23rd March

It has been a warm week with temperature in double figures, which heats up the tunnels nicely.

We should be harvesting salad bags in the next couple of weeks, plus ruby chard, and spinach, and closely behind them spring onions.

On Tuesday morning we had the fantastic job of spreading compost in the cosy tunnel, we always get a load in for the field and a wee load for the tunnels each year, in the field it is done with tractors and dung spreaders.

But in the tunnel, we fill the Fergie trailer with compost using a grape, then we spread it using the grape again, a great job if you have a blocked nose, it is pretty smelly.

After that job is done the Fergie gets the rotovator on and we rotovate it in leaving the tunnel nice and smooth, which we then go over with a roller.

This was all done for the pak choy plants that were needing planted, by Thursday we had three thousand fife hundred pak choy planted,  next week we will be planting another five thousand plants, the first lettuce of the season, half red and half green, we will direct sow oriental salad seeds after these are planted, and together they make fantastic salad bags.

Our trial of sowing beetroot seeds looks to be working so far, and there looks to be almost one hundred percent germination, and they already have two leaves, we will be planting these in the tunnel for a super early harvest.

The plan is to block the neep and beetroot seeds for the field this year, firstly to help the weeding, direct sown seeds in the field are always a nightmare to weed as the seeds germinate at the same speed, where if we plant a good size plant it has a huge head start and weeding is far easier.

Plus, there is a beastie that eats the neep seed when we sow it direct, plus direct sown seeds are reliant on the weather, last year I had to re sow them as the first batches did not germinate very well.

We blocked a very small batch of both neeps and beetroot late last year and it worked a treat.