Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

It may be the midst of winter but it is incredible what vegetables we are still harvesting from the polytunnel!! The picture below shows greens, a leek, two carrots, several sprouts and part of a butternut squash (the latter was picked several weeks ago but we still have a fair few left). And we are happy to report that all were cooked and eaten alongside a delicious pork chop (from our own pigs) a mere two hours ago... There are also quite a lot of parsnips in the polytunnel and the beginnings of some purple sprouting broccoli. We hope our brassicas and root crops will take us through to the early spring after which we should be able to start eating our salads, asparagus and some early greens (although there will probably be a bit of a gap).
The potatoes in the second photo are 'chitting': this means we are exposing them to the light in order to encourage the eyes of these seed potatoes to shoot. There is much debate about whether to chit or not, perhaps an experiment we need to set up on the Relaxed smallholding to see if it does make any difference. We will leave them to chit in the light for a few weeks waiting for the soil to warm up before we plant them in the beds we prepared a couple of weeks ago. With any luck we will be eating all the resulting new potatoes by May/June!! We still have several sacks left from this year's crop and are keeping our fingers crossed they will last until we harvest these new ones.