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Who’s the happy bunny then?” asked Mrs P as I came grinning into the kitchen with all the excitement of a mangy terrier being combed with a wire brush.

It was a sunny morning, Tuesday 3 March, and we were back out in the fields again, the long respite over which is always a happy day. Matter of fact, Mrs P had stolen a march on me as she’s been poking in the garden for the last couple of weeks making me envious.

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Speaking of the garden, I see frogspawn in the shallow pond which is always a sign that it is warming up and time to be out with fertiliser. Conditions for spreading slurry on stubbles and compound fertiliser on the crops were far from brilliant, but it’s too difficult not to be active when the sun’s out.

All the crops were in urgent need of a feed. I like to have half the barley’s nitrogen on by St Patrick’s Day, so it was high time to make a start. It’s very yellow in patches which I hope will survive. And too many of the wheat fields are patchy with total plant loss, which always becomes more evident as fields start to dry out.

It took three separate applications on two of the rape fields to achieve the correct balance of N-P-K-S (68-14-90-63). It took its toll on tramlines, so there’s not huge room for optimism with the cereal crops at present. They are wildly inferior to this time last year with much less potential. This may change either way as the season progresses but the last five months of continual rainfall (630mm) have drained yield away.

However, spraying the Kerb on the rape and tackling the volunteer beans in the wheat in early January worked really well and I’m grateful for that. The land was drier then than it is now.

We have beans to plant but I’m in no rush as last year’s were sown before mid-March and only yielded the same as the previous year’s, which were sown in the last week of April. Matt Dempsey wrote some time ago that was also his experience, but nonetheless I’d like to be getting them in by the end of the month. Beans are an important crop to us at this time of low cereal prices and ever escalating costs, not helped by that muppet in the USA. Fertiliser is rising by the hour but fortunately I bought most of it some time ago.

Lenten trial and the C foods

In a supreme act of unprecedented sheer grit and self-sacrifice, unparallelled in recent times, I’m having a very abstemious Lenten period. With unforetold self-denial, I’ve given up most of the essential foods for modern living – basically everything nice that begins with C, like chocolate, cakes, Coke, cream and crisps. Oh, and cheese. I have a particular soft spot for cheese and Coke. But it may even be that I won’t survive this tumultuous period and this could be my last column, as I quite expect that I’ll be too weak to write in a fortnight’s time.

However, I do hope Mrs P will intervene before I reach tremoring and decay and inject me with life-saving sugary drips of liquidised chocolate, cake, ice cream and Coca Cola (Classic). She is under strict orders to monitor my demise with the greatest care. Can I trust her to do this and save me from dying at the eleventh hour and being admitted through the Easter pearly gates?

However, I fear not. The vibes I’m picking up from Mrs P suggest that if I break my Lenten commitment, I’m afraid she might kill me herself. Happy bunny now? Sort of.