9th March

The cosy tunnel that has been fully harvested,  this week I went through it with the discs which helps to get the stalks and roots all chopped up, then we will leave it for a week for them to die of and then I will rotovate and roll, then direct sow some oriental salad mix and plant the pak choy which now has four leaves and nearly ready for planting.

Before I can get in with the rotovator, which makes nice smooth beds so we can plant, I first need to change all the blades.

This job only needs to be done every couple of years as they wear away, and just as well, it is not one of the best jobs.

There are luckily only twenty-four blads on the wee four-foot rotovator, and each blade is held on with two bolts.

And the bolts are all worn with lots of spinning round in the soil over the years, and they don’t like to come of very easily.

So, I just get the grinder out and grind each one-off, easy enough you would think, but they are in very tight spots to get into.

Putting them back on is far easier, but this job usually takes most of a day, but with new blads it makes an amazing job.

This week we finished blocking all the leeks and onions, and tunnel five now has one thousand and eleven trays all laid out a total of one hundred and forty thousand seeds.

The early leeks which we always do first have already germinated and poking through the compost in the trays.

We also have beetroot blocked as a trial which we will plant in the cosy tunnel, hopefully for an early crop, the other tunnel we will do courgettes again giving us an early crop before the field courgettes start.

And our tomato and cucumber seeds arrived this week, we will get the tomatoes done next week and put them in the heated greenhouse, but we will wait until the end of march before we do the cucumbers and courgettes.

And the last of the huge amounts of seeds to be blocked is the brassicas, we always do them in the last week of March.

From then on it is just we batches of five thousand through the season.