I had a few busy days last week, none of which had anything to do with farming. An Ed Sheeran concert and an overnight stay in Belfast with my better half took up Thursday and Friday. Then, a charity traditional music concert on Friday night organised by my brother and his wife in aid of the Gavin Glynn foundation and back up the road to Belfast on Saturday for a family day out at the Balmoral show.

It was lovely to be back walking normally around a show after such a long time. However, my three and a half and five-year-olds were easier to handle the last time I was at Balmoral three years ago, as they were both confined to a pushchair and couldn’t run off at will. They frequently did this every time they saw something that took their fancy.

My granny never liked anybody working on a Sunday - maybe she was right

Anyway, touring around the country for three days inevitably meant I had a lot of farming to catch up on on Sunday. Unfortunately, Sunday has ended up being my busiest day of the week for the past while, due to weather or some reason or other. The plan for Sunday was to spread lime, fertiliser and spray weeds around the farmyard and house.

A contractor was spreading the lime for me, so all I had to do was load it. It was an easy enough job and in between loads, I had time to get my quad sprayer hooked on and tested. This was to be the first time this year that the sprayer would be used, and my heart is always slightly in my mouth when I go to switch the sprayer pump on for the first time every year. But the pump easily kicked into life and was happily buzzing away. I tried a bit of water through it and everything was working great.

Even if I do manage to get my sprayer working again, I’ll probably end up back at it again next Sunday

I filled another load of lime and proceeded back to my sprayer. I filled it with water, the correct amount of spray and off I went to start my work. But of course, this time when I turned on my sprayer, the motor was buzzing but the pump was not pumping. Then the bad humour started and the tools had to be got out, along with the YouTube trouble shooting videos - how did we ever manage without them.

Then I decided that a Facebook discussion group post was needed to make sure I wasn’t being completely stupid and missing some really simple problem. The general consensus with everybody was that either the pump was just air locked or the diaphragm was fecked.

Anyway, by the time I got this information, I had given up and moved on to my fertiliser spreading. It went alright apart from the amount of money it cost me every time I dropped a bag into the spreader. Apparently, it’s going to be wet for the rest of the week, so even if I do manage to get my sprayer working again, I’ll probably end up back at it again next Sunday.

My granny never liked anybody working on a Sunday - maybe she was right. Then again, if I didn’t work on a Sunday, I’d never get anything done.