Farmer Focus: Drilling done – three cheers to Saint Walstan
Jon Pawsey © Phil Weedon I note that in my last submission we had done a couple days of winter cereal drilling in the first week of October, having been held off during the whole of September due to poor weather.
Needless to say, my ink had hardly dried on the paper when it started to rain again.
Luckily, I found the direct number for Saint Walstan, the patron saint of East Anglian farmers (he came from Norfolk; nobody’s perfect), and he assured me of good weather from 20 October until we finished drilling.
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He came good, so I’ve now got him on speed dial.
Wheat blends this year are centred on Extase, Highgrove and Mayflower.
We have also gone back to trying a few winter oats, which have never done terribly well for us – but our buyer is keen, and the customer is always right.
Although they didn’t yield terribly well for harvest 2024.
We also have another small area of vetches grown for seed, just to remind Sam, our combine driver, what it’s like to scrape a flat sheet of paper off the ground in September.
However, our purchase of a Claas Convio Flex header a few years ago has made crops with vertigo issues much easier.
Sown too is our Vespa bean and Extase wheat bi-crop, as well as some Vespa on its own for seed next year.
My concern has been our controlled traffic wheelings.
The September rain has still left our clay soils with plenty of moisture to go at, making it difficult to get a tilth behind tractor wheels even with eradicators.
We tend to sow our tramlines, as left unsown they let in light and weeds, but it’s encouraging that the crops we did get sown in the second week of October are up and looking healthy in the tramlines.
After getting only half of our winter crops sown last year, finishing autumn drilling in November will make this Christmas a much more relaxed affair.
Three cheers to Saint Walstan.
