Welcome to the February 2019 Bellmond Farm Diary!
I’m posting this months farm diary blog a bit later than I had intended, and it’s mostly down to my lack of time management. The only excuse I can come up is that I’ve experienced a period of post-harvest adjustment; an unspecified amount of time in which you have returned (sort of) to your daily routine of farm jobs and waking and sleeping times, yet your time between is somewhat a blur. A blur of catching up with farm tasks, and house tasks such as cleaning, ironing, weeding the jungle of a garden I abandoned for the paddocks at harvest, preparing farm business cash flows and budgets, and generally getting things done that haven’t been a priority during harvest. I have also enjoyed a break from sharing to social media, which has been nice.
The big news!
Murray and I found out that we are expecting! At the end of January we suspected I may be pregnant, and to our delight we were correct! I did experience some nausea during my 4 weeks of “morning sickness” period, nausea that put me off eating and cooking a lot of my favourite foods, but harvest soon distracted me from that! I’m now 15 weeks pregnant and our baby is due in the middle of September, one month before our first wedding anniversary, and two weeks into lambing time!
February was a funny month for weather, at times it was unbearably hot over 30 degrees, yet we even had snow! Technically the mountains received the snow, we just felt the chill. On the first of the month we finally got some rain, 5mm in total. Murray had spent time checking over the machinery making sure it was ready for action and we were monitoring the crops frequently. The weather at the start of the month then came in hot and so begun harvest!
Our second harvest
This years harvest marked the second harvest Murray and I would work through together, we have been leasing the farm for almost 2 years now. Of course, we don’t do harvest single handedly ( we could, but we would need a much bigger and faster truck for me to drive, and a combine with a larger carrying capacity!). Murray’s parents were most helpful last year and were again this year, we are so grateful that they have the time to help and are eager to do so. Since last harvest I have perfected reversing my truck of grain up to the auger for emptying the load into the silo, and so I spent the whole of harvest taking the grain from the paddock to storage, getting in and out of the truck, and capturing a few photographs and videos along the way!
Our harvest commenced at lunchtime on Saturday the 9th. We harvested a 9ha paddock of wheat, then we started harvesting the paddock next to it which Murray had grown barley in. We continued to harvest until 1:30am when we decided to stop, certain that the nor-west wind would continue to blow through until the next day ensuring the crop would still be dry and the correct moisture for harvesting. We packed up and went to bed for a few hours before commencing at 7am on Sunday in the nor-west wind.
The long few days…
From the start of harvest, we harvested wheat, barley and vegetable seeds for six days straight, right up to Valentine’s Day. By the time it got to the 14th, I was glad to be rained off at 8pm with a rainfall of 10ml throughout the night. I drove to Methven to get Thai takeaway for supper whilst Murray put the combine away and closed the silos ( I think he and his Dad would have liked to have kept harvesting, we were on a roll!) and we enjoyed some downtime that evening, showering at a respectable time of 9:00pm then watching Les Miserables.
In the week that followed we started harvesting the peas. The Copper peas Murray had sown towards the end of last year haven’t yielded as much as the salesman’s charts said they could, which is what we had anticipated considering the horrible growing weather the crop experienced at the start and middle of its life. Overall it was a nice even crop with a good amount of pea straw left to sell.
When the day is over…
One of the things I look forward to at the end of a day of harvesting is the shower and washing the dust and sweat out of my hair and off my body. Of course I love that unique feeling that a day of constant hard work gives you, but I find waking up clean is essential in forming the foundations for these feelings. Murray and I always make sure to wear a clean set of clothes every day through harvest too, so the washing quickly mounts up! Nothing that a night clothes washing cycle (or two) followed by an early hang out to dry in the sun can’t fix!
Machines, machines and more cheese sandwiches.
Some days during harvest, I felt like the farm was a real life model of a childs play farm set. We had stock trucks coming and going, baling contractors coming and going with balers, rakes, truck and trailers, telehandlers and wrappers, plus we had our own vehicles and machinery in action consisting of two trucks and one combine. Days were busy and varied during harvest, however one element of each day that remained consistent was the cheese sandwiches I made everyone. I also included a variety of baked slices, fruit and drinks in everyone’s bag of food each day, not just cheese sandwiches. Its amazing how much water Murray and I can drink in a day too, especially during the hot days we had in February.
The arrival of rain and family
After we had harvested most of the peas, the weather came in cold and damp which was perfectly timed with a visit from my sister Penny and her partner Joe. Since their arrival in the country in December, Penny and Joe have been working in Southland shearing sheep (Penny also does wool handling) and the last time we had seen them was during Christmas when they came to stay. They are only here for a short time to work and as such they don’t take many days off. As their trip was coming to an end they came up to see us, which I had been looking forward to during harvest. At the start of their visit, it rained quite a lot, 51mm on the 23rd and 10mm on the 24th, which was perfectly timed so we could spend quality time together. Murray and I decided we would take them both up to Lake Coleridge for an adventure in Murrays boat, but when we woke early to go up to the lake, it was very cold. I prepared food and hot flasks for making tea, and by the time we started driving to lake Coleridge it was apparent through the clouds that there was snow on the mountains! Mt Hutt received 50cm!
Seeing the snow on the mountains made me feel so happy that we had got the majority of harvest completed. We got to the lake early so that we could be back by lunchtime and spent 3 hours out on the boat and caught one salmon which we had for tea.
Family time
It was wonderful spending time with Penny and Joe. I don’t have the opportunity to see my family regularly, so the time spent together is always very special. We went swimming, went out for dinner with friends (which we hadn’t done for a while!), played scrabble, did lots of baking using my new Kitchen Aid (bought with some of our wedding money – thank you generous friends and family!) and ate meals at the dinner table, which was a change from cheese sandwiches from a box in a hot tractor/truck/combine cab.
One thing in particular Penny spent doing was teaching me how to knit, and follow knitting patterns. For Christmas she had given me huge knitting book, the bible of knitting if ever there was one, and with the aid of the book, and more so Penny’s expertise, I began knitting a pair of baby booties. Penny kept me right and helped me fix my little mistakes along the way. I have since finished one bootie and have almost finished the second. I couldn’t put a price on Penny’s patience in teaching me, however I feel that I will knit a couple of items in the months leading up to our baby being born.
After a week Penny and Joe left us to catch their flight out of New Zealand, and the weather faired enough for Murray to start cultivating and sowing.
Keeping the farm in running order
In amongst the excitement of harvest we made sure all of our sheep and cattle were looked after every day too. We sent another two drafts of lambs away this month, let 7 ewes go and also bought two new Border Leicester Rams to introduce some new genetics into our Border Romney flock. Our remaining lambs were happy eating the red clover and pasja and growing into lovely looking animals.
With the onset of autumn, we bought some store lambs to finish over the winter. They were more expensive than the lambs we bought last year ($78 each) however they weren’t all that expensive ($105 each) considering the high demand. Nevertheless the bill came to an eye watering sum to have to pay at this time of year when cashflow is tight, but that’s the reality of farming sometimes, afterall, a large portion of our income is only just being harvested!
In February we sold all of our wool which created a big space in the shearing shed and certainly helped with cashflow. Some people say there is “no money in wool” which I guess is true if you are paying lots of people to get it from the sheep to sale. Our ewes fleeces don’t have a high value, but our lambs wool does, and because we do all of the wool handling ourselves and only have to pay our shearers, we make a healthy profit from our wool.
Also in February we got our third harvest of lucerne cut and baled ready for the winter, and the Swedes Murray had sown at the end of last year are growing well, so we should have plenty of winter feed for our ewes and our little group of cattle.
The struggle to get social
Most of our contact with friends has been over the phone during harvest, I can remember one morning in particular recievening a video call from a group of close in England. It was Sunday morning here, but to them it was Saturday night, and buy what a night they were having, drinking wine, having a merry old time whilst I was confined to the cab of my truck waiting for the combine to fill up! I’d be lost without the ability to video call family and friends. But even though it’s been a busy month we were better at getting off the farm than last month, after all we had Penny and Joe staying with us for a week. We also went to a rugby match with some of our friends, went to the pub (twice!), went to our local young farmers meeting and Murray had his A&P meetings to go to. I even had a day in Christchurch with a very dear friend who I had persuaded to come furniture shopping with me. I was on the lookout for a large mahogany buffet which we didn’t get to see on this trip (it was still hidden in the stores warehouse) but I managed to go again at the end of the month and view it, and amazingly was exactly what Murray and I had been looking for to store all of our wedding china and crystal in – we paid for it with wedding money too (thanks again very generous family and friends!)
At the end of the month harvest was not finished, we still had some little strips of cereals and peas left to harvest that hadn’s been fit enough earlier in the month, and the oats still weren’t ready to harvest. I think it’s fair to say that we made the most of February and were looking forward to finishing harvest in early March.