25th May

 I had said last week that we would have a new van driver called Scott taking over Andrew’s deliveries, well he decided he did not want the job after being on the van for two weeks with Rab learning the deliveries.

Not an ideal situation, with eighty thousand leeks still to be planted and all the squash plants, plus the winter Cabbage is now getting bigger.

We do have another driver wanting the Job and is going out with Rab this Monday, unfortunately we can only give him one week with Rab, I really need Rab back in the tunnels and field to give me a hand.

I was getting on slowly and getting the plants planted, , by Monday afternoon I had fifty five thousand of the eighty thousand leeks planted, then disaster struck, the water pump of the John Deere broke, this is the only tractor that can prepare the ground, do the planting and the weeding, couldn’t have happened at a worst time.

Monday night I had it stripped down and Tuesday morning the water pump was ordered, luckily the man in the sky must have been watching and felt sorry for me, because if it was dry and I couldn’t plant I would not be happy to say the least, but the heavens opened up and the field got a soaking, and for the next three days the field stayed to wet that I couldn’t have planted anyway.

This gave me a week to spend in the tunnels, and I got the six hundred cucumber’s and tomatoes planted and tied up, then I emptied the small tunnel that has all the squash plants and winter cabbage in and took them outside to the laying out area, the reason for this was really to slow them down to buy me time, the small tunnel is roasting and the plants were coming on great, normally this is exactly where we want them, but not right now, I then took all the rest of the leeks out of the bigger tunnel to slow them down also.

I have an area that has old tunnel hoops with bird netting over the hoops, we use this when we take plants out of the tunnel to harden them off, this also has three sprinklers I can set on automatic timings, so this will also save a wee bit of time each day.

I should get the tractor rebuilt on Friday night and get back to planting the leeks over the weekend and hopefully get the squash plants planted by the end of the week.

Unless I am stranded somewhere, I now have an electric van, we swapped my van for the demo electric van I tested a few weeks ago, and if all goes well over the next month or so we will be looking at going electric on all the vans.