Archived News

5th August 2009

Edward was walking home as a storm was breaking overhead and he saw a bolt of lightning strike behind a barn.  Whether at that moment or later in the storm, our telephone line and printer burnt out and we lost computer access.  It was certainly fierce enough to affect many homes in our village and it has prevented any semblance of normality in the office for over a week.  

The harvest has not had the smoothest of beginnings.

Due to drought conditions in June, one field of wheat stopped growing and ripening, turning prematurely yellow (but not’ fit’ or ready to harvest), when ideally it should still have been benefitting from a combination of sunshine and showers to ripen properly.  Now that harvest is upon us it has of course been raining!!

With a few hundred acres to harvest, it’s not possible to sit back and wait for a stretch of fine weather and Laurence has been struggling to harvest whenever the rain stops.  If it rains every other day, this does not allow enough time for the wind to blow through the crops to dry them sufficiently, causing two immediate and stressful knock-on effects.

The crop becomes more time consuming and difficult to cut, often gets stuck within the combine harvester and takes time to un-jam.  The moisture content of the grain will need to be reduced in the grain drier before it can be stored, adding an extra process we could well do without.

Harvest began with 250 acres at Coomb Farm and Park Farm; with oil seed rape and oats being cut on a stop-start weather basis.  As today’s forecast had been for rain, the harvesting continued last night with 25 acres of fairly damp oats being cut at Raikes and the grain being fed into the drier, which was still working steadily earlier this morning.

When the drier is used in the winter, the moisture given off into the cold air creates white, cloud-like puffs of steam which quickly disappears.  This has caused the fire brigade to be called out on two occasions by concerned passers-by, when there has been no fire to extinguish, (we are grateful though for your concern ).    The good men of the brigade did need an explanation before they believed it was just steam, even though, unlike smoke, the steam had no smell and disappeared before our eyes! 

Now in the summer, as moisture is given off from the drier, it does not meet cold air and therefore no puffs of steam can be seen from the road.  

What couldn’t be missed by Laurence today as he drove out from the yard, was a vast plume of blackened smoke, stretching from the drier in West Lane, right across the fields towards the church.  Quite clearly not steam and ironically, this time no one called the firemen.

 Laurence quickly switched the drier off and doused it in water to put out the fire. Hours were spent cleaning out the wet, blackened mess which had been grain. 

Eventually back to harvesting and hopeful of some settled weather to come.