Harvesting maize near Stuchbury
Photograph: Colin Wootton
Richard Fonge writes:
The harvest is nearly over with the late sown linseed on the Moreton Road being the last crop to be combined along with the barley up the concrete road. Harvests are much earlier now than fifty plus years ago. Then spring corn, wheat, barley and oats made up the majority of the harvest, with wheat the only corn sown in the winter. The old adage was in this area, “Have the sowing done by Banbury Fair”. which is always the second week of October.
The reason we now have much earlier harvests are threefold mainly. Firstly the plant breeders produced varieties of barley and oats in particular, that could be planted with winter hardiness, and as machinery modernised better seedbeds could be made in the autumn to plant into. Secondly in the mid ninety seventies oil seed rape became part of the arable rotation and this was a crop that came to harvest in mid to late July depending on the weather. Thirdly from the late ninety sixties agriculture became more specialised, and so those farmers who went out of livestock farming and concentrated on arable farming led the way in corn production.
The weather still plays a major part in dictating sowing through to harvesting, so it’s an industry very climate dependant.
The celebration of the end of harvest was once one of the major calendar events, with a service in the Village Church, which was decorated with the produce of the land and hedgerow, often followed by a supper and auction of that said produce. But sadly over the years as our connection with the land has become more distant this event has in many villages gradually lost its significance, but the food is still produced to nourish us.
Sulgrave lies in an area of peaceful South Northants countryside, not spectacular in anyway but scenic, so the gruesome monstrosity that is HS2 is leaving a great scar across that landscape for many years to come until such time it has been landscaped after the line has been built. What is distressing to see along the new road to the B4525 and in other areas is the land taken but not used for any purpose, now a mass of dead thistles, ragwort and other weeds. The seeds of which will be airborne on to neighbouring farms, where they will have to be controlled in pastures and arable crops.
As summer draws to an end, we look forward to autumn, which sees the swallows departing for Africa from the lines on the Moreton Rd. Hundreds of them there, but where have they been all summer?
Finally. A man asked me the way to Jeopardy other day. I replied there wasn’t such a place. But he said “I saw a headline in a newspaper – Over a hundred jobs going in Jeopardy”!
Richard Fonge