Farm News  |   May 30, 2025

Market Garden Field Notes from May

The Market Garden growers share their update from May…

Farmer preparing a veg bed with a large rake. She is wearing shorts and the weather is clearly very sunny and dry

The Good

Our beds are starting to fill up with veg again – it’s very joyful to see the green lines promising abundance. Each year as we grow into the fields more life is coming back to the land. We can really feel the land coming alive again, remembering the joy of complexity as the ecosystems respond to love, attention and diversification. Lots of new birds and bugs visible as we’re working in the gardens.

 

We’re delighted that our CSA membership for the year filled up really quickly – we’re looking forward to feeding our members lots of beautiful, nutritious veggies very soon.
Our land partners Rhyze have upped their mushroom production as they expand into their new polytunnel grow space, so more amazing mushrooms are available for the good folk of Edinburgh.
Mushrooms will be available for our CSA members again this year, along with eggs and sourdough bread from Granton Garden Bakery.

 

I’d you didn’t make it onto the CSA this year, produce will also be on the Thursday market stall – keep an eye on your emails/social media for confirmation of the start date!

 

The Bad

Every year brings its own challenges, which means strategies that worked last year need to be rethought for the new conditions. Whilst last year we battled with flooding and seemingly never ending wet grey days, this year it’s been incredibly dry and hot. Pleasant to enjoy, but tough on getting plants to germinate and thrive – we’ve been constantly wrangling sprinklers around the fields and trying to keep polytunnel temperatures below 40 degrees!! It also means we’re very worried for the cover crops we sowed into the top and middle field. The seeds were planted deeper than normal to try to get them some moisture, but with consistent lack of rain, they’ll struggle to get going.

Two maps of the British Isles showing stark contrast in rainfall in April 2024 versus 2025. In the colour code, the blue spectrum means 'wet' and the orange/yellow means dry - the darker the colour, the more extreme. The 2024 map is all blue, with the darker colours over central Scotland and north west England. The 2025 map is almost all orange to yellow, apart from the south west of England and west Wales.

April rainfall comparison from the BBC website

The Ugly

Every condition usually has upsides as well as down. We had hoped the cold winter and dry spring would have reduced slug pressure, and it has for some of our beds. However, our Brassica block (kale, cauliflowers, cabbages, sprouts and broccoli) has been absolutely RAVAGED. We transplanted around 2,300 plants to this field block and around 80-90% have been eaten by slugs.

 

To put these numbers in context: we sow each seed by hand in soil blocks, care for them for around a month in the propagation tunnel, before hand planting them into the fields. There’s also work to prepare the field block (ground works, soil amendments etc) and, once transplanted, crops are netted and watered. So we lost the cost of seeds, cost and materials of labour, lost time (now we’ll be two months behind production schedule for brassicas) and also the potential value of the final crop. Some of these crop multiple times within a season, and our forecast sales, based on last year’s yield and prices, had us aiming to make about £6,000 from this block.

 

We’re regrouping, sowing more and trying new strategies for mitigating slug impact, but it means down the line in the season things will be later than planned, or scarcer for our CSA members and market stall customers.

 

The ‘ugly reality’ in farming is a lot of farmers are making a very precarious living year-to-year. Many also have to stick to one crop and grow at a scale they can sell to supermarkets (which means it’s got to be one specific variety, all a uniform size and shape, and not nibbled!). If that one crop fails, it could be ruinous. This precarious situation puts huge pressure on the farmer to use pesticides to try to secure their livelihood for one more year. So we have global corporations who produce the agrotoxins making huge profits, while their products cause long-term damage to our ecosystems, threatening the harvests and even the liveability of the future, and many farmers struggle to make a living in the present.

Click here to read more on our news page about the growing response to the state of the UK food system

 

At Lauriston Agroecology Farm, we’re grateful to be farming in community with you who can appreciate the challenges and support us through things like our CSA scheme to share and mitigate the risks. We also have funders who understand the need to invest in the transition to agroecology, and for landworkers to have liveable wages. So our crop losses hurt, but we can continue to work for the future as well as the present.

Newsletter Signup

Lauriston Farm Road, Edinburgh EH4 5EX  |  How to get here
Edinburgh Agroecology Co-operative (EAC) Community Interest Company (CIC)
Terms  |  Privacy  |  Cookies
Website by Urwin Studio