If you thought that June was warmer than average you were correct, 4°C above normal, even warmer than June 1976. A mean temperature of 19°C, warmer than most Julys.
Rainfall here has been below average at 26.5mm – our average being 48mm. That makes 160mm for the year so far; at this point in 2011, we’d had 136mm of rain and in 1976, our total to the end of June was 110mm.

It is not necessarily just how many days we’ve had without rain – the sunshine and the wind, blowing as it was for those last few days in June, affects all the crops on the farm and, of course, in your garden too.

The plants are all working hard to bring moisture up from our subsoil, not only to stay alive, but to produce the fruit that they are designed for. If the subsoil is sand and gravel, crops will be in trouble because that doesn’t hold much moisture, and the crops might well be dying. If the subsoil is clay, as in the Fens, the crops will have to work hard, but the moisture is down there. On the silt soils around the Wash, the moisture is more readily available because the silt has good capillary action. This is why the silt soils are classed as grade 1 land. Our Fenland is generally grade 2 land.

If you remember from my previous newsletters, we had a good plant of sunflowers, and they’ll not be finding this hot weather too hot, as this is what they are used to. Having dry weather in June and July may well mean it will be a wet corn harvest in August, which is when the sunflowers are in flower and will need sunshine.

Right from early March, we have had above average sunshine, and this has produced a good crop of all our hedgerow fruits, making our crops yield well if they have also been able to find enough moisture. By the time you are reading this, most farms will have started their harvest, hoping for a good yield. Prices are low because there is too much grain in the world right now and the prices we receive for our wheat and barley are much the same as the farmers in Australia or USA.

We have now sold most of our potatoes that were not on contract. I was afraid that the price would fall to stock-feed prices, but fortunately that’s not happened, but we are still selling them at a loss. To grow a good crop of potatoes requires attention to detail and experience, and with no price guarantee for those that are not on contract, that’s why probably half of all potatoes are on contract.

We’re irrigating the growing crop of potatoes as fast as we can, and in between the irrigation we are spraying against blight. Blight is a foliar disease that destroyed the Irish potato crop in 1845, and we’ve not yet managed to eliminate it.

Cuckoo

I expect most species of birds have been enjoying the warm dry weather, but the Lapwings, Oystercatchers and Redshanks haven’t been, because the soil invertebrates that they eat go down into the soil to keep moist. As they had a job to find food, this meant several of them did not produce any young at all. They are long living birds however and can cope with a bad year now and again.

The Barn Owls may well have been enjoying the warm weather but so far have had a blank summer, because they are waiting for vole numbers to increase. There is time for them to have a successful brood, but as I look round the boxes, I’m not finding any with eggs. The one pair I did find with three eggs at the end of May do now have three young.

This year I started off with a 10% increase in Tree Sparrow numbers and most of them produced young on the first brood, but several pairs decided not to have a second brood, so that increase has now turned into a decrease. Although they might be laying six or seven eggs in a clutch, they are only rearing four or five of those eggs. I suppose it is the lack of insects that has caused them to rear fewer chicks.

The Moorhens on the Café pond are doing well, they produced seven young in their first brood and six in the second. The young from the first brood have been feeding the second brood, leaving the adults free to start a third brood. This is in complete contrast with the Moorhens on the pond in the Vine House Farm garden, who did not produce any young until the middle of May. They had a brood of three that disappeared within a week, and they’ve not yet produced any more. I think at least one remains from the original Moorhens in this pond, and as it is now seven years old, it is too old to breed.

I have been seeing Cuckoos every day in May and June, and on the last Saturday of June, there were three Cuckoos down the farm here, centred on our double hedge, wildflower strips and ponds.
I went down to this area to check our Tree Sparrow boxes and while I was there, I heard or saw 10 species of birds, thinking that was quite a good tally. I then started to think what else was breeding at this site and I came up with another 10 species!

In 1998, there wasn’t even a dyke at this site. We dug some ponds and planted a hedge; six years later planted another hedge 10 yards away from the first, and when the hedge was six years old, we laid it, to make it start from ground level.

We also sowed some wildflower seeds between the two hedges and we have some wild bird cover crops near the second hedge. We have five other sites like this; most of the features are paid for by Natural England and my only regret is that we haven’t got more of them, as I believe they are the only reason we still have Tree Sparrows on the farm.