21st November

It has been a very wet week, luckily we do all the harvesting with a vintage Ferie 135 and the compact Siroma, both have no cabs and both 2 wheel drive, but even with trailers there is very little weight.

The reason we can use these for harvesting is, that we do all the harvesting by hand, no machines required.

Even the carrots, which are always lifted with machines then stored, we only use a blade to loosen the soil.

The reason we need to loosen the soil first, is that when we tried just to pull the carrots the carrot tops just snapped of leaving the carrot still in the soil.

But I had an old scrapped machine i managed to grind apart and reweld, to give us a nice light blade that goes below the carrots, loosening the soil, and makes harvesting easy.

This way we can harvest daily keeping the carrots super fresh.

We need to harvest 25 crates a week. Each crate weighs 30 kilo, and we spread this over four days, so it's only a couple of hrs a day, the only issue is that sometimes your carrots might be super dirty.

Including the carrots it usually takes us from 7.30 till 12 to get the harvesting for the next day finished, then it's on to all the other jobs.

Apart from this week Andrew, our main delivery driver, is on two weeks' holiday.

So Rab who works with me in the field normally harvests with me daily but is out doing Andrews deliveries, so the harvesting is just me, so it's an all day job for this week and next.

This week has been a bit wet harvesting, and Friday’s deliveries were a wee bit tricky, with a lot of roads flooded, and lots of abandoned cars.

but we got them all done. It just took a wee bit longer than usual.

If you had tried to phone the office, or wondered why an email wasn't answered, the reason was that all the main roads into the farm were flooded and roads closed.

I eventually got back to the farm after doing my Glasgow deliveries at 1pm, and one of the three roads going into Abernethy had just been opened.

But the road to our office / pack shed was no longer a road but an enormous pond, which was interesting.