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May Diary 
The weather has certainly changed since the last website diary in March! The spell of warm, dry early spring weather broke at the beginning of April. Since then, we have seen over 5 weeks of very wet weather with cool temperatures and sometimes very cold weather due to northerly winds. By the middle of May the farm has received over 160 millimetres of rainfall. In fact in one week we received 82mm which is more than the total for the first 3 months of the year! As a result, the last 5 weeks have been very challenging due to short spells of infield water logging. The river Granta has burst its banks more than once, briefly flooding one of our Sugar Beet fields. Luckily we have had enough dry spells in between the showers to keep most field work up to date. Unfortunately, we have not been able to complete potato planting. In fact we managed to finish one of our fields on the 14th of the month which is the first time the planter has ventured out of the barn for 4 weeks. Fortunately we only have 12 hectares of Organic salad potatoes to plant, which providing we can plant in reasonable conditions in the next 3 weeks or so, should still be able to reach their full potential. Early march planted potato crops have emerged well and will be initiating tubers by the third week of this month. However, we are very nervous at the prospect of ground frosts which are forecast over the next few nights. We managed to weed our first field of organic potatoes recently and providing we can weed again over the next couple of weeks weeds should not be too much of a problem in this crop. We have managed to keep up to date with the gas burner to remove weeds in front of the carrot drill and also in front of emerging organic onion crops. A brief spell of dry weather at the weekend allowed us to hoe most of the crop but very wet soil conditions in one of the fields has prevented us from finishing this task at the moment. The wet weather has produced a flush of weeds so we are keen to remove these before they become too large. We are concerned for some fields of sugar beet. The cold soil conditions have almost halted crop growth for 3 weeks now. We are up to date with weed control, but we desperately need some warm weather in the coming weeks if this crop is to reach a satisfactory yield this year. The rains certainly came in time for the cereals. Both first and second wheat crops look very well and providing they receive some sunshine in the next few weeks they could yield well. Disease pressure from Septoria is high but fortunately we have kept up to date with fungicide applications. Thanks for this go to our sprayer operator Chris, who completed some of the fungicide spraying at 1.30am one morning! Organic Wheats look well and are relatively free from weeds and disease apart from one crop where the wet weather prevented us from a 3rd pass with the weeder. Winter oilseed rape crops are in mid flower and have responded well to the recent moisture. They will be receiving a fungicide around the middle of the month. Spring rape crops have emerged well and our efforts have been spent keeping pigeons from grazing the emerging seedlings. The second true leaf is emerging on early march drilled onion crops. They are looking ok at the moment and we are hoping that the forecasted hail showers over the next few days will miss these tender plants. Our Hinxton Farm has recently been surveyed for breeding birds for a second time by a local RSPB volunteer. Already 3 new species have been noted since the last survey 3 years ago including whitethroats and yellow hammers. Planning for Open Farm Sunday in four weeks time is going well and we will be having some new activities for this year including pollinator surveying, health and safety demonstrations and some challenging competitions. We are all hoping for some nice warm sunny weather in the next few weeks not only for the crops but for the open day on the 17th June. Fingers crossed! Andrew Nottage 16th May 2012 |
