Progress at last

sorry obviously.

We have had a week of fine weather and have started to make some excellent progress on the daffodil harvest. We have managed to get ahead of the potato blight problems at last and are back to 7 day spraying intervals.

Our reward has been a day off for everyone. I had a leisurely Sunday breakfast with newspaper (pot of coffee, fruit and pain au chocolat - pretentious, moi?) and came in at 8.00am to just check the daffodil burners and to catch up with a few bits of office work. Chris was here already he "just" wanted to do a couple of jobs too on the delphiniums. We are both clearly addicted to our work. At least Dad is getting a well-earned rest. He is talking about taking his jetski for a spin if the weather stays fine. Amusingly Dad's jetski has more horsepower (215) than our largest tractor. It would probably be more use on the fields as well at the moment.

Dad's always been an adrenalin junkie. He has a new toy every couple of years, convertible, quad bike, electric guitar, motorbike (when he earnt the nickname Evil K'Neville). I haven't yet inherited his love of speed.

This said, it made my heart sing when our bulb harvester was moving quickly this week (a bit like this). We now a third of the way through with over 250 tonnes of daffodil bulbs already in the yard and dry.

We bring the bulbs in from the field and grade them into one tonne boxes on a Herbert 1800 Contractor grader (like this). They then get dried on the new letterbox system at 35 degrees C using two fans and modulating lpg burners. They are dry after four days and then they get moved onto an ambient letterbox system where we try to keep the temperature below 17 degrees.

Another fine week should get most of the bulbs out of the ground and then I can tell you about the next stage. Yawn, yawn, poor you.