The crop is quite tall this year and some lodging has already taken place particularly on the headland where fertiliser was overlapped. I don’t anticipate that this will be a problem unless we see some serious weather over the next two to three weeks.
You can still see patches where the crop was killed off during the winter; I would estimate that where this does occur it accounts for between 5 and 20% of the crop in any given field. The patches appear where melt water pooled and refroze back in late January early February. Fields on slopes have in general faired better as melt water failed to collect.
Cockchafers and Thrips about, some people out spraying for these, I probably won’t bother.