It’s been a slow start to the season (officially the coldest spring for 50 years), and our harvesting is at least a month behind schedule. It’s also been very dry – on the one hand it’s great to be able to get our tractors onto the fields (what a comparison to last year…), but on the other hand we’ve had to spend a lot of time and money irrigating.

We’re mid-way through planting and sowing, with a lot of crops in the ground already: 60,000 leeks, 4,000 celery, 5,000 lettuces, 3,000 squash, and over an acre of beetroot and spinach. The first crop to make it through the cold spring is radish, and soon enough we should have fresh garlic, lettuce and true spinach ready to sell. Having spent so much time growing the crops it’s a great feeling to finally start harvesting again – great to have some income again too!

We also have several visits to the farm coming up, with both adult and primary school educational visits scheduled for June and July. One of these visits, organised by Co-operatives 2020 and celebrating Co-operatives Fortnight, still has spaces left – Tuesday 25th, 2-4pm. Click here for the booking form. With so much going on, it’s a great time of year to see the farm.

We’d also like to ask you to support Manchester Veg People, the co-op we sell produce through. They are running a Crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for new equipment which is much needed if the business is to grow. Please donate! Anything from a fiver will help the cause!

We start by flail mowing and then follow with the plough. The flail mower minces up
the vegetation so that after the ground is turned over by the plough the plant material
incorporates quicker into the soil – a useful bit of kit. As well as the dry weather,
we’ve been very pleased to have so many frosts, which have helped break up the
ploughed ground really well.

We will soon use a power harrow to improve the tilth on the growing beds, and
hopefully fit in a couple of weed strikes to kill off early flushes of weed seedlings
before our crops go in the ground. First in will be leeks, lettuce, spinach and radish.

In the meantime, we are just trying to finish off the last of our winter jobs – organising
our newly extended building, maintaining and adjusting machinery, rolling up nets
and gapping up hedges, amongst other things.

After a disastrous year last year, the drier weather, longer days and brighter
sunshine have definitely raised our hopes for a good season ahead. The early signs
of spring are already there – the lapwings are back, the hares are more active,
and it won’t be long before the first swallows arrive. Let’s hope the good weather
continues: everything seems possible when the sun shines!

What a year it’s been. We know we all sound like stuck records, but it really has been a diabolical year of weather. Every farmer we speak to – be they organic, non-organic, dairy, livestock, arable or growers like us – has said the same thing. It’s been the worst year in living memory, and probably much further beyond.

It was the wettest summer since records began (around 100 years ago). Apparently the levels of sunlight in June were akin to those normally experienced in January. September brought the worst storm for 30 years. Slug populations have apparently been 200-300% higher than normal. So far this year we’ve had over 50 inches of rain. And only four periods of dry conditions that we can remember: March, 10 days in May, a week or so in September, and some of October.

Obviously there’s been a lot of areas hit harder than us – with burst rivers and floods – but the volume and persistence of the rain we’ve had this year has made our business of growing vegetables extraordinarily hard. The trouble is, for anyone like us who’s growing on a field-scale, we rely on getting tractors on to the land week-in week-out for a good six months of the year – between April and September. With a year of rain like we’ve had this year, you just can’t get the tractors onto the land without them getting stuck or seriously damaging your soil.

So we ended up hand-planting tens of thousands of seedlings, crawling on our hands and knees, with our fingers twice as wide as normal because they were caked in mud. It was slow (and expensive) work. Weeding was virtually impossible all year. Docks have thrived. Slugs were rampant. And with low temperatures and low levels of sunlight, plant growth has been really poor.

To top things off, what should’ve been our best crop – leeks – has been ruined by a drainage issue that was caused by someone else. Leeks are our staple, but we’ve stopped cropping them already.

All in all, we’ve really struggled. We estimate our yields (and income) are down by around 65%, which has crippled our cashflow and makes the future look very uncertain. Where do we go from here?

Between November and January, we do our crop planning for the following season – normally a pretty hopeful and positive time of year, speaking to customers, getting feedback and projected demand for the season ahead. Frankly we’re approaching this year’s crop planning feeling exhausted, demoralised, unsure of ourselves and our business.

The only brightness in our otherwise gloomy world is positive news from our customers. They seem to be doing well, holding their own amidst the difficult economy; some are even growing sales. We’re really lucky to have these customers, and to have ample demand for our vegetables. We can only hope that the weather is good next year, so we can meet that demand, make some income and scrape this business off the floor and back on to its feet.