Mrs Down's Diary - Oct 14 2009

Most of this year's beans have already been sold with the last load going out of the yard this morning. John kept some beans back, tested them for germination, span them on with the tillage spreader and then power harrowed the crop in. Good stuff.

Last year much of the arable land had to be left fallow over winter and then spring crops drilled, which just don't do as well on our heavy land.

We are in competition however with the rooks who see autumn drilling as a late year bonanza. Rather gruesome gibbets now hang in the middle of all the fields to deter the rooks, but the sight of their shot comrades seems to do little to blunt the birds appetite.

There isn't a gibbet at the bottom of our walnut tree, but there very soon might be. The squirrels are out in force to reap the harvest of nuts. In just a few days they have stripped what was a heavy crop.

John has been busy concentrating on land work but now he has a bit more time, war has been declared. He has set himself a table and chair up in the back garden and instead of having tea and coffee breaks in the kitchen he goes out, with gun, to guard his tree.

Honestly the man is obsessed. Jessica, our granddaughter, was disgusted with him at the weekend, pleading the squirrels case.

He dare not shoot any when she was around so Jessica has been hailed as the squirrel savior at her school. I dread to think what story she has recounted in Show and Tell.

Reminds me of when Jo, our daughter, was a little girl and her friend asked one evening as she saw John going out yet again with a gun: "Is you're Dad a bank robber?"

I know that John feels a personal vendetta exists between him and the squirrels, as they also got most of the cob nuts off the hazel tree.

My personal theory is that squirrels are all Radio Four listeners, getting up early to tune into Farming Today at 5.45 am.

A few weeks ago we had lain in bed listening to the radio as we do each day at that time, propped up with a cup of tea, me still drowsy, John planning what to do. The item that morning was about cob nuts being ripe and ready for harvest.

"I checked our tree yesterday" John said. "I'll go tonight and get a bag full before the squirrels find them. The tree is laden."

Oh no it wasn't. By evening not a nut. I thought I heard scratching by the bedroom window. The squirrels were listening in.