After the horrors of a wet harvest then delays to autumn work because of dry soils and hard clods its satisfying to see freshly drilled winter rape and cereals coming up and looking good. We may not yet have finished with slug and other problems and there is still a long way to go to harvest but the start of a new crop year always stimulates me.
Like many others this year we decided to min-till our autumn seedbeds rather than plough them. This was partly for economic reasons, partly environmental in that a lot less fossil fuel is used, but also because it kept the best soil into which to plant seeds on top and avoided turning over the summer saturated stuff beneath.
If ever there was a right year for min-till systems this has been it. The few fields I have seen that have been ploughed prior to drilling looked like liver - shiny and dark with blacker than usual furrows - and quickly dried into rock hard lumps that then had to be expensively broken down into a tilth. OK, min-till may not always be quite as tidy as burying trash with a plough but its paid off this year and as I say, the crops that are emerging after it are looking OK so far.