It’s a gentle day at the project. I like it when Sam and I get to work together, we are both… doers – makers – and today is one of those days. Sam picks me up on his way to the warehouse, and we head to Greens Horticulture for some advice on winch systems for our lighting rigs. We are in luck – as we often are when we visit Green’s. Matt has just the thing, and we can have it for free because it’s from an old display and all the winch strings are tied in knots! We buy coir for propagating some watercress for the big-rig – we can see that it will be ready soon and we will need some baby plants, and Matt recommends some organic nutrient to give the baby plants a little boost once their seeds initial nutrient has been consumed. We swing by the supermarket and I buy big bags of chopped vegetables for meals for our volunteer workdays. We eat together after working on the project on Thursday nights and Sundays and I want to make sure there is something fast and healthy we can share.

Today we decide to work more on the IBC scale eel system as it is here that we will be receiving our eels in February.

Last Friday, whilst I was in London visiting Paul Bavister at Flanagan Lawrence to talk about our modular concept system, Sam and Tom worked on further testing u-siphons as an option for draining the flood & drain system. Today we get it to fire as a working system. Then we build a sort of rigging for our lighting system.

It’s a good size as it is roughly speaking half the length of 1 of our big-rig bays. Which means we can test out the efficacy of our lighting array (spacing, height etc).

The rest of the week is looking exciting.

Thursday Jon the electrician is coming to help us set up lighting in our classroom. Plus Alan from Big Issue Invest is coming over to talk to us about our bridging loan request. Fingers crossed they can support us in this endeavour!

Friday Tom and Sam and I will complete the IBC build and get that cycling. Plus there is a lot of admin to do. I plan to apply for funding to pilot the module and I need to begin making preparations for our eel project launch on March 12th!

Sunday we are having a workday (if you fancy helping out you can sign-up here). The main job will be to start setting up our propagation area for the big-rig and to clear some of the drains that are full of autumn leaves in the Garden.