Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The Long Harvest is Finally Over.

With great relief I am happy to report to you that harvest for the 2010/11 season is finally complete. On the 7th of March at 2pm the last row of windrowed barley was reapt. This is quite a bit later than the optimal finishing date, which would be early January. We had been waiting on the moisture to come down in the barley, to get it below the required 13.5% maximum, but when it come down we were into it again as hard as we could. The reason for pushing so hard in the end was that there was another rain even forecast... and we beat it! About an hour after we finished the rain started again. We only received around 9mm, but other areas in the state received quite a bit more.
So what's next? well I'm glad you asked. With the recent rains alot of weeds have germinated out in the paddocks. While some of the weeds are good weeds that provide good feed for the sheep, there are also paddocks with some quite nasty weeds which will need to be sprayed out before they get out of control.
The ewes will be due to start lambing in just over a month too, and with harvest being late, that means that we are now running late with other jobs. Crutching the sheep is a job that would usually be well underway by now, so the crutching is really quite a priority.
We are also looking down the barrel of this years seeding program, which should start around 6 weeks from now. We're changing over some of the seeding equipment this year so we'll need to start on the alterations pretty soon too, or we'll be running behind with that as well.

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