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| Pond like a puddle start of April |
Wet, Wet, Wet!
It has been a pretty dire month for doing anything on the farm. The weather has
been against pretty much everything we had planned, like finishing off the
nitrogen fertilising, keeping up the fungicide cover on all the crops, oh and
our LEAF launch and all the other jobs we have on our list.
I downloaded our
weather station records yesterday. These record everything you can imagine with
regard to the weather and made for some interesting reading! For the whole of
April, we have only had three days without any rain recorded; in April and one
week of March we have had 149mm of rain and the average temperature has been
enough to keep me office bound most of the month! Like most farmers, I would
prefer to be out and about on the farm but this period of wet has really given
me a chance to do lots of extra office work - the type of work you always seem
to put off! We have got a number of projects on the go and all have required
some sort of financial planning; budgets, costing and plans etc, so it has been
great to dust off my old business planning folder from college.
One of these
plans has gone live! Our newly installed PV Solar Energy Unit was switched on
and is now producing power. The installation has been kept clean with all this
rain but fingers crossed it will be making loads of energy as the sunshine of
spring and summer returns!
The crops are
looking pretty miserable in these wet conditions. The wet and warm days with
cold nights have created favourable disease conditions and with the land being
water logged and not suitable to travel over, the diseases are really getting
their claws into the plants, which will soon become stressed and the yield will
be affected. As soon as we have had a few dry days, we will have to be out and
getting some overdue fungicides on to the crops. We have had to change the
chemicals for more expensive ones, due to this high disease pressure. The
chemicals we will be applying will act as protectors but will also eradicate
and cure the diseases that have found their way into the crops, so that
hopefully we can maintain their high yield potential which we are hoping for.
One unexpected
bonus of this rain was the fact that one of our very deep, freshly renovated
ponds filled up over night. We cleaned the pond out in November, the bottom now
being some 12ft deep. I walked past it on Friday night hoping for a bit more
water to be in it and there was only a small puddle down in the bottom. Then
Patrick walked past on Saturday morning and he called me to say it was full to
the brim! I was shocked! What had transpired was that while doing the clearance
work we actually redirected the drains off one of the big fields into another
part of the ditch, hoping to redirect the water into the pond. We actually
never did block the ditch to do this but a twist of fate did it for us. As the
field hit its water capacity, the field drain started to run and run and run!
The pipe we laid was a flexi pipe which then started to float as the water
built up in the ditch because we had never built a head wall against it. This
meant that all the field drain water off 16ha of land basically went into the
pond and then backed up the ditch. We had to do some emergency pond plumbing to
allow the excess water to get away and now we have a lovely deep water pond
that will never dry out!
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| Pond FULL End of April |
As May starts,
we are hoping for some dry, warm, sunny weather so we can get back up-to-date
with the land and environmental work that has been stalled by the high rainfall.
Like every farmer, we are at the mercy of the weather, which is probably why we
always want something other than that currently available. At the start of
April and the hosepipe ban we were all complaining of lack of water, so the
moral is: be careful what you wish for!!
BWB
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