Considering the last two months have mostly been extremely dry, the number of good spray days have been few and far between due to constant strong winds. These persistent winds have caused serious delays, but most have now caught up by making good use of the few recent spray windows available. Disease pressure has been [...]
Come back Atlantic weather systems, all is forgiven. The late spring means that crops are universally behind by at least three weeks. Cheshire has fared slightly better, as usual, and Lancashire is a mixed bag including some very poor crops. If growers can break even this year, most will be grateful, we’re not expecting any [...]
The thirty millimetres of rain that many places got on Friday, although being an irritant to potato planters, has fairly freshened up both winter and spring sown cereals. Having said that, despite the weather in the past few weeks being a big improvement, soil and air temperatures have remained lower than normal. The net result [...]
It is great to see how well crops have responded to a short spell of warm weather and they now look positively green compared to the scorched and purple appearance they have had for the past few months. Strong winds have dried the land out so much that even the heaviest land has been able [...]
All the seed is in the ground and its game-on. Bring on the warmth and nice soft rain. Established crops are greening already, but have a long way to go to make up. Soils have been hovering around a miserable 4C for long enough, but should now move up steadily. Some of the winter wheat [...]
In common with almost all Crop Watch reports in the past weeks this one is succumbing to “cracked record syndrome” – foul weather, cold wet soils and crops struggling. In the middle of last week the sun was giving an illusion of warmth, drillers were putting spring barley into tolerable seed-beds on lighter ground and [...]
Nothing quite like repeating the obvious, but March was rather cool. In fact, a massive 3C below the 30 year average according to the Met Office. If we add to this near normal rainfall, but only 54% of the normal sunshine hours, then you can see why all crops have been in suspended animation. What [...]
As ever the weather dominates our agricultural activities. In the past fortnight we have had some wonderful sunny days. In fact my solar panels have recently been generating more power than much of last summer! However, it is only early March and we are back to winter-like conditions with a couple of inches of snow [...]