We snuck in some early crop three weeks ago during the dry period but thankfully we can finally close off the 2013/14 harvest and move on.

All in all, we were reasonably happy with the harvest of both carrots and flowers. The carrot harvest has run to its latest date but we managed to harvest every inch of crop without any major issues, turning out close to 2,000 tonnes of saleable product. The drought during the summer stole a few tonnes off of us in the drier fields but any year we harvest and sell 100% of our crop is a success.

Flower cropping also finished last week with the last of our stock loading out this week. It is always somewhat of a lottery as the flowers are picked during a time of year that can have temperatures anywhere between -5 and 18 degrees Celsius over the past 5 years. Similar to our carrots, we managed to shift all 600,000 bunches of the flowers picked, which was a relief.

Closing off these two crop harvests has allowed us to move all our machinery over to planting our carrots and vegetable crops for 2014/15 harvest. Having managed to sneak in some early crop, we have not been under as much pressure as most, but we are still targeting planting 50% of our crop over the next two weeks with 25% already in the ground and emerged.

A shift in mentality back to spraying and crop protection is on the cards as with the split planting of two different vegetable crops, the sprayer is going to be a very busy machine cleaning up different growth stage windows for herbicides.

We installed two weather stations in the fields this week also, which will make our life much easier. The stations are remote solar powered capturing all data on rainfall, air and soil temperatures, wind, humidity and soil moisture levels at 15cm and 50cm.

The data is logged to a website portal but it is also monitored by the company that hired us the stations to warn us of the need for irrigation over the coming week. Having site specific weather data will make it much easier for us to plan what is often a costly irrigation strategy and timings.