I spent the best part of Sunday at the irrigator trying to find a pressure problem. We are pumping 1.2km from river to reel and after running the line 4 times checking joints, manually priming the pump 7 times and getting soaked to the core closing a joint, I finally realised the pressure issue was due to the pump inlet becoming block with river weed.

It seems problems like this never happen on a Tuesday or a Thursday, they save themselves for Sunday afternoon when you should be sitting on comfortable chair somewhere relaxing.

Time management is something I have long wanted to address but in cases like this I’m not sure it would make a difference. The irrigator was stopped and I had to stay at it until it wasn’t.

We are unsurprisingly pumping 15mm of water over the top of the carrots again and it looks like we will pump another 15mm next week also as the forecast has no rain coming over the horizon. We haven’t had any rain worth talking about over the carrots for almost two months now but the irrigator, albeit at a cost, is keeping the crops thirst quenched.

Climate change

The climate change issue is never one I gave great credence too but realistically, the winters have gotten more severe and the summers warmer.

The cropping we have is all winter lifted which is obviously affected by harsh winters but the warm summer this year has produced a really nice run of product.

I need to sort out straw for covering carrots this week, we will lay 40 bales of 8x4x4 wheaten straw on top of a plastic layer on each bed to protect them from carrots. It’s a cumbersome job but gives great options during the winter as not only are the carrots protected from frost but also when conditions get really wet, the plastic layer over the bed means you are lifting a nice dry bed, regardless of how wet it has been.

I have a lot of housekeeping to do over the next week as we have had a substitution in the office with one out and one in. It’s a bit of nightmare as we had only started to slip into a rhythm. Hopefully, as has been the case in the past, a new entrant brings us on another level.