We’ve very quickly found ourselves halfway through our first year and beginning our first winter. That said, it’s not been very wintery: the sun still feels warm and there’s been so little rain I’ve been hand watering twice a week. People say that it changes after the solstice. Thanks to (largely) Alex’s efforts we’ve ended our 26th week with 57 garden beds outside the tunnel, covering 428m2. There’s probably 30m2 inside the tunnel (I must re-measure this). We (or he) are on track to finish during July, so we should be ready well ahead of next season. Our fruit and nut trees will be arriving soon, which is another piece of the plan. The main gap vis-a-vis the initial plan is probably chickens. But building an enclosure is going to be a lot slower than we would hope, even with our new skills in fence-building, shelf-making, tunnel assembly and irrigation. And it’s been surprisingly easy to swap vegetables for eggs. We’ll try to move it along during winter but it’s less important than the shed or washing station or berry patch or harvest plan or seed orders or fixing the mower or working on our sales plan… So it may still be some time before we get chickens!
One winter morning 
Five more beds in the top row
Thankfully given the long to-do list, the pace of regular farm work has slowed even further. Even though the seedlings don’t grow, the weeds seem to! Fortunately weeding is easy thanks to the compost and clever tools we have and it’s quite lovely on a sunny day. Some plants that we do like are also growing. The broad bean seeds that I thought were eaten by visitors have germinated with sprouts bursting out of the soil over the past week. And the lettuces that I puzzled about a month ago are starting to grow bigger, but curiously their decision seems to spread in a non-random way. We finally planted out the last cloves in our 10kg box of garlic that arrived two months ago. Almost six beds of garlic should be plenty for us and any future customers! While the weather was nice we also emptied out more of the potato bags with our patience rewarded by larger potatoes. Next up is to taste them all to decide which of the 10 varieties we should re-order for later in the year. Another job for the to-do list – luckily it’s winter!
I’ve accepted that I won’t be eating brussels sprouts on Monday! 
But the broad bean seeds weren’t all eaten by visitors after all!