Crops in north Wexford have benefited from the recent few days of sunshine and heat to show good promise for the year ahead. And the same can be said of crops all around the country. Earlier this week, I took a drive down through a small region of north Wexford, an area mainly synonymous with spring barley for malting but winter barley and wheat are also now quite prominent, influenced no doubt by the three crops rule.

This is a part of the country where an amount of light land enables crops to be sown early. As a result, the bulk of the work is long done but I did meet a one-pass on the road and saw a few fields that had not yet been planted with anything. There was an odd scattering of maize about under plastic plus an amount of beet which varied from emerging to a pair of true leaves.

The constriction across the leaf is a consequence of growth conditions when that point of the leaf was still just developing within the leaf sheath.

There are also some beans about, winter as well as spring. The spring crop must have been early sown as it has five to seven pairs of leaves currently but no signs of flowers. But this crop had suffered severe leaf notching up to recently, making weevil damage to the roots a real risk.

Spring barley dominates

It will not be surprising that spring barley is the dominant crop across the region. Some crops were sown very early and these have pushed out to almost five unfolded leaves plus three to five tillers. But the majority of crops were sown later and were at the two to three unfolded leaf stage.

It was a little surprising to find these symptoms in an early sown crop

All crops are very clean. Some crops showed a few plants with BYDV symptoms and aphids are on the wing and present in crops. It was a little surprising to find these symptoms in an early sown crop but I would always be of the view the condition and uniformity of the crop is also a factor for aphid attractiveness. And that early sown crops lacked uniformity.

As a general comment, there were many crops that were not totally uniform where some rows were growing very well while others had less leaf, colour and tillering. Then other crops had already formed a blanket of foliage and one might wonder if this is combine drilling versus fertiliser incorporated in to the seedbed.

One field I walked into had a lot of mayweed, as well as many other weeds

Weeds were prominent in nearly all crops but the level of infestation varied considerably. In some crops, weeds were becoming quite big but they seemed soft and should be easily controlled with the correct actives. One field I walked into had a lot of mayweed, as well as many other weeds. And one or two fields seemed to have a fair but of annual meadow grass present which would always make me suspicious of lower than optimum pH level in a field.

Winter barley is clean

Winter barley had to be the next most prominent crop. Crops varied from fully headed out to awns only beginning to appear. The latter crop was exceptional in that most crops had awns peeping but there were two things about that crops that might explain the growth stage. The first is that it was in much higher fields than all the others I visited and the second was that it seemed to have been hit hard with growth regulator which can slow awn and ear emergence.

The later crops also had something else unusual in winter barley. There were a lot if intermittent yellow-tipped flag leaves but the yellow part of the leaf was hanging down. This was not BYDV but rather a result of significant constriction on a point of the developing leaves which then broke on the uppermost leaf, probably helped by the wind.

Crops were generally very clean to the butt, which is a great advantage for the crop

While only a small proportion of the leaves actually broke, the symptom was evident on virtually all of the upper two leaves on this crop and was also present in many other crops visited but without the actual leaf breaking.

Crops were generally very clean to the butt, which is a great advantage for the crop. Some crops had mildew at the base, some of which seemed alive other it seemed dead in other crops. One crop had an amount of occasional spotting up through the canopy which was not typical of anything but it could well be the spot form for net blotch.

Flags on winter wheat

A number of big blocks of winter wheat look really promising as flag leaves begin to appear. Crops have taken on a strong blue-green colour and they are generally very clean for the time of year. There was little or no evident septoria in these crops which have four to five leaves totally clean, except for some spring damage, even before the flag leaf unfolds. May can make or break a crop so let’s hope that the run of fine weather continues a little longer.

All crops were short and very still. There was a bit of mildew present in one crop and it was active and moving up the canopy.