27th Novemeber

Last week I was talking about the Pack Choy seeds we have blocked, And that this is the first time we have tried to do these seeds before the winter arrives they are still looking good especially with all this prolonged cold weather that we have been having, they are in the hot box tunnel, this tunnel is our smallest tunnel it's pretty wee and is only 20 meters long by 6 meters so it keeps the heat pretty well, in this tunnel we have two rows of one tonne potato boxes turned upside down, and the base of the potato box when turned upside down gives us a shelve to lay our seed trays on, we also have the base of the box lined with heated cable, and have old net fleece we can pull over at nights to help protect the plants even further, we have eight boxes down each side and each box can hold nine trays with one hundred and forty four seeds per tray, which means we can get twenty thousand seven hundred and thirty six plants coming on in our hot box tunnel, We always bring on cabbage, Purple sprouting broccoli and broad beans over the winter but not Pack choy if it does work this will be a braw veg at the time of the year when there isn't a lot of variety going around.
Out in the field this week we will be finished the wet, cold, and dirty job of lifting the old ground cover matting of off the field for the Courgette, Pumpkin and Sweetcorn crops, and its been a cold one on the fingers, the matting gets lifted with a machine on the tractor but first we have to loosen the mat up, because at the start of the year when we lay it down we spade earth on the edges every 10 paces the stop the wind taking it for a hurrle, this earth needs to be lifted of the mat so the tractor doesn't rip it when we start rolling it in so we can hopefully use it again, the earth over the matting is usually wet at this time of the year so we are working with wet hands pretty much straight away and the temperature has been always hovering between -1 and 5 degrees, so the fingers turn blue pretty quick, but that's pretty normal for this time of the year as we start harvesting at 7.30 am every morning and it's no been very warm in the mornings of late, but that's a good sign at least we are getting a proper season winter is supposed to be cold, and it makes it good for skiing and winter climbing.