From LEAF Farmer Duncan Farrington
As October draws to a close,
much of the work has been done on the farm, with all the autumn sown crops now planted. Towards the end of the planting season the weather has been ideal, as have the soil conditions, to help the newly planted seeds get off to a good start. Some of the rapeseed and early planted wheat crops are however looking ravaged by slugs, as anyone with a garden will testify. This year the wet early summer created ideal conditions for slugs to bread, normally we don’t need to use many slug pellets on the crops as we encourage healthy predator insects to eat them. This year however, these helpful creatures have had rather an abundance to deal with, and we resorted to slug pellets in an attempt to save the crops.
Now that the crops are planted, Father will apply a dose of herbicide to control the weeds which will soon be growing healthily. Following this it will be time to service and clean all the machinery down for winter, in preparation for the spring, which will start early with planting of the spring beans. Once everything is put away, the winter routine will start. This year in addition to the usual tree and hedge management, we hope at long last put some concrete down in front of the new grain store. When I say new, we put it up around six years ago, and have been meaning to concrete the yard ever since, but this year it should get done.
As well as winter jobs on the farm, we will also be busy upgrading the facilities for Farrington Oils. We are currently creating a larger pressing room and bottling area in readiness for our two new salad dressings that are just hitting the shelves of local shops. We are delighted to receive our latest award for Mellow Yellow, having come second behind former formula one world champion Jody Schechter, in the Daily Telegraph Sainsbury’s Taste of Britain Awards. Eli and I were invited to Highgrove for the award ceremony, and lunch with the other winners and leading people in the food industry. The whole day was a real treat for us both.
During October, I spent much time in London at shows to promote the oil. One of these shows was to mark the start of the Year of Food and Farming, which aims to promote how and where our food comes from to school children. Being right next to Tower Bridge, school groups were invited to a small part of the countryside in the heart of the capital. There were animals, a tractor, cooking demonstrations, and I went along with a small field of young rape plants, a bucketful of seed and a few bottles of Mellow Yellow. I greatly enjoyed talking to the children about how the whole story from field to bottle works. This is a fantastic way to bring the countryside to life for young children, when something as simple as putting their hands in a bucket of seeds, and then trying to extract oil from those seeds with a pestle and mortar, really brings out the inquisitiveness in them (and some of the adults too) . And of course the usual comments from city folks like, “You don’t look like a real farmer.” I never know whether this is a compliment, or am I a disappointment to them?
