Well at last we might be getting a break in the weather. We must have had about 15 inches in the last three months and it even snowed last weekend. One of the pluses of our soils here is that the rain keeps soaking in. Our soils were mainly formed under forests and are very deep with little clay subsurface layer as we have at home in Suffolk. It means the soil rarely lies wet and when we do get a dry day or so we can work. They have just been a little scarce of late. We still need about four days to finish autumn seedings (triticale) and that is worrying as it all depends on what winter we get. A very cold November and we will be in trouble. We have had some light frosts (-3C) but they should not be too damaging, although very worrying given we have a lot of late-seeded lucerne in the ground. I just hope we can avoid going below -5C for sometime yet. The cereal seeds are all a little annoying because our problems stems from seeds being delivered on the 4th October, exactly one month after they were promised and then we have only been supplied with 70% of what we ordered. It is probably the last time we rely on a Romania company and I hope autumn 2008 will see us putting a lot of seed crops in the ground.
Thoughts are already turning to spring cropping. I want to trial several alternatives for protein/break crops. The locals have used vetch mixed with oats recently and that is a good fixer of nitrogen. Very poor yields though. We will try lupins as that worked well at trial level a couple of years ago. Peas if we can find them. Also we will try soya if we can find the right varieties. I might also look for some field/horse/tick beans to see if I can put them in sometime during late winter. Lastly we will see how sunflower goes as we might try to press that on-farm. Should be an interesting year. As to the cereals, well I am looking for a high-yielding feed barley as it has to perform better than the local oat varieties have been doing. For that I am already talking with a German plant breeder in the hope that we can import the seeds directly ourselves. The fun of having a pretty poor and totally unreliable seeds industry.