Combining? Ha

I have found myself with the first bit of "spare" time in about two months so I've come to have a word with you.  This is going to be a fairly tedious round up of what is going on around our farm.  I'm completely immersed in work and incapable of thinking about anything else.  Normally at this time of year I feel envious of people on their holidays but this year I don't at all.  It is a great feeling to be fully engaged in something that feels necessary and worthwhile.  I haven't been this fulfilled by my work since I was a teenager.

I came into work at 6.00 as usual but the auto-timer of our bulb treatment plant hadn't worked and so I've had it start in manually.  This means I've got a spare hour while the water heats up to the correct temperature to put another batch of daffodils bulbs in.  We plonk six tonnes in each time and give them three hours at a constant 44.4 degrees.

There's a lot going on around the farm and we are all working long hours and having to remain focused to keep on top of things. 

We are well underway with our daffodil planting and are just about to start ploughing the last field.  I spent the weekend driving the bulb planting and enjoyed every minute of it.  This is the first year that we have used Auto-trac to plant bulbs and we are using precision fertiliser placement too.  Although it inolves a fair bit of careful thought, it has been a complete revelation.  Planting bulbs has always been a favourite task of mine but this bit of technology has transformed the job - hopefully it will give us better results too.

I've just unloaded a lorry which was delivering some potato grading equipment which we have boght in preparation for the potato harvest which should start in a fortnight.  All of the Melody and Marfona have now received  their second dessicant and we have started burning down the Maris Piper already.  I can't be sure what sort of season lies ahead but at least we look as though we will make an early start on the harvesting which gives us more time to do the job carefully.

We are busily harvesting cut flowers.  The second crop of delphiniums is the best that we have grown in 15 years.  I wish I knew why so that we could try to do it again next year.  We also have eight acres of other commercial trial crops underway which have been ideas generated from our trial ground.  They are selling with varying degrees of success and we have learnt a lot already.  Like most development work, this project has not been easy and involves a lot of hard work for little reward.  We knew this when we embarked on it and our customer (and their supermarkets customers) have been very supportive.  There are certainly some positive leads for next year.

The builders start work on the next coldstore on Monday.  This will be more a less a copy of the one that we built last year but will be a single 1000 tonne chamber rather than two smaller ones.    

We have also coughed up for photo-voltaic panels on our roofs and the work starts on these as soon as our local council grants planning permission.  It is just a 50Kw project but if we use the power intelligently then it will reduce our bills and give us some energy security for the future.

Right. Temperature is up. I'm off. When things calm down, we can get back to normal and get some wigs on dogs.