Our Story

It's been a very challenging first quarter of the year what with the rain and high winds. Our market garden site is in an exposed position and we have heavy clay soil. As a consequence of the wind we spent much of the winter chasing tarpaulin sheets across the field and re-laying them! The hard core track to our site gets very boggy in the winter and so we put 4 more tons of hard core on to lift it a little - although we still couldn't drive on it until March.

The growing beds were soaking wet until mid-April and we could do very little in the way of weeding, however we did add lots of waste mushroom substrate to improve the soil and lift the beds. As ever we remain amazed at the number of worms in the soil! We also brought some new shorter beds into production which now have potatoes and onions planted.

We've planted out two willow hedges running north-south across the site. primarily to serve as windbreaks (the prevailing wind is from the west), and we hope they will soak up some of the winter water and also provide a source of woodchip and canes in future years. Willow doesn't like to compete with weeds while it's getting established so we have planted them through a weed-suppressing membrane. To keep costs down we purchased 1000 10cm willow sticks - so it's going to take a couple of years for them to become truly useful.

Our next projects are to rotavate a lot more of the site and create beds, and to get the two remaining polytunnels erected. Should keep me out of mischief for a while!

Thanks to the relatively dry weather at the turn of the year we were back on site in mid-January. As expected, there was a lot of winter debris to clear and general site maintenance activities kept us busy right through the first quarter.

Our resident beekeeper left over winter as all of his bees had died, and we welcomed a new beekeeper with four beehives.

In May - and in between what seemed almost continual rain - we erected our third polytunnel. It’s slightly longer than the existing two at 30’ and we purchased another two which we will put up in the autumn when we have time again and the ground is softer to dig the trenches for.

The rain resulted in the grass quickly growing to a height that couldn’t be strimmed so we hired a rough cut mower (basically a heavyweight lawn mower that can mow rough fields) for four days and tried to get the grass back under control - with mixed success. We have tarpaulins down on some of the area where that we’re not actively growing to suppress the grass, weeds, thistles and brambles so that when we are ready to create beds in those areas it will be a lot less work - and we will have done it without the use of any chemicals.

Apart from the occasional visit between downpours we didn’t get seriously back to working on the site until mid-March 2022. Lots of further clearing culminated in hiring a BCS rotavator for a week to rotavate some block of land to grow on. Unfortunately, the evening that we finished rotavating Sarah fell and broke her arm very badly and is still (July) recovering.

In April, we finished building the hard core pads, topped them with sleepers and finally got the shipping container on site. We also welcomed two bee hives! In May we worked on preparing the ground for the first polytunnel and finished erecting it in mid-June.

In between we trenched and planted out an asparagus bed, and planted beans, strawberries, onions, garlic, and potatoes. Since the end of June, we’ve planted peas, chard, beetroot, carrots, parsnip, turnips, kale and cabbage.

Despite several attempts to get a contractor interested we still have no mains water, so we have to bring it to site from home every day in 25 litre jerry cans. If there is an upside to this, it’s the fact that it makes us water very sparingly!

Keeping on top of the perennial weeds and grasses is a never-ending challenge. We’re trying a mix of growing methods: digging out tranches and filling with compost; strimming close to the ground then covering with cardboard and compost; and rotavating and then covering with a tarpaulin to suppress new weed growth. It will doubtless take several rounds of weeding over the first few years to break the back of the weed cycle, and minimal digging and tilling should reduce the amount of seed that comes back to the surface to germinate.

In late July and August 2022, the site focus will be preparing the ground for the second polytunnel and getting it erected, experimenting with some cover crops and green manures, keeping weeds and grass in check with strimmer and fork.

I’ll finish by giving a huge thank you to Andy, Alan, Graham and Helen who have all volunteered their time to help us achieve the above. If you have a few hours every so often and would like to help us on site, please get in touch. Many hands won’t make the work light, but they will certainly help us to get established!