Life lesson: don’t ignore a partly blocked jet

Liquid nitrogen is working fine on the winter crops and early spring barley but there’s a striking yellow line left unfertilised

All spring crops have emerged here, even if some might be better off staying put until things warm up. This cold snap is not all that extreme but it serves to remind us that it’s getting harder to pull off the vital trick of predicting what weather is coming.

I sowed the last of my barley on March 20 and 22 and went ahead and sowed peas on the 23rd. All went in at 185kg/ ha, but only the first field of barley got liquid starter as the tank sprang another leak and was parked, not very politely, in a corner while sowing continued.

It will be interesting to see if there is much benefit to the field that got it. All of the barley and two-thirds of the peas were rolled in lovely order.

The rest of the pea ground has a few springs and was marginal for sowing and definitely not fit to roll.

All winter crops and the early spring barley have had two splits of nitrogen to bring them to 100kg/ha.

The liquid nitrogen is working out fine and lessons are being learnt. Don’t ignore a partly blocked jet, not even until you get the headland.

You won’t need a drone to spot where it happened, but if you are unlucky enough to have one around, that yellow line is pretty striking.

The same goes for giarogs, or short ground, or whatever it’s called in your part of the country.

You will be surprised how far back from the tractor the boom is on a long trailed sprayer, and if you don’t drive right out across the headland tramline, it will leave the neatest little yellow triangle to show you.

On the second split I may have overcompensated for this, and the frost this week has left the double-sprayed bits a little scaldy looking. Although that might also be from the herbicide that winter crops got last week, along with PGR on oats.

The painful memory of two severe droughts in the last three years informed the decision to press on with sowing peas in indifferent conditions.

They don’t like to be mucked in but with a direct drill there is only one pass over the ground, and the use of a tine rather than a disc reduces the risk of smearing.

The danger of leaving that ground to dry up was that the crop might be trying to establish in very dry conditions.

Pre-emergence herbicide is useless in dry conditions, and when the rain eventually comes, the weeds don’t have much competition from a thin crop of peas.

Around here it is said that “any chap can grow a crop of peas but it sometimes takes a man to harvest them”, and that sort of crop would test you.

Climate researchers say that our summers are two weeks longer now than they were in the mid-50s, and that this trajectory will give us a sixmonth summer by the end of the century.

Even with mitigation, it is likely to be a month longer than it used to be and to bring a lot more extreme weather.

So it is great to see Teagasc involved in IPM Works, a major European initiative which is not going to change the weather, but might help our crops to deal better with it.

It’s not going to change the weather, but might help our crops to deal better with it