As promised its now time for me to introduce Henry to you. Henry joined us this summer, he came straight from the agricultural college, Harper Adams university college, This is the same place that I went, as well as my two cousins, my soon to be brother in law and my uncle Nick Brown who does our agronomy. This means that I can relate to some of the things he got up to in his time there. 

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Harvest is now all but finished and I have a little time for reflection before we get busy planting the cereals again. We have already planted quarter of the farm down to oil seed rape, and need to wait a short while before we start on the cereals.

A lot has happened since my last update. Mark, and Sarah Davis have had a new baby boy called George, he was a massive baby of over 8 pounds and be brings the family up to 7 which is pretty impressive. We have also taken on a new man called Henry he applied for the position I posted earlier in the year and he started in July. I’ll do a little blog about him next, now that we have got to know him.

We had our first woodland wedding blessing this August which was really exciting! Dad had done a lot of work to make a clearing in one of the woods and sowed grass seed in it to make a woodland glade. It was great seeing all the guests entering the wood and winding their way through the path not really knowing what to expect. Then seeing their faces as the came out into the clearing, which had bales laid out for seats and staff serving Champagne. We also had our first legal wedding ceremony at the beginning of August. This was a great wedding, half the guests were Indian ( the Bride’s side of the family) and I got dragged up to do a spot of Bangra  dancing which is so much fun I think it should be promoted - even a fool like me can do it!

Dad managed to break his arm near the beginning of harvest so he has been out of action but only a bit - he has still been helping out as much as a one arm bandit can. Luckily we had a chap called Guillaume from France over to learn a bit of English. He was a lot of fun and found life in the country side to be very action packed. Once dad did his arm in Guillaume became dads arms, Dad would get him to drive him around the farm or to the grain store and stand where he could get to and then Guillaume had to run around doing what Dad asked him to do.

Our new combine has been a great success we have had quite an easy harvest we have worked less hours, but cut loads more in the time that we have been cutting. It has been really good and we have been able to cut most of our wheat when it has been dry which means that we’ll save money on drying costs, and that the crop should have a better quality about it. We have about forty hectares of wheat left to cut and another 46 ha of Beans the great thing is that we can do the area of wheat in an afternoon, so it really isn’t that stressful, and I’m all in favour of that!

That’s about all the news for now, but I’ll try to return to the blog sooner next time. See you for now!

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Its now the time of the year that we sit back and watch the crops fulfill their potential. There is nothing more that we can do to the crops to ensure that they grow the most that they are going to. Wheat is our main crop on the farm grown mostly for human consumption, with some grown specifically for animal feed. It was planted in September and since then we have been busy ensuring that it has the best chance in life.

The first threat came from slugs, I spent a good deal of my time from September until November monitoring the crops for an attack from this slimy enemy. We monitor the numbers of slugs in the area, and if the numbers reach a specific threshold we have to use slug pellets - these are a pesticide which are supposed to be selective in that they only target slugs and snails. When I use slug pellets I see it as a sign that there is something in my system that is failing, in a perfect system with healthy soils slugs don't present themselves as a threat. There are enough natural predators around to keep the slug numbers below the treatment threshold. This year I had to use a lot of slug-pellets the slugs were around in huge populations and did some real damage to my crops, they were able to move about in the wet conditions and they bred loads.

The next threat is weeds. We use a herbicide to prevent weeds from over competing with the crop as it grows. Weeds compete with the crop for light, water and nutrients, so it is important that we control them. Some weeds are harder to control than others - my hardest weed to control is a grass-weed called brome grass. it is hard to deal with because it is so similar to wheat, and herbicides work by exploiting the differences between wheat and the weed species. It could take a couple of approaches to sort out the weeds through the season, but the first application is usually in the autumn. On some of the crops this year we were unsure whether the crops were going to make it through the winter so we delayed controlling the weeds which has led to more weeds in the fields at this time of year.

In the spring I start by giving the crops some nitrogen allow the plants. They receive three dose's of nitrogen through the season. We are quite unique here in that we apply sugar in the form of molasses along with the fertiliser. We do this because we are trying to make the process that turns applied nitrogen into food for the plants more efficient. The plants do not take up the nitrogen that we apply directly it has to go be taken up by the bacteria in the soil and then the waste from this process is what feeds the plant. The idea of applying sugar is that we can give the soil bacteria more energy so that they reproduce quicker and producer more waste from naturally occurring nitrogen in the air, thus reducing our reliance on artificial nitrogen. It will be years before we start to see real benefits from this work, but I figure the sooner I start the sooner I'll see the benefits. Because our crops were looking at bit average this year I reduced the total amount of nitrogen that I applied to the fields. The crop was really varied across each field so I used satellite pictures to identify the better bits of the field and I chose to apply a normal rate to the better areas and reduce the rate on the poorer looking bits.

As the crop is growing it suffers from various fungal attacks, I control these with fungicides at two/three/four stages of the plants growth depending on the year. The aim of using these products is to keep the last three remaining leaves of the plant as green as possible for as long as possible, with the last fungicide aimed at the ear in a bid to keep mycrotoxins of the marketed grain. It is important to keep the leaves green because they are vital for photosynthesis which produces growth and ultimately yield. The most important leaf is the last one to come out - it is called the flag leaf and it the one nearest the ear. Any reduction in the green area of this leaf has a direct impact on final yield.

I have now completed all of these husbandry tasks and it is now down to how much sunlight and available moisture is around which will determine the final yields. It is typically the time of year that farmers invite neighbours to come around and judge each-others crops and I have two coming on Thursday to look at my winter rape and spring barley - Wish me luck!        

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See, now I've introduced myself - you can't get rid of me!

I have just received confirmation that we have been granted a licence to hold Civil Ceremonies here at Pitt Hall Barn! This is very exciting and means that we can now offer couples the chance to exchange their vows surrounded by the wooden splendour of the Barn before partying the night away! It offers a lovely alternative to couples who maybe are not religious and don't wish to get married in church, but would like something more personal than a registry office.

I'm feeling very chuffed because it is another step towards offering people the truly unique and special wedding package I had in mind when I became involved. Our first couple to "tie the knot" here will be doing so in August, and we hope to book many more in for next year!

 If you wish to know more, please get in touch! You can find all my details on the "Pitt Hall Barn" section of this site.

Sharon

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Following all Tim’s blogs I thought it’s about time I added my tuppence-worth! As Tim’s wife I’m the last member of the “team” to be introduced to you! Followers of the blog will know I married Tim last year on a lovely day filled with family, friends and lots of well-wishes! I’m now expecting a mini-May but contrary to Tim’s last blog I am nothing like a sleeping crocodile!

So after joining the May family in July, I then joined the Kingsclere Estates family in October to help Tim out with the Pitt Hall Barn side of the business. The enquiries were coming in thick and fast and Tim was finding that more and more of his time was being taken up responding to them and the subsequent work. Plus being such a boy he wasn’t really in tune with the wishes of brides-to-be and the emotional complexities of weddings!  

So I joined to add the female touch to the business and so far it’s been great! It’s keeping me out of mischief and freeing up Tim to concentrate more on the farming side of life. We’ve had three do’s over the last three weeks – a fundraising “St Georges” Ball, a Wedding, and a “spacemen and hippy” themed 40^th which have all gone really well! It’s good fun being involved in such happy events, and it’s really rewarding when you see a group of people who have obviously had a really great time, and know that you’ve played a small part in making their day special.

We have a bit of a breather now for a couple of weeks, but then the summer will get busy again with the wedding season kicking in! Harvest time could be interesting, as it’s when the Barn is at its busiest, Tim will be fully occupied elsewhere on the farm, and my bump will be getting ever bigger! However I’m sure it will be just fine.

On the farm side of things, everything seems to be ticking along quite nicely - it’s nice to have a calm husband at the moment (long may it continue) despite quite an amusing episode with a drill and some millet – I’ll let him tell you the story!!! He has kindly planted rape in all the fields around our house this year, and it is approaching its smelliest at the moment but that won’t last long! I can escape it by walking the dogs in the woods instead and marvelling at the bluebells. They seem to be lasting for ages this year and are as always truly spectacular!

The other thing you may not know about me is that I do not come from a farming background. Although I grew up in the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside I then moved into city living in Manchester and trained as a Sports Injury Specialist, which I still practice two days a week. This means that I’ve had a steep farming learning curve over the last few years. I hope that for those of you who enjoy the blog but are also somewhat flummoxed by the farming-speak I can help explain some of the things that happen on the farm in lay terms as I learn about it too!

Please feel free to ask me questions and post comments!

Sharon

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 Its been a busy time for me over the last couple of months. The best news is that Sharon is sporting a bit of a bump these days which is great! We went for the 12 week scan last week which was a bit of an experience. I have never seen so many pregnant women in one room before. I could see all of the men there in support were as scared as I was, not because of becoming a father, although that is an exciting prospect. It was more that none of us wanted to cause an upset! I could imagine one of us men saying the wrong thing and the whole pack of pregnant ladies turning on us and chasing us off round the hospital. I reckon it would be like walking through a pen of sleeping crocodiles, one foot out of place and they'd all wake up and start snapping at you! Luckily we all got through unharmed but it was a close one - the hospital was short staffed, and the queues were backing up.

On the farm the blue bells have arrived telling us that spring has finally sprang. I finished the last of the drilling on Saturday. All we can do now is hope they grow into some prosperous crops. I have planted the largest area of spring crops ever this year. Not because of the wet autumn - we could have drilled more then, it was a choice we had made before last harvest. At the annual meeting between me and my agronomists we decided to drop winter oats out of the rotation. It was too dirty a crop to grow in our minimal tillage system because we found it hard to keep the grass weeds at bay thus undoing all the hard work from the previous years cleaning the fields up. We weren't sure what to replace the winter oats with so we tried a few different options. We tried winter linseed on one field which drilled and established well, but has suffered since with frost lift and spray scorch I think that we'll try it again next year and try to avoid these two factors to get a fairer picture. We were going to grow some spring linseed as well but I was worried that a lot of people would choose that route after the wet autumn so I looked around to something else. I found a good contract to grow spring oats as a seed for other growers to plant next year. It meant that I had to have some really clean soils so I took advantage of the premium to plough two fields which I have a bad brome grass weed problem in. The theory being that I will bury the weed seeds on the surface and turn up ground that hasn't seen the light of day for 7 years this should mean that any seeds which were there have now died through lack of sunlight. I am also trying one field of millet which is grown for the bird seed market. The good thing about this is that it will give me a good opportunity to put stuff back into the land as the drilling date is 1st of may. This year I spread compost on the field encouraged the volunteers to grow, then grazed it with sheep before injecting some sludge. This was done for free using a subsoiler so hopefully I have done a lot of good to the soil. the crop should be pretty cheap to grow because I can't do anything to it with regards to weed control, and there aren't any major pests. The nitrogen has been delivered from the compost, sheep, and sludge along with the potash and phosphate, and a host of trace elements. It just needs to prove itself at harvest by not being to late to cut dry. I'll keep you posted!

Along with the blue bells the grass has now started to grow this is my first spring with a lawn of my own to mow I have to say it goes a little easier with my ride on fergy mower to do the job! 

It is now 5 in the morning I couldn't sleep so I thought I'd update the blog, But I'm going to give that sleeping another go now. I'll be back soon! 

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