5th February

That’s the blocking season started of to a start, for those of you who don't know what that is, it's the way we bring on all our plants from seed to plants ready for planting in the field.
We have a machine that fills trays with compost each tray has 144 cells, when we have enough filled the trays then go through our machine, this machine has a row of 9 small nozzles that sucks the seed up from the tray then when the tray passes under the nozzle a seed gets dropped into a cell, hopefully that has explained it enough, I have a video of us doing this on facebook from last year, I will put another one on facebook this week so you can have a look and see how it is done.
So last week we started of with just wee amounts, to start of the season we done three thousand Celery, three thousand red Lettuce, five thousand Parsley and five thousand kohl rabi. All these trays are now in the hot box tunnel so they won't get freezing cold if the temperatures drop again.
This week we are on to some larger volumes, and planned for blocking of this week are sixty thousand early Leeks, sixty thousand mid season Leeks, sixty thousand Onions, half of which will be red, and five thousand spring cabbage.
From now till the end of April this will the the main job for us to get to after we have harvested. It's a good time of the year, as I plan on which seeds to order for the year ahead, and look into any new seeds varieties that look interesting enough to try out, each year I always try out three or four new varieties, sometimes they are a complete failure.