Opinion: Spring to-do list seems just as long in retirement

It has been a good spring to be retired from arable work. When the rain stopped at the end of March, I imagined what my “jobs to do” list would have looked like.

There would have been a whole bunch of spring crops to get in (even some of my chalkland neighbours were only half drilled up, after a good start in February).

The rest of the farm should have been well into its fertiliser programme, and agronomist Tod’s sheaf of urgent spraying recommendations would have been visible from space.

See also: Opinion – contacting work puts paid to retirement 

About the author

Charlie Flindt

Charlie Flindt is a National Trust tenant in Hampshire, now farming 40ha of recently “de-arabled” land with his wife Hazel – who still runs a livestock enterprise. He also writes books and plays in a local band.

Read more articles by Charlie Flindt

Instead, we’ve spent most of March planting 1,500 trees and shrubs on our remaining acres.

It’s a first for us, and oddly satisfying, even if I only realised after 349 stakes that I was banging them in the wrong side of the tree guards.

Our daughter came down from Cambridge to help with the fiddly bits, but not before she’d set up a crowdfunding site (as young people are wont to do) to make it a “sponsored” event, and raised a few hundred quid for a local wildlife trust.

My evening walk is now punctuated with peering down the tree guards to see what’s come into leaf. So far, the success rate is good – all that March rain did have its use.

We’ve been doing lots of tractor work in the Back Meadow with a view to getting a proper hay crop.

I tine-harrowed it twice, and then realised I would have to go and buy some fertiliser; the days of putting on the dregs from the liquid fert tanks are gone.

I rang round the usual suppliers (a job once done by the buying group that we’ve now left, of course) and got laughed at for wanting just four bags of 20:10:10.

The internet beckoned, and my four bags were delivered on individual pallets by a man with a van. Not an artic to be seen (I won’t mention the price, though).

Luckily, Mad Mac was available to spin it on – once he’d corrected my terrible kg/ha to units/acre maths (anyone want a spare bag?)

And we’re just finishing the lengthy slit ‘n’ roll shifts at 5kph with an 8ft roller. A barnful of hay beckons.

We’ve been erecting miles of new fencing to make the “new” farm private – more important than ever as the rest of the estate is “theme parked” and the pro dog walkers have suddenly multiplied.

The most onerous task of the year has been trying to tell the Rural Payment Agency (RPA) what’s been going on in Hinton Ampner, using multiple RLE1s, emails and telephone calls to long-suffering RPA employees.

I don’t envy them their task – trying to make sense of changes in parcel sizes and custodianship. I think we’re on to our fourth attempt to get the new farm details right on their website.

Every time we think we’ve made it perfectly clear, we find another change has been wrongly made. It’s the Rubik’s Cube of farm jobs, and we’re running out of weeks to get it right.

My favourite task of a busy time was gathering up all those letters demanding renewal of our subscriptions to NRoSo and Red Tractor, and feeding them into the shredder.

Not difficult, but very significant (and topical at the moment). If life goes on like this, I’ll be needing a rest come harvest.