25/08/2026
Beautiful carrot flowers!
No, unfortunately these aren't meant to be for seed. This is a 40 metre bed of early carrots that were meant for our veg boxes. The hard-baked ground has meant they are cemented in and far too difficult to dig out (my poor dad was trying to dig them with a crow bar last month). We've not been able to invest in expensive irrigation systems yet, and we are on mains water on a meter so we have to be very mindful of our usage.
And now, with the extreme heat and drought the carrots are all gone to seed.
After some rain the next succession are just about okay to dig, though the voles have had a good go at them.
Last year was definitely the year of the caterpillar, this is for sure the year of the vole. This does mean that the raptors are having a good time of it. We had a kestrel over today, and there's lots of barn owl activity. I even saw a heron swallow a vole the other week, and it's been stalking around the fields for months now.
Still lots of veg coming from the market garden. The trick to our resilience is definitely diversity- diversity of crops, and timings with successions, and diversity of habitat and ecology that keeps everything in balance.
