Our Sainfoin field is doing very well and is now coming into flower; a beautiful sight. The seed was drilled last June into a new, clean seedbed after ploughing and pressing the field. We later broadcast a companion grass mixture containing Timothy and Meadow Fescue on top of the seedbed, rolling it in to ensure establishment.
Being such an upright plant, Sainfoin doesn't provide a huge amount of weed smothering so a grass companion crop is needed to fill up the sward. It also increases the overall biomass of the crop to produce a better yield.
Looking forward, we can use the crop for haylage with the option to take seed from it at a later date.
The second episode of the No Till Crimper Roller series follows on from week one where we established the crop was a little to under-developed to crimp yet. We continue to hunt for the ‘Goldilocks Moment’ where the Roller will destroy the crop before it turns to seed. We didn’t kill the rye and vetch in week 1 so will we succeed in week 2?
Join us next week for more, where we will be attaching a drill onto the back of the crimper roller to drill in the next crop as soon as the previous one has been crimped (And hopefully destroyed).
At this stage we are still deciding which crop to drill in, and would love to hear from you which plants you think we should drill in right after the rye/vetch mixture is destroyed.
Paul checked out the bees again on Friday. One hive was left untouched as planned, while the new queen is being raised, but a full inspection was carried out on the second hive. The queen here has somehow lost her blue identification spot! This is a blue ink marker which is dabbed on gently; it’s a technique used amongst beekeepers to help make the queen easier to find and to record which year she was reared, but it’s pretty low tech and we are not sure where it went. Anyway, Paul was still able to find her and she is doing well, healthy and laying eggs. Even more excitingly, the bees have now one-third filled the second super (you'll remember that last week they had filled their first super). So that's really good going. They are still in swarming mood though and Paul had to remove another handful of new queen cups, but there were less drones than previously which is positive. If they continue trying to swarm an artificial swarm might have to be performed soon.
Last week we reported that the bees at Honeydale were behaving rather strangely with one hive bursting with bees and the bees in the second hive preparing to swarm.
Paul’s beekeeping mentor Chris Wells has now been to assess the situation which has moved on a pace.
The hive that was full of bees last week, has now completely filled the extra super Paul added last week with approximately 10kg of honey. So yet another super has been added. The nearby rape fields are likely to be the reason for this early bounty. The bees in this hive are also now trying to swarm with lots of queen cups, some of which are sealed in readiness for a new queen to be created. The queen cups have therefore been removed and we are keeping a close eye, checking the hive every seven days to prevent swarming. If the colony continues to try and swarm, then we will need to perform an artificial swarm to maintain the colony.
The second, previously emptier hive, in which the bees were also preparing to swarm a week ago is still trying to swarm but the queen has been lost or has died and as a result the bees are behaving quite aggressively. Some of the brood frames have been removed and replaced with empty frames to provide more space and the queen cups here have been left in place so that a new queen can be created. Honey production will be delayed for at least three weeks and the hive will not be opened during this time, but otherwise the hive is active and healthy, if a little perturbed.
Overall there is a healthy number of bees in the hives and things are looking good. In light of the recent honey production and good weather we now need to increase the height of our ‘WBC’ hives to accommodate more supers as the season progresses and honey production continues. Paul will be ordering in the necessary items and building the extensions soon.
The No Till Crimper Roller is standard farm machinery in arable America but as far as we are aware our experiment at Honeydale Farm this weekend is among the first times that one has been used in the UK.
As the name implies, the Crimper Roller offers a way of terminating cover crops with no till; by avoiding the need for spraying, mowing and ploughing, it’s a much cheaper and faster method. It relies on having a bulky cover crop which is then crushed, the flattened plants forming a mulch on top of the soil which keeps weeds at bay and also allows new seeds to come through. Ingenious!
This weekend marked our first attempt at controlling our winter cover crop of rye and vetch. The trick is to find the ‘Goldilocks Moment’ when the plants are just right to terminate, in other words when they are old enough to remain flat once rolled, but not too old to seed.
We have rolled one trial strip in our cover crop to start with but as we suspected, we were a little too early and some of the plants may recover. We will be repeating the process weekly until we have determined the correct stage to terminate, so tune in next Monday to find out what happens!
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Testing the Water, Mob Grazing, Ploughing and Scattering
Following our participation in last year’s Thames Water Blitz, organised by Wild Oxfordshire and Earthwatch, we again tested the water at Honeydale.
The tests determine levels of nitrate and phosphate and a range of samples were taken across the ponds, dams, stream and spring that comprise the new flood alleviation waterworks on the farm.
The nitrogen levels were high and the phosphate low, which is what is to be expected based on last year’s results. But we are fixing our own nitrogen with sainfoin, green manures and grass leys so will be monitoring levels closely now and we are confident that our new farming system will not be adding to the problem, and is a method that should, over time, help to reduce water soluble nitrogen in rivers.
Mob-Grazing Moving On
Now the electric fencing is all in place, we are moving the sheep, thirty ewes and sixty lambs, every day. It’s only taking about twenty minutes a time. After two weeks the sheep now know what to do, and and as soon as the fence moves and they can see their way open to lush ungrazed herbal ley, they walk on through, follow each other just like...sheep!
Mob grazing moving on
One maintenance job we have to complete every two weeks is mowing under the fences with the Allen Scythe to make sure the grass does not grow too tall to touch the wire and earth it.
We’re also addressing the issue of bringing drinking water to the different areas as the sheep are moved. We’ve installed a bowser with a 1000 litre capacity which is pumped full from the spring and we are awaiting delivery of plastic tubing which will be run in a loop around the field with branch lines into each area. All we’ll have to do then is move the small empty trough each day, and in the future when different fields are given over to pasture in the rotation, we can simply move the water pipe to the new areas.
The Sheep have been enjoying grazing the Sheep’s Parsley in the Herbal Ley
We plough the fields and scatter….
Our arable fields were planted with Summer Quick Fix green manure which we over-wintered and ploughed a couple of weeks ago and have now power harrowed, rolled and planted with cereals; spring wheat, spring oats and spring barley. After sowing the spring wheat we’ve sown our standard mix of yellow trefoil and white clover under it as an intercrop. This will act as a soil improver and to be grazed after the wheat has been harvested.
Ploughing in Summer Quick Fix Green Manure in Arable Field Summer
Like many of us, the bees in the Honeydale hives appear to be extremely confused by the weird weather we’ve been seeing lately. One minute it’s warm and sunny and ideal for foraging and the next it’s freezing cold with rain, sleet and snow, weather that tells them to stay inside the hive. To confuse matters further, the recent mild winter has meant that the bees probably didn’t use up as much of their reserves as they usually do over the cold months. With rape seeds in flower now, the bees have been out and about, busy gathering nectar. As a result, one of the hives has filled up so quickly with brood, larvae and honey that we’ve already had to add another super (What's a super? go to 4:05 here), long before we’d normally expect to have to do this.
But the behaviour of the bees is as topsy-turvy as the weather. While one hive is full, the second is pretty empty and the bees are trying to swarm by creating lots of new drones and queens in queen cups. Swarming is a natural process that occurs at certain times throughout the year and allows new colonies to be formed from a single hive. It’s a process that beekeepers are always looking out for and trying to avoid because allowing a colony to swarm can mean losing up to 60% of the population in the hive. The tell-tale signs are the production of new queens and a high proportion of drones (male bees). This would be a major setback in honey production, and reduced bee numbers in the hive make the colony more vulnerable to collapse. We would normally expect swarming to happen later in the spring/early summer. To stall them for now, we have removed the developing queens in their queen-cups. Paul’s bee-keeping mentor Chris Wells is coming to the farm this week to assess what’s going on and take further steps to prevent the hives from swarming.
It’s always been part of our vision to have a farm as an extension of the Cotswold Seeds business and in 2013 we bought Honeydale Farm, one hundred acres in the Cotswolds. During the past couple of years we've been making huge progress on the farm and this blog was set up to share this progress with our friends in the farming world.
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