A Week on the Estate: Ploughing Silt, Rejuvenated Lake & Lincolnshire Bread
We’ve just passed the autumn equinox and it’s hard to believe we started the month with Mediterranean temperatures. While Saturday 23rd September marked the beginning of astronomical autumn in the northern hemisphere, at our latitude we came closest to equal day and night on Tuesday 26th.
Storm Agnes is the latest Atlantic weather system to visit our shores. While we endured some distinctly maritime wind and rain midweek, we got off lightly compared to more northerly and westerly regions and were still blessed by a few beautiful, blue-sky days either side of the hullabaloo. Whatever the forecast, the nights are noticeably drawing in as we roll gently towards the winter solstice on 22nd December. The week to come is set fair and blustery with highs of 21C and lows of 11C.
One of our biggest projects this year was giving South Ormsby Hall’s Lake a generation’s worth of TLC. Restoring the depth from 10cm to 2m was the heftiest part of a hefty job, yielding 10,000 tons of home-made fertiliser. It was a feat of logistics to handle that volume of silt, but in return it’ll give our land an organic boost for many seasons to come.
Work on the Lake is nearing completion. The depth has been restored and all the silt has been moved to field bunds to be spread on the land as and when required. A new lake edge is being shaped complete with coir matting and wooden boarding as well as new trees, shrubs and water-loving plants. Bird and bat boxes will complete the picture along with kingfisher tunnels. It’s all coming together nicely.
Out on the land, this week’s benign weather was a boon. With the harvest safely taken in, the drilling season got underway with organic winter barley. Paul Barnes photographed a lovely bit of recycling: Jonny ploughing fertile lake silt into one of our arable fields.
