Posted on Tue, Aug 04, 2009
The time has come for a holiday, August is a busy month but it does provide enough breathing space for you to take time off. The plants are all in, the grass is cut and all that remains is weeding and planting out a few late salad crops, so i'm off for two weeks and leaving it all in the capable hands of my two faithful co-workers. Hopefully they will find time to write some things on here.
We had a few big jobs to finish and they are getting done, the potatoes all got dug up, we harvest over 100kg from what was planted in April and there are still a couple of rows left. The onions are pulled and waiting to be picked up and bagged with the help of the Early Years class (who were also helping with the potatoes). They are a class of ten, so we can really get lots done when the energy is channeled into the right places.
We are moving more into spraying the Horn Silica prep now to help the forming and ripening of biodynamic fruit and vegetables which will be harvested from now until the autumn. The carrots are looking and tasting amazing and i'm getting quite excited about digging them up in a month.
Our brassicas have had a really hard time, first pigeons, then some fungus and now its flea beetles attacking them. I hope they pull through all this stress. A lesson learnt there - we should have planted them a little later and watered more when we had such a hot and dry spell. I'll have it sorted by next year with a thorough crop rotation and more planning into design and layout over the winter.
Next year is coming round the corner fast, i'm looking at ordering the over wintering garlic and onions and planning where they will go. This means I have to plan the space I plan to grow on. It's a hard one to make at the moment as it's unclear when a tractor and rotavator might arrive so I'm not sure how much land is realistic to grow on. I'm assuming it'll all be fine so I'll go all out and grow a large crop of onions and garlic with a positive frame of mind.
I've learnt a lot this year about what I should focus on next year and how much the kitchen uses, when. I'm looking forward to putting all the lessons into practice from September and seeing the results. It'll be a long process to get everything right but so long as there are always contributions coming to the kitchen from the biodynamic garden, and the helpers are happy i'm doing the right thing.
Happy Holidays!