16th March

This week I got all the blades of off the wee rotovator that the Fergie uses for rotovating the tunnels.

It’s not the best job but luckily it is only every couple of years that they wear down and need changed.

There are thirty-six blades, each have two bolts holding them on.

And the bolts are usually seized and worn, with spinning round in the soil for a couple of years.

I was planning on using the grinder and grinding them of, but I forgot that there is not as much room as there is on the huge bedformer for the field.

So, it was a lot of big bars on the sockets to get the bolts to move, with some chapped knuckles in the prosses.

Putting the new ones on is far easier and takes hardly any time.

The tomato seeds arrived at the end of last week, but we didn’t manage to get them blocked.

Rab was out on the van doing deliveries as Andrew was on holiday.

These seeds are tiny and there is only two hundred and fifty, so not enough to change all the nozzles on the blocking machine, (we change the nozzles for different size seeds).

When there are just small amounts of seeds to be done, we do them by hand.

I am not very good at this fine pernickety job, and far too impatient, plus my fingers are far too junky for handling these fine seeds, I end up putting two to three in each cell, when there should only be one, and Rab gives me a telling off, I’m supposed to be the boss, so Rab will get them done on Monday morning and put in the heated greenhouse.

One other wee building job I was planning before we get busy out in the field, was to build a wee shed in between the tunnels, this will be for the lawnmowers, hand rotovators, strimmer’s and hand tools for the tunnels.

This will make it far easier having them all in one place right in the middle of the tunnels.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I waited until we had thirty good sturdy pallets for the sides, then I bought enough posts that would go in between each pallet, these posts are in the ground two feet deep, and the pallets are secured to each post, two pallets high.

The roof again will be made with three old tunnel hoops, and I will use the excess polyethene we have left over from building the Fergie shed, for the roof and we will sheet the pallets at the side with polyethene too, making it watertight.

I would have had the whole shed finished this week with just the polythene left to do, but Thursday was a wet and stormy day, so that job should be finished next week.

All the tunnel tools are now getting fired up and in use after their winter’s hibernation.