This week’s weather brought us much-needed rain (around 50mm) and a sprinkling of snow, along with some foggy mornings and sunny afternoons. The plants were largely unscathed by the snow but one of the (two) avocado trees looks even sadder than a week ago. The unfriendly weather together with delays in our tree mulch delivery focussed us on indoor jobs for much of the week. We managed to (re)agree on key elements of the shed plan. (Until the rainwater tank decision partly unravelled later in the week as the environmental merits of stainless steel compared to plastic became murkier). The planning spreadsheet gained some more bytes. And we agreed on how to use the last space in the garden so that one sunny afternoon we (Alex) started one of our pumpkin mounds, which will circle the peach tree.

The system of starting seeds in the sunny laundry and shifting the trays to the tunnel after enough have germinated is now under way. We’re still learning about heat and light needs but we’re optimistic that the seedlings will be ok, especially now that the days are longer (10-hours now) and the tunnel gets more light because the sun is higher than the trees for longer. The first tomato seedlings have graduated to vine pots and we’ll start taking them outside in the daytime but bringing them inside at night. This small amount of coddling will hopefully be rewarded later. Another round of tomato seeds (with a confidence-inspiring name: “Siberian”) are warming up on the heat mat. The spring onion experiment continues: those with a lighter covering germinated fastest but two weeks later there is no visible difference. Hopefully at least one set will develop deep roots.

September and the associated harvest schedule are a week closer, which is exciting and worrying at the same time. It seems that we won’t match the spreadsheet, which was always a risk. We wanted to take four vegetables to a local shop in the first week of September. And we hoped to achieve that by growing six vegetables: lettuce, broad beans, spinach, rainbow chard, kale and radish. It looks like we could have three: lettuce, rainbow chard and a small amount of kale (with risks still around each of these). But maybe longer days will be enough to convince the radish seeds to take off and the broad beans plants to flower. The other overwintered crops are certainly good enough for us to eat but not attractive enough to sell. This degree of fait accompli four weeks before a deadline is certainly an adjustment: part of me is still looking for ways to just work more hours to resolve the issue like I could previously! But we can adjust a little: to give us a bigger buffer later in September we’ll sow extra radish seeds and lettuce this week. On a related note, we finally have a shortlist of farm names that we like – a vast improvement on the long list of names that we felt indifferent toward!