Organic Farming Weather Watchers with Barra Best

'Today, I'm in County Down to meet up

'with organic farmer John McCormick.'

-How are you?

-I'm very well, thank you.

-It's perfect weather for the old garden, isn't it?

-Beautiful.

Beautiful day.

'John is passionate about growing organic food,

'locally produced and completely dependent

'on our Northern Irish climate.'

John, here we are, your field of tunnels, different veg in every one?

That's right. This is a row of four of our larger tunnels

and we'd have a four-year rotation going on between the four of them.

You see some kohlrabi in there, that was carrots in there first

and now it's kohlrabi and then it will be salad.

So different veg planted throughout the year?

At least three crops per tunnel.

John, a nice big tunnel here of cherry tomatoes.

They've done well with our weather this year.

Yes, I'm very pleased with them, they're called Sakura.

They're a very sweet tomato,

so would be incredibly popular with children, as you can well imagine.

And you have got your normal amount of crops for this year?

Yes, by and large, the cropping would appear to be good,

where we normally go for seven or eight trusses,

this is a truss, they start at the bottom and, you know,

work right up to the last truss at the top.

This would be the eighth truss on this,

but they're actually doing very well.

Very well, so another few weeks left

and these boys here will be ready to pick.

Five, six weeks before I start taking them out.

'Food is a requirement for all life

'but we need the right weather to grow it.'

What can you do here that you can't in the west?

I suppose we're blessed, in the sense that

if you want to be a vegetable grower, certainly,

you're far better off over here on the east coast

than you ever would be on the west coast.

We can just about grow everything, except bananas and citrus.

What I have noticed is we seem to be getting extremes.

We're breaking records, left, right and centre -

we're getting the hottest days that have ever happened in the year,

we're getting the wettest days that have ever happened in the year.

These nets, John,

do a good job protecting against pests and rabbits,

that kind of thing, but they also protect against our bad weather.

That's right, we're finding, increasingly,

that in the summertime, we're getting very, very heavy rainfall

and the result of that

is it splashes the mud back up all over the lettuce

and makes it unsellable, so the nets act as a barrier,

so when the rain hits that, it diffuses,

and you don't get that splash.

You also keep bees here. How has the weather affected them?

2015 has not been one of the great bee years.

We had a cold May, which wouldn't have been nice for the bees,

but they were busy enough and survived it

and managed to build up to a decent brood size for June

and then we had a nice June, we had a good June,

so the bees were very busy in June and there was plenty of nectar

and pollen around and they started to bring in a lot of reserves.

But then July turned wet and by the end of August, because we had

another wet August, they had already started to eat into those reserves.

There can be up to 50,000 or 60,000 bees in a colony.

And they all need to be fed every day

and if they can't get out to feed, they will eat their reserves.

So we won't be taking much honey off the bees this year,

simply because we want to leave them with the reserves that are there.