Cold Harbour Farm

Another New Years resolution to restart the blog has already lapsed.

However the lovely weather of the last few days makes it seem like anything is now possible.  It is my favourite time of the year with lots of things going on all over the place.

All our crops have now been drilled,and there had been an ensuing panic over wheat bulb fly and pollen beetle in the oil seed rape. These crops have now been sprayed, so the next problem is what colour bull to get to replace Simon. Simon is in no danger of being pensioned off yet, but it is cheaper to buy a young bull and get him used to our happy calm way of going on rather than suddenly aquiring a grumpy old man who is set in his ways.

The informed money is on a shiny, sleek, native  black version.

Slugs are a recent problem to us. Before the days of oilseed rape and when we were allowed to stubble burn we never had a problem with slugs,except the ones which used to eat the potatoes in the garden!

Recent changes in our crop establishment have shown that we may be able to reduce our slug problem without recourse to chemicals.

For the last two autumns we used a Simba DTX cultivator on some of the land and conventional plough and press on other. The land cultivated by the Simba had less of a slug problem than the ploughed land. This is only after two seasons so it is too soon to be certain  but we feel that the results look promising.

The early start to winter in November meant that the slugs dropped down to lower levels of the soil profile out of harms way earlier than in recent years. .