Red House Farm: Cloddy Seed beds & 3.5 Inches of rain

Cultivating the land at Red House Farm has been really hard this year.  The usual application of “min-till” to all the fields has completely gone out the window as the heavy wet clay soils make this technique impossible to apply. Two fields of Oilseed Rape were finally drilled in early September although continuous rainfall has resulted in a wet cloddy seed bed rife with slugs.  

The Cloddy Seed bed

 

The rain gauge we’ve installed at the farm recorded a staggering 92.8mm (3.5 Inches) of rain falling between the end of August and the beginning of October!  

With the seed beds drilled, the next task was to apply SLUXX to the fields to ward off the slugs from eating too many oilseed rape seeds.  Two fields are being trialled with SLUXX at the farm – “Hawthorns” a 9.1ha field received an application of SLUXX around the headlands and the first 3 tramlines and the rest of the field received an application of 1.5% metaldehyde pellets; whilst “1325” a 6.87ha field received an application of SLUXX throughout the field apart from a small strip up the middle. I’ll be looking at the amount of leaf damage on the crops in both fields and looking at the variation of leaf damage between rape growing in areas that have received metaldehyde slug pellets and those that have received SLUXX.  I’ll be also taking water samples from the drains to look at how much metaldehyde is running off the fields and into the River Leam which flows along the boundary of the farm.

Hopefully SLUXX has got what it takes to ward off the slugs!!