The evenings are drawing in and morning dews are getting heavier, but finally we have seen some sunshine. Just in time for our increasingly nervous, grain-growing neighbours to snatch a harvest which was looking at risk.
Having won the church tenancy of Riverford in 1951, my father recalls being persuaded to take possession early when it was suggested that another harvest with a binder would kill the previous tenant. The binder and threshing machine was replaced by a combine harvester. Pa might have been a forerunner of the new age of mechanised farming but we were never much good at growing barley and sold the dilapidated and painfully slow combine harvester after our last grain harvest 40 years ago. On a long, dry day, free of break-downs, it might have cut and threshed 10 acres. Memories persist of teas laid out on a blanket in the field and later, when I proved my worth by pitching bales, cider from a barrel in a shaded hedge; the labour was such that you sweated it out before ever getting drunk.
Years on I find myself looking over hedges at combine harvesters pouring grain into waiting trailers with a nostalgia that I don’t quite trust; harvest was a backbreaking job that seemed to go on for months. Today’s combines can clear 10 acres in half an hour and it’s a long time since anyone pitched a bale of straw by hand, preferring to make giant 500kg bales and move them mechanically.
On our side of the hedge a sunny end to August has helped, but may prove a little too late for the tomatoes; it will take a miraculously sunny September to ripen the 10 tonnes of waiting, green fruit. I hope some of you are keen chutney makers; I suspect we will be pushing green tomatoes by the end of the month. With age and declining light our basil has run out of vigour and flavour and been abandoned, but cucumbers are still going strong. Rather than try to coax yield out of exhausted plants we are increasingly taking the view that it is better to plant a second crop which, with the vigour of youth, seems less willing to accept that summer is over in August. This works well for cucumbers and courgettes and could also work for basil; something to try next year.
Guy Watson
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