Twelve months, four seasons, one harvest.
What actually happens on a thousand acres, month by month. Most of it is waiting, and the waiting is the part nobody films.
The four seasons.
Spring
Drilling spring barley, lambing in the barn, and the annual gamble on whether there will be enough rain in April.…
Summer
Watching the wheat and waiting. Harvest begins in late July if the weather allows, and in 2025 it very much…
Autumn
Combining whatever is left, drilling the winter wheat, and the beginning of the long argument with blackgrass. Later drilling is…
Winter
Hedging, walling, machinery maintenance, and the accounts. The quiet season, which is when the year is actually decided.
The year, month by month.
Hedging, walling, accounts
The quiet months, when the previous year gets totted up and the next one gets planned.
Machinery, and the last of the hedging
Everything gets serviced now because there is no time later.
Spring drilling begins
Spring barley goes in. The window is narrower than it looks.
Lambing, and praying for rain
On this soil, a dry April is the single worst thing that can happen to the year.
Rape is yellow, everything is growing
The photogenic month, and the one everybody thinks farming is like.
Watching, spraying, worrying
Very little to do and a great deal to worry about.
Harvest, weather permitting
The combine comes out. Three weeks that decide the year.
Harvest continues, shop is heaving
The busiest month for the farm shop and the pub simultaneously.
Autumn drilling
Winter wheat goes in — deliberately late, to give the blackgrass less of a chance.
Drilling continues, first frosts
And the annual argument about whether it is too wet to travel.
Everything is in, or it is not
Whatever did not get drilled now waits until spring.
Fallow, and glad of it
The fields rest. Almost nothing on this farm does.
What the year actually produced.
Watch a whole year of it.
Field cameras, running continuously, including the eleven months when nothing happens.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Not on foot, most of the year — it is a working farm with machinery in it. The cameras, the virtual walk and the footpaths are the honest alternatives.
The farming does not. It made a hundred and forty-four pounds in its first year and has rarely done much better. Everything else on this site exists because of that.
Elsewhere on the estate.
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