September 2007 Archives

Well. We've reached our centenary. This is the 100th blog entry. Actually I thought I wrote the 100th entry on Wednesday but it seems to have got lost somewhere.

Not sure how we celebrate. Perhaps we could have 100 comments on this blog entry. Maybe I could give £100 to the first £100 people to comment. Maybe 100 readers could give ME £100. Yes, I've thought about it and I've decided to go with the last suggestion.

We are having a wet spell here which is disrupting the potato harvest. Things have got a bit muddy and we are now going at half the speed that we were at the start of the week.

The new owners have moved into Middlecott House and I am now living with my parents for a week...

So another day of potato harvesting (also had the removal men in all day although I won't bore you any more with that subject - I will just say that they were wearing too many chunky rings to be handling antiques, particularly antiques with such thin veneers as mine)

Highlight of the day was this sign on the back of a van which came to repair a tyre on a lorry in the yard.

I didn't realise how much crap I owned until I started packing. How many people do you know who have a life size cardboard cut-out of themselves? What am I supposed to do with that? In fact, send me your suggestions and I might send it to the person with the best idea.

Oh. And the kitchen drawer...

This is my last weekend in the cottage; I am moving out on Thursday. I have found the packing up really rather emotional.

I've been restoring the place for nearly a decade and have finally got it how I like it. In fact I love it but I have got to convince myself that it's right to move on.

The house is dripping with history and character and it was plenty big enough for me and any entertaining I did there. The neighbours are great and the view is... enough, Matthew, enough. You're moving, get over....

I have just found my first grey hair.

I have been listening to the radio in the tractor today. It is gratifying that the Foot and Mouth outbreak is being treated with an appropriate level of seriousness by the media.

It must be desperate for those farmers who have cattle under movement restrictions, particularly since feed prices are rising. I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone affected.

One of the farmers interviewed was called Bert Broom. I have a feeling that this was our own Hugh Broom operating under an alias (obviously I was listening to the BBC so it was a rival station to the one he works for). Can anyone confirm?

Whoever he was, he spoke very well and put a good case forward.

How are the potatoes going, Matt?

Well, not too bad since you ask. Obviously it's bloomin' dry. We haven't had any of the rain that the rest of the UK has enjoyed.

We have had a smaller team today with just me and Chris driving the trailers and we have been crossing the A17 main road which has been nose to tail with lovely, lovely caravans all day.

This said we have done about 100 tonne boxes today which is pretty good for us considering the conditions. The bruising from Thursday was 5% which would be a bit too high in a normal season. Because of the year 5% is just about acceptable to Rufus, the Manor Fresh buyer. Since then all the machinery has got a nice layer of silt on it and the crop is a bit smaller so I would expect our results for today to be a bit better. We have slowed down the web and grader since then too and fitted a couple of flaps on the end of the grader to slow the crop down.

I have just had a count up and we have five boxes of reject potatoes which have picked off by the grading team, these are mostly cracked or green ones. So even a dunce like me can work out that that is 5%. We are grading them on a 45 millimetre screen so we have also taken out four boxes of small potatoes, which is 4%. Get me, I'm like Carol Vorderman here. We have taken 7 loads of loose soil back to the field as well today.

The potatoes from this field are all going into cold storage so we need to get every bit of waste out. There is no point in storing something that won't make the Marks and Spencer grade. This should help with our carbon foot print. PLAN A - Because there is no Plan B

A special hello to the geezer who overtook me in a white Transit van a moment ago (he was in in the white van, I mean, not me - my van driving days are behind me).

I was powering along the A17 at 50kph in a John Deere with a full load of scrumptious Maris Piper potatoes on the rear. He waited until we were on a blind bend before he performed his tasty manoeuvre. Pity the poor man coming the other way in the Renault Megane (particularly if he has to clean his own upholstery). Praise be for his quick wits which saved us all a load of trouble.

Anyway, white van man. I dare say that like most of the UK you were in a hurry to get home to read the latest news on this blog. Consider yourself chastised, you useless pillock.

I was in the Cotswolds yesterday for an interview for a course that I have applied for at the Royal Agricultural College. I have had a load on my mind lately so I was looking forward to the drive down there to have a think about things and clear my head out.

What with thinking about next years plans for the farm and moving house and potato lifting and concentrating on not driving under a juggernaut and stuff like that, I hadn't thought about the interview once on the whole journey. I got to Cirencester pretty early so I visited the large Waitrose store which is close to the college so I could buy a paper and have a look at the flowers. That set me thinking about flowers again so I still hadn't thought about the interview...

My grandfather's best man, Arthur Birkett, sent us some information about the Naylor family tree a few weeks ago and I forgot to mention it here. Although my grandfather died a few years ago, Arthur is still in superb health. He still holds his pilots licence in fact. He always was always a more flamboyant figure than my grandfather - although that comments not intended as an insult to either of them.

I am intending to do a bit of research into our family tree during the long winter evenings so this was a wonderful start. It showed that our family have been farming in Moulton Seas End back into the 1600's. Once you have got back that far there's a fair chance that the family has always lived there. I may be wrong of course. Perhaps one of my forebears worked as a systems analyst in London in the 1400's and decided to move to Moulton Seas End for a quieter life. God knows he would have found it here.

I have just been filling in a very long questionnaire to arrange my house insurance. One of the questions was "Do you work in the entertainment industry?" I thought about my three seconds on gardeners world and wondered if I should declare it. Does this blog count as entertainment? "Not on the evidence of the last few entries" I hear you say.

It is only a week or so until the house move now. Most of my stuff is packed.

My friend Jo paid a suprise visit last night. "Shall we have a cup of tea?" I asked, only to realise that I had only got one mug that hadn't been packed. We couldn't decide if we should share the mug between us or whether I should drink from the tiny plastic jug that I use to fill the kettle.

In an ideal world Jo would have volunteered that she actually preferred to drink tea from a plastic jug. She didn't say this and so I was left with no alternative but to let her use the mug and I had a cold beer from the fridge instead.

Everything that you've been told about house moves being stressful is true. The beer will the last thing that I pack and the first thing that I unpack at the other end.

We started harvesting potatoes today. It has all been a bit of a rush. Rufus is the buyer for Manor Fresh, the packer that we work with. He telephoned just before lunch to say that he urgently needed a load of Maris Piper for Marks and Spencer. I said we would pull out all the stops but that it would take us a while to get things set up properly.

"Do you have a back up plan if I can't do it?" I asked him.

"Yes, I'll ring your Dad and ask him instead," said Rufus.

It is 6.30pm and the lorry should be arriving at any time. By tomorrow these will hopefully have been packed and will be heading to M&S stores in (biodegradable) packaging with my name on. The skin finish looks very bright in this field (Vickers 5). There is also suprisingly large yield but we are throwing out quite a lot of potatoes which are cracked, green or mis-shapen. Bruising is my biggest fear. The ground is very dry and although this is one of our best fields there are still lumps of soil entering the trailer. Thankfully the dry matter of the tubers is not too high at 20.7%.

It has all been a bit of a rush today, hopefully we can spend the morning making fine alterations to all the harvesting and grading equipment to make sure things run as smoothly as possible.

As Churchill said (from memory so I paraphrase) "This isn't the end. It isn't even the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning." Comparing the 2007 potato harvest to a World War may not turn out to be an inappropriate analogy.

In 2008 it will be sixty years since my grandfather started our family business. One of the things that we are doing to celebrate this is donating 60 000 daffodil bulbs to Marie Curie Cancer Care who are also 60 years old next year (and so's my Dad but we've got to keep that particular milestone quiet). These are going to be planted in Hyde Park next to the Joy of Life Fountain on November 6th. You can read a bit more about it here if you like.

Sorry this is a shameless plug - I have a creative blockage at the moment, remember.

If you want to sponsor a bulb in remembrance of someone you can do so by clicking here

There is even talk of a few celebrities coming on the day to help with the planting. Not sure what calibre of "stars" to expect. It's best that I don't get too excited, it will probably be Ruth Madoc and Rick Waller.

Sorry it's been yonks since my last entry. I seem to have a creative blockage at the moment. We have had a very busy week finishing the daffodil planting and tidying up all the loose ends and I haven't been outside the perimeter of the farm for weeks. We are starting the potato harvest this week so at least you can expect plenty of moaning on here about the dry conditions.

On top of all this I am moving house a week on Thursday. There are lots of conversations with solicitors and estate agents at the moment which have done little to set my creative juices flowing.

Anyway. I just visited the Marks and Spencers website to buy some work trousers. They are now selling Organic Trousers. My mate James telephoned me from his holiday last month to say that he had seen a dispenser selling organic tampons. The phrase "organic" is gradually becoming devalued and will soon be totally meaningless.

I spent half a day on a tractor on Thursday. The time sits heavily on my mind when I'm stuck in a tractor so I started playing a little game with myself. I decided to see how many names I could come up with that sounded like a job. I realise that this a fairly puerile activity for a company director in the prime of his life. Maybe I've drunk too much coffee again or probably it's an effect of the long hours.

Anyway here's what I've thought of so far

Den Tist
Paul Bearer
Wyn de Cleaner
Math Steecher
Phil Mactor
Lou A. Tendant
Lol E. Popplaydee
Percy Noll-Trainer
Pam L. Beeter

Then 3 people who obviously work together in a school canteen

Dina Ladie
Dean R. Laydee
and Dee Nerlady

More suggestions welcome

We are reaching the end of the daffodil bulb planting and just have two varieties left to go. We all took a packed lunch with us today to show that we meant business.

I don't normally have a packed lunch (or pack-up as I believe they call them in the trade) so it was quite an adventure. We all sat around on the ground at lunch time and it was a bit like one of the sepia photos that you see of farmworkers in the 19th century. We didn't have flaggons of warm beer to rinse it down but this is definitely something for us to consider in the future.

Anyway when I got up I was stunned how large an imprint had been left in the ground by my bottom. "Whose fat arse made that?" I thought. There was no other explanation, it was mine. I have a much fatter arse than I thought I did.

I don't have a Trinny and Susannah - style mirror at home and it has never occured to me to check this out before. I suppose that this was always a possibility but I had just assumed that I had a very little bottom like an Italian waiter.

Oh to see yourself as others see you. I have barely recovered from the Gardeners World debacle and the painful realisation that I speak like a bumpkin and now this.

Here's a good article about a musical based on Walmart, the American supermarket that owns Asda.

Dad and I were talking about wheat yesterday. Every time the price of wheat goes up, Dad starts getting nostalgic about growing it and starts arguing the commercial case for introducing it back into the rotation. I remain (stubbornly) convinced that our future here is in more intensive crops and better marketing.

It all reminded of the moment when I decided that I hated growing wheat. I was about 18 and had been combining for several hours at Welland House Farm. It was a hot day and I was in a cronky New Holland combine (you are now picturing a cronky combine in your minds eye - but it was cronkier than that). It didn't have air conditioning. I am a useless tractor driver because a, I get thirsty really quickly and b, I always forget to take a drink.

Anyway. This was in the days before mobile telephones and it was all arranged that Grandad would bring me a drink with the next trailer. But he forgot. My throat felt as though it had been sandpapered and it was really dusty. Two hours later, with the next trailer, he remembered but instead of picking up the bottle of drink that my mum had left on the work surface, he picked up the tin of dried spaghetti next to it by mistake. (This shows how long ago it was, who keeps dried spaghetti in a tin any more)

So it was three hours before the drink arrived. I can't think of a more disappointing moment in my whole life that seeing him walk across the field with a tin of dried spaghetti. I really need to stress how parched I was; if he had brought a tin of glyphosate I would have drunk it. I might even have drunk Dr Pepper, I was so thirsty.

This was nearly a couple of decades ago. I can almost laugh about it now. But even if (or when) it gets to £300/tonne, I still don't want to grow wheat again.

Guess what?

I have only bloomin' well gone and got a Facebook profile. Get me, eh? Mr trendy farmer man.

I am quite excited by the idea of an electronic social life. At the last count I had eight friends on there which is five more than I have in "real" life. Eight still makes me the least popular person on facebook. Even Rose West has got more than that.

If you have been too timid to leave a message here but would like to become my facebook friend (and help me to pip Rose) my username on there (rather embarrassingly) is Matthew James William Naylor.

I don't mind if people start stalking me and making my life a misery. At least it would give me something funny to write about on here - the last few entries have been rather dull haven't they?

We have started digging the new pond at the back of the yard. We laid out the drainage from the two newest buildings so that we could harvest the rainwater.

Finally we have got round to digging a pond to store the water in. We have not yet decided whether we will fit a butyl lining and store clean water for irrigation or just stock it with fish and keep is an ornamental wildlife habitat.

Just take a look at that Lincolnshire sky. It looks like the apocalypse is coming.