22nd June

Over the last months few we have been looking into getting another two tunnels.

But I haven’t been able to get out and see any, with corona virus, and secondly, we couldn’t put one up till the end of the season, because the field is all planted with vegetables.

So to increase the amount of produce that we could fit into our existing tunnels, I started looking into the compact tractors again.

I had been looking at them when the Fergie’s engine had blown up, and was going to replace the Fergie with a new compact tractor.

But I decided to fit a new engine in the Fergie instead.

The reason for that was that, with the Fergie, I can use it in the tunnels and the field, for field work, I need the tyres to be 72 inches wide, for the beds in the field, and when we need to go into the tunnels, I can then move them into 54 inches, then its much narrower for the tunnels.

The compact tractors wheels are only 32 inches wide, so that would have been no use for the field.

But I started looking into them again, and we eventually bought one, it arrived at the farm last Thursday.

With this compact tractor’s wheels only being 32 inches wide, we can now get an extra bed of plants planted in each tunnel, which is almost like putting up one and a half new tunnels.

This now means, we can get an extra seven thousand plants inside the tunnels, in one planting, and the tunnels get re planted three or four times in a season, depending on what we plant.

And we still have the good old Fergie, to use on the field work, alongside the John Deere.

Its already rotovated, and rolled it’s first bed which is almost planted with Lettuce.

Out in the filed this week, we planted seven thousand Romanesca Cauliflower, and all of the field has now been bed weeded once, and the onions and early leeks have had their second bed weed.

The bed weeder that I made, has really speeded up the weeding, by freeing up the John Deere tractor, which used have the old bed weeder, on it all of the time, now it can be doing the brush weeding as the bed weeder is working at the same time, so it has worked out really well.

Inside the tunnels, its now Cucumber time, they are growing really fast, and all have Cucumbers on them, so it shouldn’t be long before we start harvesting them, but with the speedy growth, it’s the very time consuming work, of taking of the side shoots, and tying up them, twice a week.