Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Our autumn tidy up in the polytunnel is now well under way with the remains of the butternut squash, courgette and pumpkin plants being piled up (see photos below) ready to be dumped on the compost heap. Later this week we will be removing the last of the tomatoes and digging up the final potatoes, we have been really lucky this year in NOT suffering from blight (our blog from described how we thought we had blight on the tomatoes but it turned out to be moles eating the roots of the plant and making the leaves wilt and the plants die off). This means we can safely put the foliage of these plants on our compost heap. It is really quite important that diseased plants, vegetables and fruits do NOT have a chance to infect any plants the following year - so any that are diseased should be burnt rather than composted.
It is also important to clear the land as much as possible of root crops such as potatoes in order NOT to encourage pests and diseased specific to that plant to develop year on year - for example, we will be planting onions next year where this year's potatoes were as these tow plants DON'T share any common pests or diseases.
We are still harvesting carrots, courgettes (from three later plants), leek, peppers and parsnips and hope to start ordering seeds for the new year one evening this month.