12th January

 I haven’t done a newsletter for a few weeks, with us all being on holiday.

Hope you all had a great Christmas and wishing you all a happy new year.

And many thanks for your support over the years.

Wee, started back to work with nice but very cold weather.

Each morning in the field it was sitting around minus 5, by the end of the week we had one morning where it was a roasting hot 2 degrees, almost needed the shorts on.

We can always harvest the leeks no matter how cold it is.

On a normal day we can harvest around fifty leeks in fifteen minutes, this involves pulling the leek, then we cut the roots off, cut the top of the leek, then usually we need to take of a minimum of two outer leaves, this then leaves a beautifully dressed leek, ready for the delivery.

But when the ground is frozen solid, we can’t pull the leek, so we need to cut each leek at soil level, then we need to cut the top of the leek, the hard part is dressing the outer leaves.

We can’t just pull a couple of leaves of because they are frozen, so we then need to run the knife down and try and peel away the frozen outer leaves that need to come off.

Fifty leeks at this speed now takes over half an hr.

At this time of the year we have moved away from our summer/autumn leek onto our winter variety, the summer autumn leek cannot handle getting frozen, it turns to much when it begins to defrost, where the winter leek is quite happy do be frozen then defrost and freeze again, you will have had leeks delivered that look like they have come out of our freezer, they have but a natural freezer.

The other crops, neeps and beetroot again are ok with the freezing temperature, but we cannot get them out of the ground, so they need to wait until the soil defrosts.

The winter leafy crops kale, spinach, and Ruby chard again they are ok and when defrosted will be standing up looking great, but we can’t harvest then when they are frozen.

This week the temperature is forecasted to rise, so harvesting as normal.

And we have taken the polyethene of off the tunnel that I had patched last year.

This tunnel frame is needing a wee bit of repair work before we get ready for re sheeting it.

We couldn’t do it last week because everything was frozen solid.

So hopefully this week we can make as start of some repairs.