With a big proportion of winter barley now harvested, growers have moved into oats and oilseed rape. And looking around, there will be some crops of winter wheat ready to come under the knife relatively soon.

Broken weather is making harvesting a bit awkward, but there have been good windows to date.

And straw is obviously a brisk trade, given the amount of baling activity taking place.

It is heartening to see so many fields cleared of straw so quickly and this provides an opportunity to get stubble cultivation done, and possibly even get organic manure spread or a catch crop planted.

Stubbles

The broken weather with showers provides a terrific opportunity to get stubbles cultivated, once they are cleared of straw.

Heat and moisture will encourage weed seed germination. When a cultivated seedbed dries out, it can help to reduce slug numbers by helping to dry out the eggs laid in the last crop.

This can be very important for those plagued by slugs, but you need to try and leave a loose-ridged surface behind your shallow cultivator.

Stubble cultivation is essential to help tackle grass weeds.

Cultivation must be shallow so as not to bury seeds, to maximise the likely strike and to avoid having a depth of fine soil if the weather turns wet. Every seed that can be germinated in the stubble is one less weed for the future. What you can grow in the stubble can be gone forever.

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