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!