31st January

Well we are at the end of January and it is unseasonably warm.

This usually gets everyone twitchy and thinking about stating to sow seeds.

But hold on, I have seen this in the past, then we get hit with a polar vortex that lasts until April.

I have sown Leeks, onions and spring cabbage at the end of January before, and then been hit with a severe late winter.

The plants survived but they took a wee bit to recover.

Some varieties of leeks and onions we do sow early, and a couple of years ago I done a trial and sowed the early leeks in three batches.

A third I sowed at the end of February, another third end of February and the last third at the end of April.

And the end result was that they all got planted at the same time and in the field, there was no difference when it came to harvesting.

Some seeds will be ready for harvesting when they are supposed to be ready for harvesting and you really can’t bring them on any earlier in normal conditions,  

In last week’s newsletter I was on about the Siroma gearbox eventually arriving back after getting repaired.

I did eventually figure out where all the nuts-and-bolts cables and arms were all to go, and the spanner throwing stopped.

UNTIL test drive all gears were working perfect, fantastic I thought with a huge Cheshire cat grin from ear to ear.

BUT then I tried the high and low box, no high box only a low box AAAAAAHHHHHHH.

So after a very polite conversation with the siroma dealer (believe that if you want) I was asked to take of the gearbox cover to investigate.

To cut a long story short, the result was that they had put the leaver that is inside the gearbox up side down, so when I move the high low box gear lever it is not connecting.

You can see the difference in the photos on the web page.

So this week I need to take the tractor completely apart again, so I can push the hi low lever out of the gearbox casing, so I can then turn it round the correct way.

This has made me very delighted as you can imagine, there was a couple more spanners getting thrown around in rage, and these spanners were huge lol.