Weather: We are in for some more showery weather this week. The weather of recent weeks has helped to slow crops down.

Hopefully this will be good for grain fill on winter barley and wheat at this stage.

Spring barley crops have turned inside out in many cases.

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The early crops raced through the growth stages in the heat and some of them are not as good as people would like, but crops sown after the middle of April look to be generally very good and thick.

Many of these are still receiving their final fungicide.

This should be applied at awns peeping.

Keep on top of timings where possible as disease risk is high with the wet and mild conditions and there is disease in some crops. Some oats are also at final spray.

Septoria pressure is high enough in winter wheat crops and so will be in spring wheat as well.

Keep on top of disease in these crops.

BYDV: There is plenty of barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV) around. It’s very visible in crops and looks very bad, especially from the gate.

When you walk out into crops and take a closer look the infection is not that bad.

It is a very small percentage of the crop and indeed the leaves. There is dwarfing of plants in some fields and in some cases the flag leaf is yellow.

The symptoms can depend on the time of infection. Sprayed and unsprayed crops seem to be impacted by the virus and most sowing times are impacted too.

The impact on yield is unclear and expected to be very little where infection is a small percentage.

Grass weeds: Grass weeds are visible in winter crops and spring crops at present, though they will be easier to see in spring crops in another few weeks.

Get out and pull grass weeds where they are in small numbers. Where they have developed into bigger patches consider topping the patches out.

If fields are badly affected whole cropping is an option, but this needs to be done as soon as possible to avoid spreading the weed to another farm.

All grass weeds are an issue. They can shed large amounts of seed.

Blackgrass has 6,000 seeds per plant for example, but weeds like Italian ryegrass, canary grass and brome are all big issues.

Wild oats and blackgrass are noxious weeds so they need to be controlled by law.

Open evening: Please note that the Crops Open Evening that was due to take place at UCD Lyons next Thursday, 25 June has been cancelled due to circumstance outside of the Irish Farmers Journal’s control.

The podcast recording will not go ahead as it was to feature some of the UCD research work.

We apologise for an inconvenience caused. Don’t worry though. We have plenty of great interviews coming up on the podcast from agronomists and plant breeders to plant protection product and technology experts.

This week we feature John Dunne, the arable trials and agronomy manager at Goldcrop and we have some interviews from the Cereals show in England.