The year has well and truly turned and we are on the back straight with summer cropping nearing a close off and we’re getting into the swing of our winter programme.

Then we do it all, all over again

Lettuce harvest is getting closer to completion for the year, spring barley put in a good performance a couple of weeks back and the tsunami of pumpkin harvest is just about to begin.

Once the summer programme is done, from November onwards we have our winter root veg crops, carrot and parsnip, which will be hitting full tilt and then come January they will be overlapped for 4 months by our flower cropping season.

Then we do it all, all over again.

Peace and quite

The whole 365 day thing is great in one sense but I do miss the days of arriving into the yard on a Tuesday and being the only man there for the whole day. The peace of having little to no staff was something I didn’t appreciate at the time.

Staffing

With a staff of approx 50, peaking at 100 during flower cropping, the HR aspect of what we do is one of the less enjoyable jobs. A couple of years back we had 300 flower pickers on the field during the peak of the season, it wasn’t fun.

Crops “middle fo the road”

Out in the fields, crops are looking fairly unspectacular, middle of the road would be a fair assessment. I’ve given up getting excited by crop potential in mid season as a little like my 5th Christmas where Santa was due to drop off an industrial loader and instead dropped me what you’d politely describe as a fiddly crane, they tend to disappoint if you get too excited.

Carrots

Carrots last year had huge potential in August but come harvest the dry summer left brittle carrots resulting in us paying to transport broken carrots around the country.

The dry weather coupled with possible over irrigation was pinned with the blame.

Ploughing around the corner

Ploughing is around the corner in Tullamore and I wouldn’t mind some dry weather to get some winter crop ground dried out and ploughed.

Can’t really complain with the summer as June and July were nice but August was a total washout with us and the remnants of that rain is still lying around the field.

With that in mind all irrigators are parked up in a nice tidy line at home for the winter, confident our Indian summer has sadly passed us by.

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