28th February

That’s been another week of interesting weather.

Winds again, rain, whiteout snow conditions and frost.

None of that really helped us get those tunnels re sheeted and the new one built.

And I’m of to France skiing this week so there will be nothing getting done this week.

But on a plus side the tunnels are all ready to be sheeted, well almost, I only have the trenches to dig round two tunnels for earthing in the polythene, the big cosy tunnel we rope the polythene down, and the new one the polythene will be bolted onto base rails.

And I have had a plan that might work for speeding up the earthing in the polythene.

The two we have to earth in, I dig out the trench with a mini digger, it’s a fairly big trench 57 meters each side, and earthing it in takes a wee while with the mini digger too.

But I have a cunning plan, I have an old broken rotovator, the plan is I will grind of the body just leaving the heavy frame that is used for fixing it onto the tractor, and onto this frame I will weld / bolt  a metal plate, turning it into something like a snow plough.

The thought I have, is that once I have the polythene fixed in place with some earth at the vital points, I will then just run down the side with the john Deere pushing all the earth in one run, hopefully turning a 2hr job into pretty much 5 min.

This way we could sheet three tunnels in one day, fingers crossed.

The new tunnel I did make a start on this week when the weather gave us the chance.

The first job was taking apart the two huge pallets that everything came in and then sorting them out into piles, so we could see where everything was.

Then marking of the area where the base legs would be getting dug into, making sure I get it square and the correct size, or we could come across huge problems near the end of the build.

All that done, we then bolted the 56 base plates onto the legs, and dug the first two holes, and ye ha got the first hoop up in place, but the weather didn’t let us get any further.

So there is a load of work to get on with when I get back from my week in France skiing this week.

If you remember from past newsletter, that we had made a start on blocking spring cabbage seed.

Well that was on the 15th of February, and we put them in the greenhouse, we have a heater in here that can regulate the heat to whatever we need, at the moment it is sitting around 10 degrees, and the spring cabbage has germinated and looking great.

If you look on Facebook you will see them.