August 2025 Video Diary
04 August 2025
How well have our first early potatoes, Francis and Elland performed
05 August 2025
Damage from storm Floris
On Monday, 04 August 2025, we were battered with gale force winds. The winds were unusually strong for the beginning of August. It was windy again on Tuesday, but we headed to the allotment to water the tomato plants in the plot greenhouse. I was rather surprised by the amount of damage resulting from the August gale force winds.
12 August 2025
Weed of the year- Fat Hen – weeding our leeks
Almost all our beds seem to have been infested with Fat Hen this year. In the beds we’ve watered, it has taken over and even grown well among the potatoes, which haven’t been watered. You can see how it has grown amongst our leeks. I also dug up some of our Elfe potatoes, and while the crop wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it might be, it was abysmal.
14 August 2025
Abysmal crop of Elfe potatoes and a surprising sweetcorn recovery
I decided to lift this bed of potatoes. The haulms of some had almost disappeared. If you can’t locate the potato root, digging them up is much harder. To our surprise, our sweetcorn is making a good recovery from the damage inflicted by storm Floris. Besides more watering, we managed some harvesting too.
17 August 2025
We trialled some Kingsman potatoes- how did they perform in the drought
It’s not been a good year for trialling any crops due to this year’s drought. However, it was time to lift and find out if we had any potatoes on our Kingsman crop. This is the first time we have grown them.
18 August 2025
Clearing up plum tree debris day 1
After storm Floris brought down a branch of our plum tree a few weeks ago, I thought it was about time I got rid of the debris. It turned out to be a bigger branch than I thought.
19 August 2025
Clearing up plum tree debris day 2
A second afternoon, clearing up the debris from our damaged plum tree. Could my bigger chainsaw cut up the remaining branch?
21 August 2025
Cutting cabbage & cauliflower plus some Elfe potatoes
I decided to lift a few more potatoes. The variety is Elfe, which normally does very well for us. However, in this year’s drought, they haven’t been very good. We also managed to harvest a few other things, as well as clearing this year’s broad bean bed of its plant remnants and weeds.
24 August 2025
Potting strawberry runners and our best potato crop this year
We are planning a new strawberry bed for next year. To get started, we are going to see if we can grow some plants from this year’s strawberry runners. We might buy a couple of different varieties if we are successful at getting these runners to grow. Last year, our Sagitta potatoes produced the best crop of the year and once again they have produced an excellent crop even in this drought affected year.
25 August 2025
This year’s potato harvest is completed and watering weeds
This year’s potato harvest is completed with a surprising crop to finish off with. We also started preparing some ground for planting out sweet Williams.
30 August 2025
4 days to plant sweet Williams due to the drought.
It took us four afternoons at the allotment to plant out our sweet Williams. The ground is so dry due to the lack of rain that we initially needed to water the bed just to get the weeds out.
30 August 2025
Ruby’s game at Fountains Abbey – filmed using Insta 360 X5
We decided to try out our Insta 360 X5 camera at Fountains Abbey to video Ruby’s game of chase. The advantage of a 360 camera is that it films everything around you. There’s no need to follow Ruby with the camera as she will be in shot. It’s then possible to choose exactly what you want to see in frame using software when the footage has been downloaded. The camera didn’t bother Ruby as she was only interested in a game of chase.