Well, it is just as well us farmers are by nature uncomplaining cheery chappies! The photo below shows the closest I got to harvest for most of the week – and even then it was raining!
The weather was again against us, but as a consolation there wasn’t really that much ready. We had one field of what was supposed to be winter barley to cut, which I duly did on Thursday, but it didn’t take long. We always seem to have one disaster, and this field was it. Basically the weed control was less than adequate, and the field was taken over by a grass weed called sterile brome. It had swamped out pretty much all the barley. To make matters worse, I had a breakdown on the combine when the knife bar broke.
As can be seen from the bottom picture, it has been going for some time. You can see a small area of silver at the top left corner. That is the fresh break, the rest of the break is rusted, meaning that it has been exposed to air, and is therefore older.
It didn’t take too long to fix, and I was up and running again within an hour.
Thankfully on Saturday the sun appeared, and a good drying wind got going. We were able to make a start to the spring barley in the afternoon after getting the dryer cleared of the last of the winter barley.
The spring barley has to be kept separate as it is destined (hopefully) for the malting market. Also, I disabled the straw chopper on the combine, as we are selling the straw to a neighbour, who arrived with his baler on Sunday.
Other developments included the dryer being fixed – many thanks to Charlie Pryde for coming out on Monday and putting things right. All 3 burners have worked perfectly since then. Finally we lost our ‘trainee farmer’ this week when Cameron went back to school on Wednesday. Hopefully he’ll still be happy to help us out at weekends.