3rd November
With the pumpkin weekends over with, it is time to get on with tunnel work.
We have fifteen thousand spring onions, ten thousand Lettuce two varieties, and five thousand spinach and five thousand Ruby chard all waiting for a tunnel.
Usually, they would be planted by now, but with the weather still quite mild we are still harvesting. Last week we still managed to harvest one hundred and fifty cucumbers, but that was the last.
So, the first job this week was to get all the cucumber plants out of the tunnel.
It is a time-consuming job; they are all tied up with string and through the year we are constantly wrapping the cucumber plant around the string to keep them from falling down.
And the string is tied up on crop wires near the top of the tunnel at around 7 feet.
So, when it comes to taking them down, we must untangle two hundred and fifty cucumbers and one hundred and fifty climbing beans.
When that is done, we then gather up all the rope and tie it together for next year.
After that is done we then take out the ground cover fabric and roll that of for next year.
Finally, we load the Fergie trailer up with compost, and spread that through the tunnel with a fork, then rotovate and finally roll then it is ready for planting.
Luckily, we only have to do that much work before prepping a tunnel for planting in one tunnel once a year, with that done next week we will get the spring onions planted.
When they are planted, we will go into the Tomato tunnel, these have been untied and ropes down, this tunnel only needs compost and rotovated and rolled, in here we will plant the spinach and Ruby chard.
This then only leave the lettuce to be planted.
Luckily at this time of the year the plants can sit for much longer before needing planted, if it was in the summer they would have been needing planted a few weeks ago.
We already have Spring cabbage, and Romanesco Cauliflower, planted the big ninety-meter cosy tunnels, so when Feb / March comes we should have a lot of nice veg to start harvesting.
