Mouth of the Wash

I am just about back in the swing of things after the African trip.  It rained for the entire time that I was away but, fortuitously, the weather has been excellent since I returned and we have been very busy catching up with outdoor tasks. 

This morning we finally finished planting the last field of potatoes; this is the latest that we have ever concluded the job and I feel mightily ashamed of the situation.  We were very busy with daffodils in March when the planting conditions were good.  Annoyingly, if we had been able to start planting potatoes one week earlier then we would have finished six weeks sooner. 

The building work on the new bulb warehouse is going well.  The roof is now being fitted and the flooring contractors start on Monday.  Our target was to be finished by the end of May so we are fashionably late but it should all be ready for the 2012 bulb harvest.

All of the flower crops look great after the rainy spell.  We lost about 5000 plants from one of our new commercial crops because we couldn't plant them but everything else is running to plan.

Next week we will be very busy with the start of the delphinium harvest but today our workload feels lighter than it has for the last four months.  I am nipping out to lunch with Charlie, the M&S flower technologist, with a clear conscience.

I have just arrived back from East Africa where I have been visiting FARM Africa projects in Uganda and Western Kenya with Charlie Russell (FW Farmer of the Year) and Cathy and Matt from the FA London office.

It was a mind-blowing experience.  I will tell you about it all over the coming weeks (for the time being we have to attempt potato planting again)

I can give you a little taste here.  Everywhere that we went, farmers and schoolchildren showed their appreciation to FARM Africa by singing and performing plays.  To properly enjoy the film you have to imagine the baffled faces of Charlie and me.  We are unused to this sort of self-expression in the countryside in the UK.  We looked like the Queen and Prince Philip on tour (an analogy which works on far too many levels). 

Warning: This song is incredibly infectious.  We were all humming it on the plane home and it is still rattling around my head even now.

 

I spent a day farming in London this week.

I went to the FarmAfrica's HQ first of all to plan a trip to Uganda that I am making with with my award-winning, kilt-wearing, sheep-farming friend, Charlie Russell in a couple of weeks.

After that I went to the House of Commons to the All-party Agroecology Group's meeting about the degradation of British soil. 

The demise of mixed farming systems, the ploughing up of grassland and years of using artificial nutrition instead of organic husbandry mean that the organic matter of UK farms has fallen dramatically in the last half a century.  Obviously this is uncool, organic material greatly improves the ability of soil to retain moisture and nutrition, it also helps drainage on silt soils.

We have limited options to improve the situation on our farm but I came away with the urgent resolution to introduce more cover crops into our rotation.  I also bought a forage harvester this week (there can't be many flower growers that own one of them).  After the crops have finished flowering, I am going to harvest and compost our foliage anaerobically to prevent the nitrogen and carbon in it from oxidising.

There was frustration at the meeting that the government doesn't have a soil policy.  I didn't agree with that viewpoint.  I agreed with Dr Charlie Clutterbuck, he laid the blame with the closure of the agricultural colleges and the agricultural extension service.  I would have loved to have had a beer with him to discuss that subject in a bit more detail.

 

There is general hilarity in the media about the irony of receiving high rainfall while we have a hosepipe ban.  I'm not sure why it is so complicated for people to understand. 

The water table is exceptionally low, reservoirs are at their lowest levels for years and there is a hot summer forecast.  This is like a bread shortage occuring as we embark on the wheat harvest.

Anyway.  I filmed

I don't look at the web page for this blog very often.  I write in a bizarre bit of software called Moveable Type (which was designed by someone who hates bloggers and wants to punish them) and so that's how I usually see these entries.

Anyhow. I had a look at the proper webpage today, the one that you see. Blow me down, there's a bloomin' advert on it.  An advert for New Holland tractor and combine parts.  It's like ITV here all of a sudden.

My instinct is to now take the mickey out of New Holland tractors to prove that there is nothing corrupt going on and that I haven't received a free combine harvester or baseball cap in exchange for the space.

 

An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a
Welshman, a Latvian, a Turk, a German, an
Indian, a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a Dane,
several Americans (including a Hawaiian
and an Alaskan), an Argentinean, a Slovak,
an Australian, an Egyptian, a New Zealander,
a Japanese, a Spaniard, a Russian, a Uzbek,
a Guatemalan, a Colombian, a Pakistani, a
Malaysian, a Croatian, a Cypriot, a Pole,
a Lithuanian, a Chinese, a Sri Lankan, a
Lebanese, a Cayman Islander, a Ugandan, a
Vietnamese, a Korean, a Uruguayan, a Czech,
an Icelander, a Mexican, a Finn, a Honduran,
a Panamanian, an Andorran, a Venezuelan, an
Iranian, a Fijian, a Peruvian, an Israeli,
an Estonian, a Brazilian, a Liechtensteiner,
a Moldovan, a Syrian, an Aruban, a Mongolian,
a Portuguese, a Hungarian, a Canadian, a Cook
Islander, a Norfolk Islander, a Haitian, a
Macedonian, a Bolivian, a Georgian, a Bahaman,
a Tajikistani, an Armenian, an Albanian, a
Samoan, a Greenlander, a Micronesian, a Virgin
Islander, a Belarusian, a Qatari, a Tongan, a
Cambodian, a Canadian, a Cuban, an Azerbaijani,
a Romanian, a Chilean, a Kyrgyzstani, a
Jamaican, a Filipino, a Ukrainian, a Dutchman,
an Ecuadorian, a Costa Rican, a Swede, a Serb,
a Swiss, a Greek, a Bulgarian, a Belgian, a
Singaporean, an Italian, a Norwegian and two
Africans walk into a fine restaurant.

"I'm sorry," says the maître d', "but
you can't come in here without a Thai."

I have just written my latest column for FW about farm auctions.

Afterwards (in fact, during) I spoke to Stockings and she corrected my pronunciation of the word "Auction."

She said that it should be pronounced "auction" and not "auction"

Did you enjoy my joke there? Wasn't it great?

She was pronouncing it as "Ork shun", (as though she was some sort of crazy Scotch egg from the Outer Hebrides)

I was pronouncing it as "Ock shun" (which also sounds pretty Scottish, maybe I have confused things by throwing a Scottish accent into the mix).

This all made me a bit paronoid because I like to think that I talk posher than what she does.  Let's face it, ordinarily, she would pronounce "bath" with a very flat "a" so that it rhymes with Maths.

I, meanwhile, would pronounce "Bath" to rhyme with "Darth".  As in "Barth Vader" (and I understand that Dave Prowse particularly enjoyed a long soak in the tub after a hard day on the Death Star - being a ruthless cyborg can really take it out you)

The Norf and Sarf divide is all very well but it gets very confoosin' around the Midlands.

I just dropped in at the filling station to fill my car with fuel (£90, outrage, still considering an electric car to recharge off our PV panels).

There were four people behind me in the queue at the checkout.  When I turned around to leave,  I realised that I knew all four of the people in the queue reasonably well.

It was a bit odd walking along saying hello to each of them in turn, they didn't seem to know one another.

I felt like the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance

If we forget about daffodils, then not much has happened here since I last wrote an entry.

Things have been slightly chaotic; we have got diggers and things on site putting in pipework and foundations for the new warehouse.  I was walking across the yard the other day and narrowly avoided walking straight into a hole (although in fairness I was absent-mindedly looking at a bottom that I shouldn't have been looking at).

We made a good start with the potato planting this week and now have a quarter of the crop planted.

I broke my own (admittedly pompous) rule about never appearing on the local news and on Tuesday I was filmed by Look North talking about the dry weather conditions.  It started raining while the cameraman was filming and that was the beginning of 50mm of rainfall over the next 12 hours.  We aren't planting potatoes anymore.

Jules rang afterwards and said

"So you can %^&* off with your drought talk, can't you?"  He has properly picked up a Lincolnshire dialect now, he occasionally slips in a nice vowel but by and large his expensive Sherborne education has pretty well worn off.

The daffodil harvest is coming to an end; we have just a week's production left now.  It has been a tough season but I've quite enjoyed it.  I was talking to another grower this morning and he said

"You have to hate this job before you can start to love it"

I could see exactly what he was getting at.  It's true of farming in general.  You need to have looked a few problems in the eye before you can properly call yourself a farmer.

It's been Daffodil Central here recently.  The warm weather has made things happen very quickly and the last few weeks have passed by in a blur. 

Daffodils are not a valuable commodity and so you need to handle large volumes to make a living.  We have been selling anywhere between half a million and a million stems per day this week and today it was nearly double that. 

In amongst the chaotic excitement of all this I managed to sneak away for the LEAF Board meeting this morning.  I shot down to Royal Leamington Spa late last night and was back on the road by lunchtime today.

I hadn't been to Lem before (I'm calling it Lem now. Some people go with RLS, but it's "Lem" to me).  I hopped out of bed early and had a good stroll around before breakfast.  It's a gorgeous place.  It's a proper Georgian jewel with some lovely, unspoilt architecture and beautifully-kept parks and gardens.  I felt as though I was having a weekend mini-break.

I am thinking about re-branding our village, Moulton Seas End, as Royal Moulton Spa.  King John had a lovely time here back in the day.

It's back to the daffodil orders for now.  The potato machinery is all fitted to the tractors and has been tested, we hope to get started on that job on Thursday