Summertime,…………….

.......and (if you have land) the living isn't always easy. But, like money, beer and dogs, you can't have too much of it – especially if you've got a posse of fat & perennially hungry horses to feed. And if you're lucky enough to have a field or two which you can keep Trigger and his pals out of during the spring, you'll be able to cut your own hay. Depending on how much rain God has chosen to provide and how much the grass has grown (and it varies hugely – bone dry for months in 2012, when fodder prices soared - and torrents of the stuff this year, making it difficult to harvest) this can save you a small fortune – and also means you can keep an eye out for (and pull up) ragwort – innocent looking enough, but potentially deadly when dried & baled.

So far, so good – but only if you’ve got a barn full of tractors, trailers and chunky equipment. Which is where your friendly local farmer (who has) comes into his own. And we’ve got one. Alain will listen to the forecast, choose his moment, then arrive (anywhere between pre dawn and sunset) and, as the buzzards wheel and dive above, cut, turn, fluff and bale at lightning speed. And all this toil without a centime changing hands – just the excess hay (that you didn’t need anyway) taken in return to feed his cattle through the winter.

Suffering from severe tractor envy as he waves from his air conditioned cab and takes the final trailer load away, all that’s left now is to tidy up the fence lines and hedges and to put the new bales into the barn – which, being already stuffed full of quads, mowers and surplus furniture now needs rubber walls. Just like last year, in fact.