The dry weather over the past month has been beneficial for getting our carrot lifting completed in mainly good conditions, with just four wet days out of eight weeks of harvesting.

We got harvesting finished on June 7, a fortnight earlier than in 2021, which is good as harvesting five days a week is very tying for both labour and machinery.

All in all, harvest went smoothly, with just a couple of breakdowns. A few transport issues with two lorries going in ditches two days in a row did cause a fair bit of chaos, but as they say, you have to take the rough with the smooth.

Carrot drilling was completed on June 9, and so far the majority of crops are looking well, with the pre-em having worked effectively. Cereal spraying is up to date, with early spring barley crops having had their T2, and the rest due in the next week or so.

The windy weather we have had over the past few weeks has not made spraying easy, with 11pm and 4.30am spraying being necessary at times to avoid the worst of the wind, fortunately we all enjoy making the most of the long days at this time of year.

Wheat crops have all had their T3, and look really good at the moment, let’s hope this continues to harvest and we get some good yields to make up for high input costs.

In regard to grain marketing, I sold another 50t of spring barley at £350/t + seed premium on May 16, after which the price dramatically fell, with Nov ’22 sitting today at £302/t, and I am kicking myself for being greedy and not selling more at £350/t – human nature is to always want more!

The payment top-up came in a fortnight ago for last year’s oilseed rape crop, with our average price for 2021 being £597/t which we can’t complain about – hopefully it is as good this year.

We got our silage done for our sheep at the start of the week in good conditions, with much more bulk than we had expected! We could see six weeks ago that the grass was going to get away on us, so we shut the sheep out of a four-acre paddock in our paddock grazing system and cut it for silage, we were quite amazed that we got 40 bales from it!

Though contractor costs for making silage are not cheap, as we all know, it seems a better use of expensive fertiliser to silage it than just topping it, as would have been the case were the field set-stocked.

Lambs are growing on well now, having had their second Ovi-vac a fortnight ago, and were treated with Clik at the same time to prevent strike. I plan to wean the lambs around July 20, and the Clik withdrawal will be up by then so I can put the first draw of lambs away straight off their mothers.

Sheep are due to be sheared on Thursday, so no Highland Show for me this year, hopefully we will get down next year, when we don’t have such an action packed wedding calendar. We've attended three weddings so far and still have another four to go this year and it has been so good to catch up properly with people we haven’t seen for years!