Spring Into Action!

Spring into action!

Martin wielding his tape measure and Pippa her Hori Hori

This week brings the Spring Equinox — the point in the year when we begin to receive more hours of light than darkness. As a result, the Northern Hemisphere starts to warm up, blossoms begin to burst, green shoots emerge, and life returns to the fields and hedgerows around us. The welcome appearance of the sun this week has really helped us feel this seasonal shift, putting a spring in our step as the pace on the market garden quickens.

This transition into spring also means we are in a race against time to finish the last of the winter DIY and maintenance jobs before the demands of the growing season require our full attention. Martin has been busy with his toolbox — extending our hardening-off benches, building a new cardboard store, and making various other refinements to ensure everything runs smoothly as the garden gets busier.

Broad beans in the polytunnel intercropped with radish soon to be harvested

All the work we’ve put into sowing seeds in the propagation tunnel has paid off, and we now have hundreds (if not thousands!) of seedlings ready to plant out. This Tuesday marked our first full day of planting: Chinese cabbage, summer cabbage, kohlrabi, and salad turnips all went into our freshly prepared no-dig beds. Elsewhere on the market garden, we planted salads, broad beans, lettuce, and sugar snap peas. We’re able to trial these earlier spring crops thanks to our no-dig system, which allows us to get onto the land and plant out at a time when it would otherwise still be too wet to cultivate using larger machinery.

This year we’re putting a lot of energy into making the most of every bit of growing space we have, using methods such as intercropping. This involves sowing quick-growing crops — like radishes, spring onions, and turnips — alongside main crops such as broad beans or sugar snap peas (as seen above). The idea is that the quick crops are harvested just as the main crops begin to need more space to grow. Through these methods, along with earlier plantings, we hope to increase both the diversity and quantity of our produce going into the veg bags much earlier in the season. Here’s to a spring filled with fresh, delicious veggies!