Growing Fast
At the busiest point of the season!
The summer solstice is now less than 12 days away, and everything on the farm seems to know it. Crops are growing fast, weeds are growing even faster, and we’re doing our best to keep up!
Our first-ever garlic harvest commenced on Friday. It might also be our last… lol. Whoever said garlic was easy clearly never tried pulling hundreds of them out of hard ground. Harvesting felt more like a tug of war with the soil. The garlic definitely did not get the message that’s is time to leave!
They don’t look quite as polished as the garlic you’d find in the supermarket, but wow, do they taste good. They’ve been grown without any sprays at all, which is probably why the plants died off a little earlier than expected. Nature always has a way of keeping us humble.
When you get yours home, give them a little clean-up and let us know what you think. They may not win any beauty contests, but we’re pretty confident they’ll win on flavour.
We also had our first proper soaking of rain last night, which was fantastic news. Most fruit and vegetables are made up largely of water, so a good drenching at this time of year is worth its weight in gold.
Mind you, farming has a funny way of moving your worries around. Yesterday afternoon I was standing in a field wondering if the soil might literally blow away as we finished sowing our final spring carrots. Fast forward a few hours and now I’m worrying the rain may have caused the soil to cap over. That’s when the surface goes hard and crusty, making it difficult for tiny carrot seedlings to push through.
You definitely have to be willing to lose a few battles in farming. Right now, at this busy stage of the season, I’ve probably been hanging on a bit too tightly and trying to grow everything perfectly for you. The reality is that nature doesn’t do perfect - it does surprises.
So, I’m taking the rain as a reminder to relax a little, trust the process, and remember that farming is part skill, part luck, and part learning not to panic every time the weather changes.
Your Veg Box Farmer - David Fryer
