Normally our carrot harvest would be cleared at this stage but as a result of yields and a few other factors, we are at full steam at present trying to finish out the season. Parsnip harvest still has another few weeks in it also, as does flower cropping. I’m looking forward to the second week in April when all the decks are cleared except for new crop seeding.

The plough just left the yard to go turn over our first ground which will hopefully be seeded over the weekend. We are stacking the headland with the destoner, bed tiller, ridgers etc, in anticipation of getting stuck in.

We will seed only 5 acres under plastic but it's enough as we are quite small on parsnips. Even so, with the early crop seeding its vital that you think about harvest. In the season gone by, which was our first on parsnips, we struggled with our packhouse setup and lost an awful lot of harvest days in August, September and October when we should have been digging. As a result, crop got too big and we had to skip on and leave it, a disaster of a situation.

As novices in parsnips, we still have more to learn than we know but hopefully for the season coming we will be able to match our digging schedule with our planting schedule.

On the carrots we are busy taking straw off and harvesting. 20t/acre of straw takes a bit of moving but we are getting there. On 10 beds we trialled (when we make mistakes we call them trials) laying straw with no plastic which has so far been a nightmare are the beds are sodden and wet with the straw none too keen on coming off the bed.

Checking the heifers

My daily relief from all of the machines is checking the heifers that we grass B&B for Bill O'Keeffe of the Irish Farmers Journal. It’s remarkable how relaxing it is to wander through them pretending I have an idea what I’m looking at. Word on the street has it that they will pack on around 300kg while they are with us and leave in-calf, this dairy thing seems quite easy to me?

Last item on the agenda is our return to growing cereals, a full 10 acres of spring barley. We have some land near the yard that is out of rotation for our other crops and will prove another option for relaxing walks checking the crop.