24th February

 This week we made a start on the seed blocking.

We bring on around 80% of our seeds in seed trays.

Only the Beetroot, Parsnips, Turnips, Beans, and Carrots are direct sown with a machine in the field.

All the Brassicas, Leeks, Onions, and Squash plants are brought on in seed trays in the tunnels before planting them out in the field.

Each tray has 144 cells which takes 144 seeds, the Squash plants trays are bigger cells and each tray which is the same size only have 24 cells, taking 24 seeds.

There are thousands of trays to be filled with compost and seeds every year.

Luckily, we have two machines to make the job quicker.

The first machine we fill with compost and put the empty trays on a wee conveyor belt.

The trays go along the conveyer belt and come out the other end full of compost, from here we stack them up ready for filling with seeds.

The seed machine again has another conveyor belt.

And we put the full trays on this, and they slowly go under a part of the machine that first compresses each cell then followed by a seed, and just before the seed tray come out the other end we sprinkle vermiculite over the seeds.

Each seed is picked up with a tiny nozzle, that works of by sucking a single seed by air, then dropping it in each cell.

We can change the size of each nozzle depending on the size of the seeds, and we can increase or decrease the air pressure again depending on the size of the seeds.

It is a amazing machine, and we have cut down the amount of compost we use by half.

And it is now a one-man job and takes half the time that it used to do.

We always start the blocking season with the early leeks then the onions and then the late leeks.

By the end of this week, we will have all the leeks and onions sown and in trays and laid out in a tunnel waiting to germinate.

There will be over one thousand trays and one hundred and fifty thousand seeds done.

After the leeks and onions, we will make a start on the brassica’s seeds.

Last week we also got most of the spring onions planted in the cosy tunnel that still has polythene on it, we have ten thousand to plant.

And this week we will be planting Ruby chard and Spinach, and direct sowing some salad mix.

And we still have a wee bit of tunnel and irrigation repairing, and three tunnels to re sheet.