The month of May

Fleece waiting to go on early strawberries

The month of May on the farm is a busy time: the crops are growing like crazy, getting ready for their time in the sun. It’s also the month before we open for pick your own, so we’re busy dusting down the scales and mowing the pathways.

The strawberries go from blossom to green fruit in this month. We lay the straw under the plants at this time so that the fruit is protected from the earth below it. Frost can be a big a problem once the blossoms and fruit are formed – just one night of frost can wipe out whole fields of baby fruit. If they forecast a frost, we cover the fields in huge rolls of a fleece material to protect them, and uncover them again the next morning.

The gooseberries start to form in May too, so we cover the gooseberry bushes in netting to protect the fruit from pigeons and other hungry birds.

Broad bean blossomDepending on when they were sown, the broad beans are growing tall and some forming very early pods.

This May was unprecedented for it’s torrential and continuous rain. This delayed much of what we planned to do on the farm: we sowed the sweetcorn and sunflower seeds much later than usual, and next year’s strawberry plants spent a staggering seven weeks in the cold store before the ground dried out enough for us to plant them. We hope that they’ll survive despite this.

The raspberry fruit doesn’t form until later in the summer and so we hope that they won’t be adversely effected by the rain. On the contrary, the raspberry canes are looking lush and healthy!

 

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