23rd February

There was no weekly story last week as I was away in Italy skiing with Erin and Calum.

We had a fantastic ski holiday, and it was Calum’s first time abroad and on a plane.

The cabin crew got him up front in the cockpit for a photo because it was his first flight,

And a signed card from the pilot’s special treatment from British Airways made Calum’s day.

This week we got the shed we are building finished, now I am just waiting on the green polythene to arrive to get the roof sheeted.

The plan for next week is to get that finished and hopefully get the trenches dug around tunnel three and get that sheeted also, but next weeks weather is looking wet, so we might need to delay these Jobs.

Rab made a start on the blocking, ( filling seed trays with compost and putting the trays through the seeder which fills the trays with seeds).

We have five thousand pack Choy already done, these are in the heated greenhouse, and have already germinated, and we have started the early leeks twenty thousand of these are already done, we will be at this job for a couple of months with hundreds of thousands of seeds to get blocked.

The irrigation at the start of the season is always a wee bit of work,

First we need to prime the water pump which we have drained for over winter, then when we get the pressure up we need to test out each tunnel, each tunnel has two lines of irrigation which are fifty meters long, usually with the frost we have broken pipes which are just small cracks caused by the frost, and when we open the irrigation line they explode pouring water everywhere.

It is normal and at the start of the year and we usually expect half a dozen repairs as they are just plastic pipes, and we cannot get all the water out of each line before winter sets in.

But this week I tested out each tunnel, and so far, everything is running perfect with no broken pipes yet.                                                                                                                                    We have plants now starting to come back to life and need a wee drink plus our seed trays will be needing a water, so this is why we needed the irrigation up and running.