9th February

It has been a wet and windy week, perfect weather for making a start on building our shed.

We had to dig eighteen holes three feet deep for the posts, and the ground was just gutters with the non-stop rain we were slipping and sliding everywhere carrying the three-meter posts to each hole, must have looked like a couple of Bambis on ice.

But eventually we got them all done, by the end of the week we had the side braced and the centre ridge ready for the tunnel hoops.

We are going to use the tunnel hoops that was the original tunnel / shed, these hoops we will bend to make them fit over the ridge and bolt them on to the sides, from here we will use green polythene for the roof, and attach that just like we would be if we were sheeting a tunnel.

The shed is 9.6 meters wide and 8.5 meters long, big enough to get the Siroma tractor and the Fergie in one side, leaving the other side, free for repairs to tractors, machinery, and our vans.

Both the tunnel that we repaired, and the shed, will need to wait for a wee break in the weather before I even look at sheeting them.

The tunnel we will do as soon as we can, as we are starting to block the first of our seeds next week, and this tunnel is here we will lay them all out to germinate.

I get asked at the markets what blocking is.

Blocking is just bringing seeds on, we fill trays with compost, each tray has 144 cells in it, basically there are 144 deep holes, these get filled with compost.

Once that is done, we put the trays through a machine that puts one seed in each cell / hole.

We them cover the seed with vermiculite, this helps to retain moisture, and most seeds need to be covered.

We then move all the trays into one tunnel, in here they will germinate, and when they have four leaves, we then transfer them outside to harden of before getting planted in the field.

This year we will be doing just under nine hundred thousand seeds.

And at this time of the year, you are restricted to what seeds can take the cold.

We are starting with pack joy five thousand and our early leeks seventy thousand of these.

It is then onto onions then late leeks; all the other seeds follow on from these.