2025-26 Winter Update
Our wheats are looking great!
After a wet winter and spring last season, we are so pleased to see some great wheats around on our and our clients’ farms. All our wheat varieties were drilled later than traditional dates, which helps to avoid aphid pressures with the likely cooler temperatures we usually experience in late autumn. This also reduced the need for insecticides, as we tend to find many fewer aphids in our crops.
Winter wheats and companion beans were direct-drilled into previous Oilseed Rape stubbles.
The same goes for our Oilseed Rape, which is also looking dense and lush, with very few bits of damage from pigeons! These were drilled in early August, with a mixture of companion crops. These companion crops have helped to keep the OSR hidden from the pigeons and flea beetles and also provided an added benefit of fixing nitrogen and serving as a late pollination source.
Winter Oilseed Rape with companion crop.
We have also started taking our first vegetable crops off the field. As some of you would have seen, we have recently introduced vegetables back onto the farm. We are aiming for 2026 to be the starting year for the vegetables, but we took the opportunity to plant some vegetables directly behind the combine. Cabbage, Kale, Chard and lettuce were planted, and all are now harvested. These have been great and perfect to adjust the machinery to.
Cavolo Nero Kale
Second planting of broad beans.
The start of 2026 vegetable crops has also been planted. The team planted around 75kg of broad beans across 2 plantings. Annoyingly, our resident crows have been having a field day on the first planting - the second planting has yet to be discovered. But, if all goes well, the broad beans shall be in wholesale and veg box orders in June!