Time flies

I cant believe its been so long since I last posted here. It has been a hectic spring here, with so much to do. Why so much? Well its always quite busy here but we have had an exceptionally dry year (until the start of July anyway) which has allowed us to get a lot of jobs done that we havent been able to because of the last two wet summers. Lots of barbed wire and electric fencing up now but unfortunately lots more still to go.

We got all our hay and silage cleared up in the second week of June without a drop of rain. Despite farmers everywhere complaining about poor crops we had good yields and really good quality grass. Crops were low yielding because of the lack of rain and cold temperatures, but fortunately, on this occasion our soil suits dry weather, which is a curse during wet weather, giving its high moisture retaining capacity(bog!). Anyway fertiliser has been sowed again now and were sitting back waiting for 2nd cut to grow. Its really easy to see the 09 re-seeds amongst the rest. Their response to fertiliser and even the speed at which they greened up after cutting is incredible. We need a dry August now to get some more ploughed.

I have over-seeded a few acres with Hybrid ryegrass, white and red clover to try and freshen up some of the really tired swards. The worry with ploughing is that we get more of the awful downpours we had last year and loose production for a year. we wont really see a response to the seeding until next year but hopefully the clovers will have kicked in to give us some free Nitrogen and improve the forage protein.
Bulls have been with the cows now for about 6 weeks. Plan is to let them go for another 3 weeks but all things being equal the cows should all be in calf by now. We have been a bit back-side foremost with our commercial maiden heifers. There are only a few of them and were a bit young to breed first so they have just gone to the bull last week. They are going to have a quick turn around next year but we should be able to manage them for this to work. Fingers crossed!

We have had a lot of rain as I mentioned above, with 10cm's alone last week. So far the ground is coping, except for the moss, but we really could do with a dry week, just in case this is it!

Anyway better go a empty the rain gauge.