15th April

This week the weather stayed nice and dry, and I have now got all the field Grubbed, and then over it again with the triple K,  it’s now nice level and smooth, and is now ready to be bedformed.

Bedforming is the final machine I go over the field with, so then we can start planting.

This machine has 72 blades that spin round and make the soil very soft, behind the blades there is a roller, this firms up the soil and leaves us with a 72 inch smooth bed, this job is pretty slow and can take up to 10 minutes to bedform around 200 meters, to give you a example of how much we need to do. The fifty thousand red onions will need 22 beds formed.

And we have over five hundred thousand plants to be planted, with our planting machine and around two hundred and forty thousand seeds to be direct sown, these are the Neeps and Beetroot.

One other job I did get done last week, was replacing all the Bedformers blades, they do wear and we usually only get a couple of years out of a set.

It’s not the best job as each blade has two bolts holding it on, and they are usually worn, so they need taken off with the grinder, then all the new blades need re bolted back on, that’s a total of 144 nuts and bolts to be tightened on. And it’s all on your knees, at least it’s done now, and I won’t need to do it again next year.

Inside the tunnels, we have Spinach, Giant red Celery, spring onions and Chicory almost ready for harvesting, so you should see it in your nets in the next few weeks.

Also in the tunnels last week we planted  three thousand five hundred Lettuce, the same amount of Red Kohl Rabi and five thousand spring Cabbage.

And if you remember from last weeks newsletter, I was going on about how worried I was that my wee heater would pack up inside the greenhouse, Well I ended up buying a proper greenhouse heater, which is perfect, but no better than my auld wee heater was.

This week we are going to take all the Onions and Leeks outside, so they can sit for a week and get acclimatised before we plant them