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We carried out another litter-pick on Watton Road a couple of weeks ago – from the crematorium all the way back to Knebworth itself.

All that strip of land next to Watton Road is owned by Herts Highways, but the endless supply of litter thrown from car windows is not picked up by the council – so we do it when we have a chance, just to keep the area looking better. This is especially because we have attended services at the crematorium in the past and feel it’s a tiny favour that we can do to improve the experience for families in slow moving convoys of cars heading to the crem. We also litterpick Swangleys Lane as it’s near the farm entrance.

 

What we find on Watton Road is that the waste is almost exclusively takeaway food containers and drinks bottles discarded from moving cars at the first opportunity after leaving the built-up area of Stevenage.  It’s a thankless task and I’ve noticed that new litter is already taking its place, but it is something we will continue doing when we get the opportunity.

Weather permitting, we are going to be starting harvest at Swangleys later this week.  This year the entire agricultural part of the farm is dedicated to growing beans, which have now wilted off and reached the dryness needed for harvest. The remainder of the farm is used for environmental stewardship initiatives that you might have noticed in the fields locally.

Harvest is THE crucial moment in the calendar for us as a farm business and is when our entire year’s labour and investment in the land is finally converted into a saleable product. It’s also a major operational challenge and involves coordinating the arrival and assembly of multiple combine harvesters plus articulated grain trucks, tractor pulled grain wagons and all the people, fuel , spares and other resources needed to get the entire farm harvested in just a few days. All of this activity is carried out by external farm contractors and 2024 will be the first harvest at Swangleys by our new contractors – who began work for us in autumn 2023.  Although relatively new to Swangleys, they are extremely experienced and competent.

 

So, please bear with us while this job is done – there will be a short term spike in the number of large vehicle movements around Knebworth, Woolmer Green and Datchworth, along with dust and noise from fields while they complete this essential and urgent task.

We’re getting ourselves ready for the imminent start of Harvest 2023.  In the space of just a few weeks, we need to gather in 100% of the crops that we have worked all farming year to nurture.  This is a crucial activity for our survival as a farm.

 

So, do please bear with us during this busy period. We plan harvest to try to minimise disruption for local people, but it’s always a dusty, noisy activity and comes with an unusually high number of vehicle movements both immediately around the farmland and in getting people and equipment to Knebworth from elsewhere – all in a very narrow window of time.

A lot of people have been saying how much they like the sunflowers on Watton Road opposite the Harwood Park crematorium.

These sunflowers are part of a project within our wider environmental initiative and are designed to progressively release seed for birds from right now through to mid winter when the birds need them most.

The sunflowers are the most obvious part of this project, but actually it’s the other five species that we have mixed them with that provide the bulk of the long term supply of bird seed.  In that one strip, we have established 130,000 square feet of these seed-rich plants, which is an area the size of approximately 60 tennis courts.

Normally this kind of environmental initiative would be tucked away from sight elsewhere on the farm, but we thought people travelling along Watton Rd or visiting Harwood Park might enjoy it.

Thanks for everyone’s positive feedback on this project, we appreciate it.

 

We regularly put in intensive sessions clearing roadside rubbish from the Council’s verges around the farm.  This month we cleared Watton Road.

I know a lot of the local community had noticed that the entire length of Watton Rd west of the crematorium and up to the junction with Old Lane was in a shocking state.  The photo shows the rubbish we picked from just half of the road length that we cleared  – almost all of it was drinks and snack containers lobbed out of car windows on the move as they drove between Knebworth and Bragbury End.

We cleared the rubbish over three days and by the time we had finished at one end, more rubbish had arrived at the other.