WTFIH @ Thriplow Farms, November 2018

The problem with not writing a column for September is that I have to cram all of harvest into the October space, and that doesn’t leave room to talk about all the drilling we are doing at that time. So rewind the clock back to the beginning of August - just after harvest had finished on the 3rd. Nowadays we like to plant our oilseed rape as early as possible as soon as July is done and dusted. This year was an ideal opportunity to get it in the ground at the perfect time, with one major exception: the soil was drier than a desert. There is not a lot of point in putting seeds into dust, as they will either sit there and do nothing, or even worse, they may germinate and then die if rain doesn’t come quickly enough. So we sat on our hands for a week or so, and luckily the rain did come. Once the decision had bene made it took around 5 days to get 160 hectares planted, which went fairly smoothly aside from the usual temperamental nature of our oilseed rape drill causing a few headaches. The worst of these involved me “drilling” 7ha of a field late on a, very wet, Saturday night, only to find out a week later that I had not actually put any seed into the ground. Luckily we noticed quickly, and were in time to redo it. This year we have slightly changed the mix of plants that we grow alongside the rapeseed, so there is also vetch, buckwheat, and fenugreek, all of which will either die off over the winter, or be killed off by us in the spring. Once again we have managed to avoid problems with the dreaded Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle, and so the crops remain insecticide free, which is one of my big goals for the farm.Until a few years ago, we used to start drilling wheat from the second half of September onwards. More recently we have started to delay this by somewhere between one and five weeks, which gives us better weed control, and reduces the likelihood that we will have to use insecticides to control aphids. The tradeoff is that you do risk worse drought tolerance in the spring, which is a real concern on our farm. This year we started off on the lightest land at the end of September, and have moved at a relaxed pace from the southern end of the farm going northwards. The plan will be to finish drilling in the month of October, the last fields being either beans in Barrington, or perhaps a field of wheat to the south of Thriplow which has had a particularly bad black grass problem over the last decade. Hopefully we are getting on top of it now, and this extra-late drilling with be the coup de grace for that particular weed. Of course, after this we must plant wheat and barley following sugar beet, lifted in November and December, and when it gets that late in the year, we are really in the lap of the Gods. I may have to pray a lot next month.