With the wretched Christmas ads already appearing on television, I decided it was high time for us to stop mucking in wheat.

Seedbeds this autumn have been far from brilliant and I’ve never been a fan of November sowing. Still, it was great to get that dry spell of 12 days which began in the last days of October – it was, in fact, the longest dry spell since last June.

When conditions are tough, it’s hard to beat the plough and combined power harrow and seed drill.

The dusty old Kuhn/Accord was extracted from the back of a shed and a contractor came in with two ploughs and did some nice work.

But ploughing is ploughing and even with skilled work, fields and headlands become rough and all the lovely levelling work of min-till cultivation is quickly undone.

Equally, the earthworm-laden and friable top four inches of soil, created by a few years of min-till, is turned over which is regrettable but when it’s the difference between sowing or not, needs must.

Besides, there are some advantages to late sowing such as less disease pressure from septoria and take-all.

I don’t think we missed any min-till opportunities this autumn; any min-till sowing we did was done in poor enough conditions. However, the oilseed rape looks great but that was sown in August.

Poor weather

But with so much poor weather over the past two months we’ve spent more time looking into fields than we have looking out of them. Now while I don’t think I’m a nosey person, I like a look across my neighbours’ hedges. I wouldn’t like to think they were stealing a march on me by combining or sowing while I’m messing around at cattle or poking in the garden.

I often think of a deceased tillage farmer friend who I spied spraying one morning in very catchy weather. Now if it had been a lesser individual, I’d have dismissed him as a chancer who didn’t mind putting on the wiper as he folded up the booms. There are enough of them around.

But Tony was far from being that sort of operator and one who was well able to read the forecast and make an informed decision, balancing risk against reward. I quickly aborted my trip into Trim and hopped up on the sprayer and got a valuable few hours work done.

The Land Rover, with its high seating position, is ideal for an observation recce but as it’s a rather distinctive vehicle everybody knows what I’m at. But I speed by purposefully as if I’m on a mission presenting an ambivalent, couldn’t-care-less attitude.

However, I don’t think I’m alone in looking over the hedges.

In fact, I think it’s the reason why most farmers drive jeeps. Because, let’s face it, a van would do most farmers but the problem is you can see nothing out of a van. They tell you it has to be a jeep for their towing ability but a van will pull enough, provided it’s not the birds you’re after.

Of a summery Sunday afternoon, I’ll install Mrs P into the little Mazda sports car, throwing back the hood and heading off for a drive and maybe a picnic. But I’m really out to assess the amount of combining done in a bad week when we did nothing and hoping everybody else was the same. You see, I’m never at my best in catchy weather and I feel I miss opportunities.

But the low-seated Mazda is useless for a state-of-the-nation drive as my bottom is all of three inches off the road and I can’t even see the end of the bonnet, much less across a hedge.