11th December

Every day when we start work the first job we do is to get on the wellies and waterproofs and head out to harvest, usually we start at 7am but it's not light till 7.30 ish in the morning now so we have a later start. The first crop we head of to is the Leeks, most morning we need to pull and dress 600 Leeks. Dressing the leeks is basically cutting of the roots and the tips then pulling of a couple of the outer leaves which then leaves the leek looking braw and clean, BUT on Monday morning it was a pretty hard frost pulling the leeks out needed a good hefty pull, but dressing them was near impossible, we could top and tail them but the leek itself was frozen solid and we couldn’t pull back the outer couple of leeks, so it was into the tunnel and let them thaw of a wee bit, and continue harvesting everything else, So we are now pulling 600 leeks last thing in the day and leaving them in the shed over night so as we can dress them in the morning when we arrive, making the job far easier, last year we didn't need to do this but it looks like we are going to have a proper winter this year, so we will continue doing this till probably the end of February.
There has been years in the past that the ground has been so frozen that we have had to get the auld digger out so we could get the leeks out of the ground, then we have had to hit the earth of of the bottom of the leek with a hammer because the soil was so frozen around the base of the leek, this did take a wee bit longer to harvest than it should usually take, and there was a year that we were due to harvest cabbages first thing and overnight so much snow fell that we couldn't see any cabbage's anywhere so we had to walk along brushing the snow of off the cabbages to see what to harvest, now that did take ages, now we weather watch more closely and try and harvest in advance if possible.