet of red spider mite. I am planning to relocate these helpful spiders to the corners, I appreciate the part spiders play in a healthy eco system but I don’t really want them on my face. Currently they are spinning little webs across the French beans, right where my head will be when it’s picking time!
This week’s Croft Shares will have salad leaves, proper garlic, onion onions (as opposed to Spring onions), mange tout/sugar snaps, kale and courgettes or broccoli. The broccoli isn’t growing very speedily so there may be a few weeks of broccoli or…….
Last week I added some photos of recent progress to our facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/EllasCroft/.