While the dry week has been great for getting the last of the cereals and straw wrapped up, it has meant unusually poor grass growth for late August, early September.

As I mentioned last week, we have ended up housing the most forward cattle and will probably aim to finish them for the pre-Christmas market.

The more backward stores have been given more room and should be okay for the moment, though it’s noticeable that the after-grass sward is less dense and more open than I would like and won’t keep them going for that long.

Ideally, we should be giving them some supplementary feed at grass, but we are not well set up for that.

Meanwhile, it has been all go on the tillage side.

The oilseed rape is well up and we have dealt with the winter barley volunteers.

For the first time we have tried gravel-filled mole ploughing, in an effort to drain a large patch that flooded and held more water than I have ever seen, as the rain fell last autumn and winter.

We had tiled that area some years ago and it had worked well until this year.

We hired in a small, tracked machine with a gravel bucket, that fed in stones into the trench made by the mole, as it cut through the ground from the ditch to the now dried out area.

We made several cuttings to a depth of about 15 inches and brought the gravel up to within a few inches of the ground.

I can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work, but we will see.

Meanwhile, we just have the beans to harvest. There are none cut in the area and I am told that applying Roundup to control the grass weeds will do nothing to speed up ripening.

As one neighbour commented, the ideal would be to have access to Reglone, another useful agri chemical that is no longer available.