Buckwheat

We undersowed herbal ley to buckwheat to act as a nurse crop to protect the herbal ley from hot weather while it establishes, especially important on our thin, free draining soils. It was sown seven weeks ago at 10 kilos an acre of buckwheat and as you can see from the below the herbal ley has taken wonderfully well. We’re not going to graze the sheep on it, because we’re not certain how they will take to the buckwheat, so we ran the topper over it this week to allow the light to get to the herbal ley for regrowth. We’ve also left a trial strip of buckwheat so that we can observe what happens if we don’t top it. 

Combining the Wheat

Like many farmers, there was no rest for Sam over the hot and sunny bank holiday weekend. He was busy combining the wheat. As part of our rotation it was late sown in May, undersown with trefoil and white clover for the sheep to graze in spring.

We achieved a yield of 1.4 tons an acre, which we’re very happy with, given that it was a zero input/no cost crop. The financial data is being professionally monitored by Farm Business Analyst James Turner from Strutt & Parker which will enable us to compare the new rotation with the control plots from the previous conventional, high cost/input system.

We were hoping to combine the oats too, but they weren’t quite ready.

Haymaking

Two permanent grass fields, fifteen acres each of ridge and furrow, have been cut for hay. It’s been baled and Sam has been tedding it for the past 4-5 days. Weather permitting, it might only need a couple more turns and then it will be ready to bale and feed to sheep and cattle over the winter.

Wildbird and sunflower seed mix

This was thin when it was sown in April because of the dry weather, but it’s looking a bit better now, and getting plenty of interest from our farmland birds already.

Dry-stonewalling

H and Kelvin from local dry stone walling and fencing company ‘Sticks & Stones’ have been carrying on with the building of the wall at the entrance of Honeydale and it’s progressing slowly but steadily. It’s highly skilled and painstaking work and we could of course have just erected a fence here. But limestone walls are so quintessentially Cotswold and there was a wall at the entrance of Honeydale which had fallen down, so we wanted to rebuild it reusing the old stone.

Development of Honeydale

We’ve been working closely with architects and West Oxfordshire District Council to progress the plans for the development of Honeydale. We’re currently at pre-application stage and Tim and Chris, our architects, are now drawing up visualisations, taking great care that replacement farm buildings will be perfectly in-keeping with the landscape of the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. 

Exciting times.

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!

Anyone who’s tried to repair a combine will know how difficult it is just to get access to anything. We were soon covered in prickly ears of barley and baking in the hot sun, listening to the taunting hum of fully-functioning combines busy at work on the neighbouring farms.

After several hours we had to admit defeat and called in the local engineer from Cotswold Combines. He visited the following morning, diagnosed a broken bearing in the unloading auger, and had it up and running within a couple of hours. The only trouble was the rain, which forced us to postpone harvesting the rest of the barley.

A week later we were able to finish the job, with a good yield of 1.8 tons per acre with 15% moisture content. We’ve sold the barley to a local farmer for feed and we shall be baling the barley straw, probably for bedding and feeding to sheep.

Our main reason for growing spring barley though, it that it’s traditionally been grown at Honeydale and though we’ve diversified with various other crops and mixtures, we wanted to retain a small acreage of the original crop to benchmark ‘before and after’ soil conditions.

On the subject of quick fixes,we’ve been experimenting with a method of soil improvement in the form of over winter green manure which we believe has been used little in the UK in recent times. We sowed our Summer Quick Fix, comprising mustard and legumes, in one of the fields and it’s grown well, smothering weeds and creating double the density of a trial brassica mix of radish and mustard. We’ve now purchased a crimper/roller with blades and will use it to flatten and cut some of the green manures before drilling with rye and vetch to protect the soil over winter..

We’ve bought a set of cultivation disks so that we can experiment with shallow soil cultivation techniques and weed control. The idea is to look at how traditional cultivation techniques can be utilised to remove weeds, with a lower reliance on chemical methods of weed control. So far we have noted that to get a reasonably weed free seedbed, the ground must be disced two to three times before sowing, set at a shallow depth to cut weed roots without moving excess soil and bringing up more weed seeds.

The ewes and lambs were sheared just before the weather warmed up and are grazing well on our permanent grassland.



We are planning to establish an orchard in November in the twelve acre grass field, with three hundred mixed fruit trees and an ‘orchard within an orchard’ of denser, shorter trees for children. The aim is that the orchard can be used for education at all ages, from schoolchildren to students studying orchard maintenance. 

 

Harry, as we have named him, arrived at Cotswold Honeydale Farm on a grey, rainy day in March and we’ve not even started sowing the fields yet. He’ll be spending the next few months in the bar. But we’re very pleased to have him, as you can see from Sam’s smile!

Most farmers require maximum capacity combining, but since we will be growing research plots for our seed mixtures, we needed a combine capable of dealing with small areas. So when we saw this one advertised on EBay, we couldn’t resist having it transported up from Dorset.

‘I got a brand new combine harvester and I’ll give you the key.’ That song charted back in the record breaking hot summer of 1976. So here’s hoping for some sunshine soon, and a good growing season.

Nigel Adams, who grazes his sheep at Honeydale, brought his mower and tractor to cut and bale the hay meadow which produced 130 round bales and a further 40 small bales. The hay was cut on one of the many hot sunny days, so conditions were ideal, and Nigel was pleased that it made really well and was of good quality to use as animal fodder for the winter.

Our malting barley was combined with the help of the Swinbrook estate who arrived with two big tractors and trailers and a 10.5 metre combine complete with drivers. 

I told Jim, who farmed Honeydale for many years before we took it over last year, that the combine was on its way and he was very excited and pleased that our first harvest had been successful. The barley straw has now been baled and sold on to farmers in Wales for livestock bedding, as we don’t have a requirement for it.

 

This means that the 12 month baseline cycle we have been following in order to observe the established practices on the farm before deciding what changes to make is now complete.

What’s particularly important about the barley for us is that it has only been in the ground for four and a half months. During the rest of the year the pattern has been for this field to be left as stubble. While this is an easy and low input method of farming it means that the soil has been left inactive for nearly three quarters of the year and this is something we’re going to change, starting from now. We’re planning to grow as much green matter as possible, to improve the soil and produce greater quantities of food. We’re looking at what we can grow to best improve the fertility and what can be achieved if the soil is more active.

The good thing about the stubble was that the skylarks and hares liked it, but we will still continue to provide some of this habitat on the farm.

Polytunnel

Living on Honeydale over the summer months, I’ve had chance to see what’s been growing in the polytunnel and observe the changes on daily basis.

Earlier in the year we tried to plant a selection of the seeds we sell at Cotswold Grass Seeds and it’s particularly pleasing to see that the sainfoin has established well. There’s a noticeable difference between the growth habitat of some plants with the majority having a large rosette of basal leaves, while some have put up ‘heads’ and are in flower.

The majority of the cover crop examples have also taken and the cornfield annuals have flowered well. The buckwheat was the first to get going and has now gone over, making way for other species such as borage and annuals like crimson and persian clover.

Unfortunately, most of the brassicas have been badly affected by flea beetle which even struck the mustard and fodder radish which flowered early and are now setting seed.



The dwarf sorghum and millet got away quickly though and the sunflower and quinoa are catching up.

From our spring sowing the earliest wildflowers to bloom were the hawkbit, musk mallow and yellow trefoil while the self heal and lady bedstraw are just starting to come into flower now. The yellow rattle and cowslip did not germinate because they need to go through vernalisation (cold snap) first.

Outside the tunnel, I’ve spotted a clutch of 5 partridge chicks at the top of the drive. They’re very young and not flying yet.

As autumn approaches we’re planning on re-directing the watercourse in the middle field away from the hedge and into several shallow pools to create a feature and create better habitats for wildlife.