Brassicas!

Over the last few years I think we’ve perfected the art of growing brassicas. You can see from these photographs the only way we’ve found of keeping nearly all their pests at bay, though not all. First on the ground, is a black woven weed fabric, with planting holes cut out at spacings that suit the types of brassica we grow. This speeds up the planting process as no marking out is needed. This fabric also prevents weeds growing up around the various plants. Then over that we hang scaffold netting, to keep the butterflies and pigeons off. Initially we used to have a complex triangular framework of bamboo sticks to suspend the netting over, and weighted it to the ground with pebbles. This took so long to create, and was a pain to crawl through to pick stuff, last year we used vertical sticks with cane toppers. This worked until a local fox decided to jump all over the netting whilst trying to chase what we can only assume was a vole. This year we’re using our large amount of metal fence spikes (used for temporary chicken mesh fencing), and hopefully they’ll do the job. The only real pests we can get now are slugs and white fly. I learned one year in particularly heavy rain, that white fly can be hosed off, to keep their numbers down. With this system we can hose through the netting to try and get some off, but we end up suffering the odd fly here and there for the sake of no chemicals. Slugs we can combat either by dropping a handful of sand around the base of each brassica, and/or the new organic slug pellets using ferric sulphite.

We’ve left planting spaces on the left for spring cabbage which we’ll plant out later in the year, and winter cauliflowers, which are about to be sown in pots, also to be planted out later in the year.