20th February

One job I still had to do, was fire up the water pump, and checking the irrigation.

Rab now has started our eighty thousand onions seeds. And these will be set out in one of the main tunnels,  there will be five hundred and fifty five trays, these will be needing watered daily.

Each tunnel has two lines of irrigation, and each line has thirty-two sprinklers.

There are seven tunnels, so four hundred and forty-eight sprinklers.

At the start of the season, I take of the end drain plugs, and every sprinkler, then fire up the water pump.

This then clears any debris, or gunge that has built up over the winter, and we can check the sprinklers before putting them back on.

We have been getting a wee bit of uneven watering, and puddles under each sprinkler as the pump is switched of, which has always been a pain.

So, I have up graded the sprinklers this year with a better system of sprinklers.

The sprinkler now is not attached, straight onto the pipe.

With the new system the sprinkler attaches to the bottom of a 60cm tube, this also has a weight on it, making the sprinkler hang perfectly vertical.

And between the 60cm down tube and the sprinkler there is a anti drip device.

We have all the tunnels now with these on, and have been watering the blocked onions.

It is much better, very even watering now, and no more puddles.

Before we had to make sure not to plant anything directly under a sprinkler, and definitely not put any blocked trays under one. it always was a real pain.

One last thing.

We are very reluctantly, going to have to put our prices up.

We have tried to hold off, hoping that things might start to calm down just a wee bit, but unfortunately, they have not.

Everything from the thousands off seeds we buy right the way through the whole business to the seeds growing and becoming nice and fresh veg arriving at your door has gone up in price.

So, from the 1st of March the nets and goodie bag shall go up by £1.00, and the fruit bags by £0.50.