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Over the Farm Gate - this week kindly supplied by John Jefferies, Member Services committee chair
At this time of year the farmers mind slips to two things, planning the spring work and skiing. The family ski trip is all planned and neatly coincides with school half term. It will be my girls first every trip to the mountains and their first skiing. Exciting times.
Planning the spring work on the farm comes with an air of excitement as the crops look fantastic. The autumn weather pattern was so kind to the re-gen/sustainable farmer. The chopped straw mulch from harvest retained moisture I late summer/early autumn the autumn. On cultivated land this was soon lost to evaporation in the high temperatures and windy days. I was able to use a tine drill to cut the seed into the moist soil beneath the mulch. Very good levels of germination and emergence followed.
The hot autumn conditions (I call 8-10 C above average hot, regardless of the month of the year) allowed the crop to establish perfectly. The recent snows and severe frost had little affect upon the crop. Indeed, the snow cover protected the crop from the hard frost. Here is a photo of my SY Insitor 2nd wheat after the snow melt on 20/12/22. The crop has since grown rapidly in the hot winter conditions we have recently had.
I have a couple of fields that have a particularly severe Wild Oat problem and for what every reason the wild oats gods were certainly upset this year. I had had good control of the oats in the past few seasons but following a linseed crop and the hot dry summer the seed bank decided to cash in its chips and the oats emerged in numbers I had never previously seen. A flush of oats was sprayed off pre-drilling and yet couple of days later more were emerging. The plan was then to spray them off with Glyphosate before the wheat emerged. However, due to a couple of reasons this spray window was missed. Upon checking the crop the morning of the planned spray day I found at least 50% of the wheat crop was emerging. If I sprayed the field, I would kill the Oats and the wheat. I then had to find a plan B when none seemed to exist. Luckily, I did find the plan B and I think it has been 100% successful, as the photo below shows. Below the red line is an area that I left unsprayed and above the red line in the photo is the treated area. The green between the rows of wheat is Wild Oat and this population of Oats would completely swamp the wheat crop next summer. I now have an untreated strip in the field that is 6m wide and 30m long. I will leave this until next summer to monitor the effect the wild oats have on the crop and make an estimate of the benefit that the successful control of the oats brings.
And finally, the Christmas season. I had a lovely extended break with my family and have only really now got back to work. One of the highlights of the season was the Croft Farms turkey supplied to me via Camgrain. The bird was truly delicious. After Christmas this was complimented with gammon that I had boiled in Cider (rather than water) and then studded with cloves and roasted with a maple syrup glaze. Together with homemade pickles and homemade sloe vodka our “leftovers” were also delicious.
In terms of planning the spring work and getting back into the fields, I can’t wait. I am looking forward to managing these crops through to harvest and with the help of a kind climate (no drought, no flood and no excessive heat please) then we can also look forward to a good harvest being delivered into store this summer.
John Jefferies
Member Services committee chair.
