2014/15 - Wet, Wet, Wet

And so it continued. We had a good year, we built what we could, we had a bad year, we shed a tear or three, consolidated and rebuilt, there were wet wet summers, winds that tore off tunnel roofs, and then there was 2014/15 when it rained and rained and then rained a whole lot more, from November until April ..... That year was hard. We didn't get anything in the ground until May and that year the new 'big' polytunnel on its slightly higher ground saved the day once by giving a small salad crop that gave us a trickle of income and it also allowing me to sow millions of modules which grew away in the sheltered warmth until there was dry enough ground.

And then the sun shone! It was a wonderful year for growing and the amazing resilience of our nurtured ground shone through, yes soil structure was damaged, yes we'd lost a lot of our worms and much of the available fertility had been washed away but as the soil warmed in the spring, the locked up nutrients got working and we worked the ground when we could. The water had come up from below, not over land so that summer the water table remained high and once the plants got established they didn’t need watering and I only needed to use additional watering to get seeds going in the very hottest weeks of July and August.