The quaintly named Crook’s Gardens field hasn’t had much luck recently. It never has. But first let me deal with the origins of its name. I don’t know who the Crooks were and there’s no evidence of a house. But the house may have been built of what we would now call very biodegradable and entirely sustainable materials, namely mud, cow dung and straw. The sort of house Manchán Magan might like you to build and read about in The Irish Times.

Once these houses were left uninhabited they quickly returned to the soil, leaving no trace. Such houses in the neighbourhood were fairly common – the vernacular architecture of my childhood, but are now all but gone. They were simply built from what was widely available; a scarcity of freely available stone but any amount of sticky clay-based mouldable soil with straw both as a mud binder and roof material.

But while the history is unknown and nothing remains, the family name lives on, which is good

Building stone had to be quarried in Meath and so was only used for the more affluent cottages. These mud-walled buildings had few illusions of grandeur and stone window sills were the height of it.

As for the garden portion of the field name, it seems like a bit of a misnomer. If such was the house, the garden would have been tiny and certainly not 22ac which is the field size.

But while the history is unknown and nothing remains, the family name lives on, which is good.

I think it is important to retain the old field names. No greater honour can you bestow on a countryman than to name a field after him.

When the earth was created and then re-styled by the retreating glaciers, Crook’s Gardens wasn’t shown any favours. It’s home to our toughest soil to till. Geologically, it fits into the Boyne alluvial series but I think it deserves its own sub section. It’s a very heavy silty/clay mix overlying what we in Co Meath call lack – a grey, impervious subsoil.

No amount of farmyard manure or cover cropping or straw incorporation will ever entice it away from its inherent state

At its best, it’ll till up to clods the size of tennis balls; at its worst, it won’t till at all. If it dries out, you’d need to nick some dynamite from Tara Mines to shatter it. No amount of farmyard manure or cover cropping or straw incorporation will ever entice it away from its inherent state. But, for all of that, it is fertile and has a high pH. The application of gypsum might help its workability but it’s a high-cost solution – maybe worth it in the long term.

By right, of course, it’s not at all suited to tillage and would be better in grass. But Crook’s Gardens is surrounded by tillage fields and neither is it fenced and there’s no water. Tillage wise, it’s at its best in wheat and was in continuous wheat for years until I foolishly broke the cycle. I don’t remember why I did – probably a wet autumn.

As a result, it has had a mix of cropping over the last five years, which culminated in winter barley sown in the autumn of 2019. This, quite predictably, was a disaster and it never made it to harvest this year. In the interlude, we carried out some remedial drainage and mole ploughing when conditions were ideal in the early summer drought. Crooks’ topography is flat with marginal falls.

In September it was sown to oilseed rape with a Claydon, to avoid bringing up the plasticine-like soil. The theory was good but as I mentioned before, the slugs took the lot.

So that’ll be two expensive and successive crop failures in Crook’s and now it’s a case of third time lucky and is sown with wheat.