Speaking of leafy greens, at this time of year our chard, spinach and lettuce are all outdoors, (they’d practically cook undercover, even well-irrigated employees get pretty wilty if they’re in the glasshouses for hours during a scorcher!). This frees up space for green manures. No these aren’t lime, pea or mint coloured livestock byproducts that we buy in, they are plants we grow, not to harvest, but to suppress weeds, protect the soil from erosion and build fertility. We’ve been using a mixture of buckwheat, fava (or ‘field’ beans) and phacelia which we’ll incorporate back into the earth and leave to decompose. Each of this trio play a different role; 

• Buckwheat isn’t a wheat at all, it’s a relative of rhubarb and sorrel and if you’ve only seen it in flour form, its seeds are triangular. Perhaps you have toasted them to add to salads or cooked them liked rice for some Eastern European kasha? Buckwheat is one of the quickest growing green manure crops, meaning it produces a large amount of nourishing matter before we have to mow it in so new crops can get established ahead of coming temperature drops. (The radicchios which will bring bright, bitter crunch to the colder months are currently in our propagation house preparing themselves to unfurl an amazing array of Barbie-pink or speckly leaves).    
• Fava beans are wonderful for making the nitrogen which all plants require readily available, they do this by partnering with a bacteria called rhizobia, which can convert atmospheric nitrogen into organic forms. You can actually see evidence of this amazing chemical process in visible bobbles (or nodules) that form on the roots. The fava bean tops are also super tasty in our salad mix so look forward to finding them in your bags in a couple of weeks.     
• Finally, phacelia has one of the top twenty honey-producing flowers as well as being attractive to hoverflies (and hoverflies eat aphids!). It also has an extensive root system which improves soil structure and dense foliage to crowd out any lurking nettles or other cheeky interlopers.
• 
  

We’ve also been experimenting with ‘undersowing’ which is a similar idea to green manures but done alongside crops not instead of them. It can be implemented everywhere from full-scale fields of cereals to smaller areas where you might utilise polypropylene sheeting, which we made the decision to stop using due to micro-plastics, as a suppressant. Our aubergines, for example, currently have a lush carpet of trefoil and clover underneath them so that when you look down from above the scene is reminiscent of a forest floor and canopy of trees. We scatter all these seeds by hand, and while nowadays the word ‘broadcasting’ is more likely to bring television or radio to mind, that is of course its original meaning and it’s an activity we all enjoy. There’s something affirming about pacing up and down flicking out tiny, shiny, hard-cased things from which newness will spring. The pace and gesture can’t have changed since the first humans did it, and none of us need to forensically trace back our family trees to twig our ancestors were all land workers at some point. In modernity it’s quite unusual to tend to veg as a vocation, rather than a hastily squeezed in hobby, indeed when we visited a local primary school recently not a single pupil wanted to be a grower when they grow up, prompting us to ask who is going to feed all the footballers and singers? Farming is not presented as an attractive or respected career. We don’t all need to be fully self-sufficient to create a resilient, fair food system though, and we’re here to help you bridge the gap between contemporary existence and eating (and living) in tune with nature. 

On that note, at this point in the annual cycle, late summer, it feels a smidgeon less frantic than the beginning. Our big field-scale plantings are all in the ground and it’s a pleasure to see the world around us maturing and mellowing. The neighbouring farm's fields are filling with hale bales like curls of butter and there’s a wild plum in a overlooked corner that we’ve been meaning to drag a ladder up to and inspect…

We hope you’ve been doing whatever you look forward to doing in the summer holidays; whether festival-going or trading in local pebbles for somewhere with enough sand to build castles.