September / October 2025 Newsletter

September / October 2025

Croeso to all our customers and thank you for buying a veg box from us! Here is a quick update from us about what has been going on here at Hooma Hu.

It has been a good year for veg this year. After the near disastrous year of 2024, we are extremely happy to have a year like this one come along. The weather has been near perfect for veg growing throughout the summer, lovely hot spells but still getting enough of a shower here and there to see the plants through. The crops have been very happy and the harvests have been very full; we must have harvested over one thousand cucumbers along with dozens of other types of veg. For many weeks we spent almost a whole day just picking veg, with many 6am starts through out the week to get an early harvest in before the day fully begins.

So, we do hope you have been enjoying the harvests with us. There are things that worked well this year that we had never tried before. Pointed Green Peppers were a new one, also runner beans! Kale was wonderful early on, plus so many Lettuces, Chard and an overwhelming amount of Beans!  We also had a few crops that didn’t preform so well, the red Cherry Toms never really took off (the yellow ones did great however). I think the issue with red tomatoes came from us planting them too close to the Rainbow Chard. We are always trying different combinations of plants in a single veg bed, it is called inter cropping and when it works well you can have two different crops growing in the same bed amongst each other and both preforming very well whilst saving space. This time however I think the Chard got the best of the Tomatoes. Overall though the veg grew very well and you will still be finding the tail ends of the summer crops in your boxes now.

Although we had a great year it wasn’t fully without its challenges. Whilst last year we were completely over run by an army of tiny slugs this year we had a new army to contend with, caterpillars! The slugs seemed to have almost completely disappeared this year and the numbers of toads have now increased dramatically. This being related to slugs because toads are a natural predator of slugs. We are finding them all over the veg garden this year, much to the delight of our daughter we are also finding baby toads too! So, the toads seem to have the slugs under control but we certainly were not prepared for the caterpillars... all of a sudden in mid-August we had a massive influx of Cabbage White Caterpillars. You may be familiar with the Cabbage White Caterpillar, if you are not then I can tell you that they love to eat plants in the cabbage family (brassicas) hence the name. That means Cabbage, Sprouts, Kale, Broccoli, Cauliflower are all seriously on their menu. They arrive via the Cabbage White butterfly which lays its eggs on these plants, then they hatch out and get munching. They can totally destroy whole plants overnight! We came to the field one morning to find them all over our brassicas, the kale mainly. Quite a lot of the kale got munched but with the help of a friendly regular volunteer and our daughter Luna we picked off as many as we could and saved the rest of the crop. It wasn’t until a few days later that we started to notice another interesting phenomenon, we started to see evidence of a special kind of wasp that feeds off these caterpillars in the most peculiar way! They don’t only feed off them but actually lay their eggs inside of them and then alter the caterpillar’s behavior from within to protect the eggs whilst feeding off the caterpillar its self, crazy I know! It was a great find another instance of nature restoring a balance.

As the year rolls on we now start to turn our attention to not just the Autumn but also to Winter. As a veg grower we start thinking about Winter way too early, usually around June. That is because by July we are starting to sow the seeds for Winter and then in September we are up to full speed at planting all the Winter crops in to the soil. These are crops like over wintering Cabbage, over wintering Onions, Pak Choi, Winter Lettuce, Spring Onions, Mixed Leaf Salad Mix, Spinach. Quite a lot of leafy crops actually. When October comes around, we are busy planting Broad Beans for the Spring and Garlic for next summer too.

As the seasons change you too will see changes in your veg box. We start to leave the Green Beans and Pointed Peppers of summer behind and from about mid-October we will begin harvesting a host of new crops. Leeks will start being dug, Lovely little yellow and green stripped squash known as Delicata Squash (amazing texture when cooked!), Sprouts will be on the menu, winter salad mix too. The winter salad mix is always a hit; it is made up of a carefully selected mix of 8 different winter salad leaves, a delicious blend of sweet, bitter, spicy, fresh and crunchy leaves, we look forward to it each year.

We have had some fantastic volunteers helping us over the past few weeks and we do encourage more! if you wanted to learn about veg growing and wanted to come down to help out then we would certainly welcome you. Just get in touch before hand and we can arrange something.

We wish all of you the best as we journey in to the more Autumnal months. Thanks for sticking with us and experiencing the change of locally grown vegetables throughout the seasons. Thanks so much for reading and keeping up to date with some of the goings on here at Hooma Hu, as always if you have any questions feel free to get in touch with us. We hoped you enjoyed our newsletter.

Cariad Mawr from Rita, Luna and Will

Phone: 07901804318  Address: Hooma Hu, Werndolau, Gelli Aur, SA32 8NE.

www.hhveg.co.uk