It really feels like summer now that we’ve started eating (and selling small amounts of) our tomatoes. The basil is getting taller, the beans have begun and we’ve got more snow peas and snap peas than we can sell at the moment so we’re freezing the “seconds”. Seedlings are growing easily and apparently we have 600 lettuce now! We have zucchini at last, though there’s no threat of the feared zucchini glut that we had worried about (before realising the extent of our compost woes). In a happy surprise the zucchini that are fruiting are “Ronde de Nice” (the French round ones) which is good when everyone else has zucchini. And we’re still drying broad beans, chamomile flowers and coriander seeds for later in the year.

The tricky aspect of this abundance is that bed space is at a premium (compounded by having taken some beds out of production for green manure to help fix the bad compost). It’s pushed Alex to accept my inter-planting suggestions so there’s even kohlrabi in between kale with some rogue but healthy-looking tomatoes (seeds we’d given up on germinated it seems). Having noticed that the oldest pathways have completely decomposed woodchips Alex has repurposed a path for growing kale. And I’ve accepted that broccoli plants need more time and space than we will have so I gave most of our seedlings away to friends (and received eggs and fermented carrots in return!). The podding peas made a tough decision easier by getting a definitively terminal case of powdery mildew. This was sad because customers really liked them and we even started selling small amounts to Tasmania’s best sushi chef but it will make space for spinach and spring onions.

Although it’s summer we recorded almost 60mm of rain falls between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Unfortunately for us the rain ended just after we finished harvesting but I think harvesting in the rain gives us a bit more farmer cred. The rain pushed woodchips around to unlikely places and we lost a little bit of our beds into the pathways but overall the no-dig beds held up quite well. Besides, the plants look to have loved the unusual combination of warmth and lots of rain, shooting upwards and in the case of the pumpkins, sprawling all over the path.

Alex remains obsessed by his compost. Daily temperature reports have eased off but every day there is piling, turning, sifting or spreading! We also scored 8-year-old compost from a friend who lives nearby, which was very exciting. It’s noticeably better than ours, with especially small particles and the earthy smell that all the experts talk about (often as they look like they want to eat it). After some debate we ended up mixing it with our own compost to stretch it out and topped up a few of the “good” beds. We’ll be watching closely over the next few weeks, happily silencing the “correlation doesn’t equal causation” mantra we learned at uni and crediting the compost with any changes!