4th April

 It was another good week, with the tunnels now all finished.

It wasn’t just a job of re sheeting, the three tunnels that had their polythene ripped off, we also had to re do all the irrigation, it got blowen apart too.

Each tunnel has two lines off irrigation so in total there was 380 meters of irrigation to be repaired and 760 sprinklers to be checked, cleaned or replaced.

But now it is all done, and just in time too.

In the tunnels we now have, five thousand spring cabbage planted, and in another tunnel two beds of mixed salad leaves direct sown, these beds are 50 meters long and each bed has three rows, this gives us six rows of different varieties of oriental salad seeds, so when they are ready for harvesting, we cut them and mix them all up, giving a nice tasty salad bag.

Rab has also made good progress on the blocking.

We have now blocked Spring Cabbage (these are planted) four thousand kohl Rabi, four thousand Rhubi Chard ( both of these have already chitted) three thousand mixed lettuce and fifty thousand onions.

By Friday Rab had made a start on blocking the one hundred and fifty thousand leeks, these should be finished next week, then it will be onto the brassica’s crops.

We did have one slight hiccup, we have a machine that fills the seed trays with compost, its not very high tec but it is much faster than doing it by hand, well the chain driven belt that moves the trays along to get them filled with compost, decided it would break.

So I had to dismantle that, then rush into Perth only to be told it was a specialised chain and we would get it for 3 to 4 days, so it was filling trays by hand again, hopefully by Tuesday I will have it re built and on the machine working again.

The only job we aren’t getting on with very fast is re building the new tunnel.

Last week I did get the ridge bar bolted in place, but there is still a lot of work to be done before we can get the polythene on and get it working.

But it was always going to be tricky, at this time of the year it is all about blocking seeds and planting tunnels, then it will be preparing fields, and the bed former for making the field beds needs new blades, I have them in and there are 74 blades with 2 bolts per blade all need taken of and replaced.

We will get the new tunnel built but it is when.