Monthly Archives: November 2017

Whats going on with this weather

What’s going on with this weather, It’s the middle of November and I saw a butterfly today. You might not be able to see it clearly but this Painted lady (I think) was busy around the ivy which is in bloom right now. Surly it should be too cold for butterflies this late in the year.

I guess it’s getting warmer later and later, there must be a term for when there is this sort of change in the climate, I wonder what it is?

Clement and I went for a walk over Monk Hill this morning. It was windy on the top but the sunshine made it nice. We saw this mushroom but I can’t give it a name.

Mushrooms, of course, are normally found in dark moist places and it’s well known that they thrive on a diet of manure. This one seems to have made a break for freedom and is doing very well, bathed in sunlight in the middle of a grass field.

In other news.

I’ve given in to popular demand and written a book about the comings and goings of Wimplebridge Village. It’s a murder fuelled romp through an English country village and bound to be a best selling classic.

If you fill in these two fields I’ll let you know when I’m ready to publish. I guess it will be early in the new year but don’t worry, you’ll be one of the first to know.

A few hurried lines – I’ve not got much time.

It seems like weeks since I last posted anything about the village and, truth to tell, it has been quite some time but ask any farmer or contractor and they will tell you that after the brief which follows silage and haymaking we’re into harvest.

Barley, wheat, Oilseed rape beans and of course maize silage, everything has taken twice as long as it should, not because it’s been a heavy crop, far from it, there have been some poor crops around this year and to make the matter worse the quality has been changeable too. No, what’s stopped us has been the weather. It seemed that every time we got a few dry days and the moisture content was approaching something we could cut there would be a brief downpour and we’re back to square one again.

We finally got the beans, the last crop we were cutting, off in mid September but some farmers haven’t been so lucky. I read of a farmer in Aberdeenshire who only finished on the 6th of October. More than seventy, yes Seventy days after he started!

Once it is all of the field of course it’s a race to get the ground ready for the next crop. We have sub-soiled about sixty acres this year which meant an extra machinery pass but generally it was all drilled in time and both the rape and wheat are looking okay, the rapes is a bit patchy but I hope it will fill in.

If we can have a few more warm days, say till the middle of November, then everything will have enough growth and ground cover to go through the winter months without loosing condition. We always have a bit of yellow at the tip of the wheat leaves in the spring. It’s where the frost has got them, but if the plant is big and healthy it will weather this without too much trouble.

Okay, the next crop is in the ground, tomorrow the clocks go bake an hour and the fire in the house is lit; I’m off to watch strictly.

Hubert Belcher.