This autumn has been much more favourable than the past 2 years. Wheat is all drilled up to date although we still have some crop to go in behind Sugar Beet and possibly celery if lifting those crops doesn’t create too many issues with ground conditions. Emerging crops look well and although we still have some spraying to do, prospects for 2022 harvest already look better than the previous couple of harvests. Oil Seed Rape is also looking well although we have lost about 10ha that has been grazed off by both deer and geese – a problem we have every year on a contract farm we look after. The geese are here all winter and although we do our best to keep them off crops, they are particularly active around each Full Moon where they will still be grazing on land for most of the night! Red Deer numbers are also increasing each year and our landlord is reluctant to carry out any type of culling which neighbours are, so we end up with even more deer to contend with. We may have been one of the last members to deliver into store with our last load of Skyfall going to Kettering last Friday. Thank you all for your hard work over harvest and into the autumn keep our crops in the best possible condition.

Last week we had the Funpark open for our Halloween Hoot. A daytime non scary Halloween event revolving around Pumpkin Picking and carving. This event has grown every year and it now seems every child has to at least pick a pumpkin whereas a few years ago Halloween hardly happened at all. A bit like a busy harvest day at Camgrain stores we were inundated for 6 of the 9 days to the point that we had to find emergency supplies of Pumpkins to ensure that we didn’t run out! We are already planning a much larger area of pumpkins for 2022 in the hope that the numbers continue to grow. We are already planning for our Easter event which needs sheep lambing and, to help this, rams are now in with the ewes, and we should start lambing just before the Easter Holidays.

 The shop continues to be busy, and our café is getting many rave reviews which is great but too many breakfasts and lunches their isn’t doing my waistline any good!

Stay safe and well

Richard