10th November

This week we got all the cucumbers out of the tunnel and the strings untied and down and the ground cover matting lifted.

It is time-consuming job, with each of the two hundred and fifty cucumbers all tangled around the string as they climb up to the hight of the tunnel through the season.

We have three rows of cucumbers and one row of climbing French beans in the same tunnel.

The cucumbers are bad enough, but the beans are terrible to untangle, they through out loads of wee arms (side shoots) that they use to hang onto the string and climb up, we never have to help them up the string like we do with the Cucumbers, they just climb up themselves, they latch onto anything close by to get a grip and climb up, they could turn a tunnel into the amazon jungle if they got half a chance.

The first job after the tunnel was cleared out was to get the side of the tunnel strimmed.

Then the smelly job of forking a trailer full of well-rotted smelly compost, followed by forking it out evenly over the whole of the tunnel, if you ever wake up in the morning with a blocked nose, this is defiantly the job to get that cleared.

Then it is rotovating, usually this takes longer than it would usually, the reason is that we have been walking up and down the tunnel all season harvesting full wheelbarrows of cucumbers, this makes the ground compact, finally I go through with a roller on the Fergie, this compacts the soil and leaves four beds for planting in, the roller has three rows of small squares that presses holes onto the soil, and this is where we plant the plants.

Planting the spring onions is the most time consuming of plants to plant, they are small and thin, and they need to be planted in between the holes that have been pressed into the soil. When it comes to planting spring onions, we can get fifteen thousand of them in a tunnel, because they don’t take up as much room as a lettuce would.

Next week we will be planting the lettuce, spinach and ruby chard, and that will be all the tunnels fully planted for the winter.