3rd February

Last week we spent every day clearing up the tunnel damage from the storm.

We don’t get all day at it because every morning we have to harvest first.

We had three tunnels to get the polythene of and cleared up.

Two of the tunnels are fifty meters long and these are earthed in at the sides.

So, the polythene needs to be cut all around the bottom, and around the door ends, then pulled of off the tunnel hoops.

The third tunnel is the ninety-meter-long cosy tunnels.

The polythene is held on these tunnels with ropes.

The legs of these tunnels have hooks at the base of them, and this is where the rope is tied onto, there are seventy-four legs on each side, so there is a lot of untying ropes.

The rope is supposed to have a breaking strength of one tonne, so it is strong.

But the wind was so strong that it managed to break a lot of the ropes.

We managed to get all the ropes untied of one side, so we could then get the polythene pulled away from that tunnel.

This then left three enormous piles of polythene, which had to be dragged up to the shed.

We now have a skip coming in, no normal skip nowadays.

It has to be a much more expensive skip than normal as it is polythene.

Funny thing is they use this polythene and recycle it and sell it on for various things.

Nice money earner going on there.

My new shed that I built for the fleece storage also took some damage.

The wind tried to take my roof of and rehouse it over the other side of the river Earn.

I really didn’t want it rehoused, so as the wind was blowing a hoolie trying its best to take it over the river Earn, we brought out our heavy weapons, tractor and heavy machines, plus proper heavy-duty ropes and got the roof tied down before it flew away.

This was another job we managed to repair last week, the roof is now nicely repaired, and firmly secure, and it is willow tree growing time of the year, so we cut thirty willow cuttings and replanted them as a wind break, these grow at an incredible rate and will have the shed protected by the end of the year.

We now have all the ropes to get of the cosy tunnels this week.

And we received our Fertile fibre coir compost order in last week, so it is now time to think about getting the blocking of our seeds started, plus re sheet three tunnels.

And there is the irrigation repairs, plenty to get on with.