Harvest preparations have begun in earnest this week. My harvest help, Nicole, has arrived and taken her telehandler training, gaining an impressive 100% in both the theory and the practical.

Machinery has been serviced, greased, and inspected. Then parked up ready for action. Sheds tidied and the grain pad walls erected, and the pressure washer is finding plenty to do. Hopefully, most of this will be completed before the first crop of winter barley is ready in about 2- or 3-weeks’ time. Here in southwest Cambs we have good moisture retentive soils. The winter barley looks to be an average crop, which is excellent when compared to what it looked like in early May. In fact, I have no idea how it looks quite so well.

In other news, the winter wheat is green as you like. A late august start for these is most likely!

I have grown quite an area of Linseed. This was drilled late (mid-) into very dry and drying conditions. The May rains followed by early June heat really did kickstart this crop. Some of the crop is a white flower variety called Ineke. This crop seems particularly good and has produced a mass of flower. There is a long way to go for this crop and a mid to late September harvest beckons. This might well be very tricky with the short days and dewy nights.

I have a couple of fields of Planet barley. These follow a winter cover crop that was grazed by sheep. The barley is not quite as thick as neighbouring crops established after the plough, however it is standing rather than leaning or lodged and being grazed by pigeons.

Perhaps the best benefit of this slightly later than recent seasons and my abject failure to grow OSR is that I will be able to relax on a 5 day glamping trip on the banks of the River Wharfe in Yorkshire safe in the knowledge that everything is ready and nothing is ready.

So I still have a long way to go before this harvest is complete and indeed there is still plenty of time for the potential of these crops to be affected by the weather. However, the potential is markedly higher than the disaster that was 2020.

Safe harvest everyone,

John