20th April

At long last we have taken the blocked plants pout of the tunnels.

Last year we had already started planting.

We now have all the main brassicas crops out; the leeks and onions will be in another week.

With the plants out it is time to get the field bed formed, bed forming is just making a ploughed field super smooth for planting the plants into.

I put the bed former on the John deere, it is a really slow job, it takes around ten minutes to do two hundred meters, there are a row of blades on the front of the machine and they spin round really fast, and behind them is roller that compacts the soil leaving a nice smooth bed.

This is a constant job over the next couple of months as plants come out of the tunnel.

I only bedform enough beds for the number of plants we have ready for planting.

If I did the whole field, the beds would be sitting empty, and the weeds would get a head start.

We are just about to harvest a different variety of pack joy, it is a small variety so you will be getting at least two, we are trialling this variety, as the normal pack choy is terrible for bolting and we have lost hundreds over the past when that happens.

Unfortunately, we are going to have to put our prices up, we have been trying to ride out the storm, but the price increase caused by the extremely high fuel prices has forced everything we buy in to go up in price.

This has pushed me into looking at changing all our vans over to electric, they do not get enough mileage at the moment for our deliveries, but with one small charge halfway through the delivery day it should work.

I am picking up a demo electric van next week for my Friday Glasgow deliveries, so I can be the Guinee pig and see how it might work.