28th January

 It was another nice fresh and dry week with the temperature dropping to minus 7 on Wednesday, luckily we had picked enough leeks in advance because I knew they would be frozen if the weather was correct.

So to try and help us over the winter I thought we would try and cover the leeks with fleece, the fleece should help to keep the leeks frost free and hopefully they won`t freeze.

Usually we only use fleece at the start of the year when we are planting to help protect the new plants against the pigeons.                                                                                                                                                       WE only covered two rows just to see if it work’s if it does we might cover all the leeks, the fleece is supposed to increase the temperature by around 5 degrees so hopefully if its minus 5 under the fleece will be zero, time will tell. If it does the job we might cover all the leeks till winter is over.

We didn’t start the blocking the seeds this week, because the compressor that makes the machine pick up the seeds doesn’t like temperatures below minus 2, if we do try and do the blocking the machine will miss a seed now and again, and leek seeds are really small and we wouldn’t see if there have been seeds missed.

So instead we rotovated the empty beds in the cosy tunnel and I direct sowed 3 beds of Palco spinach then we covered them with fleece. This is a wee bit risky if temperatures drop to what they were like last year we won’t get a crop, but we can always re sow them again if needed.