In theory I have 114 hours left before we begin Open Farm Sunday. However, as I need to sleep, eat, cook, shop, collect one of the kids from Sheffield and break off to answer queries from members of the public and farm staff  it’s likely that I have only 72 hours, or even less, to produce a stunningly informative display on modern farming. I have a broken printer and a laminator that regularly pleats the paper and things are not looking good.

To add to my general feeling of forthcoming disaster we’ve just had a meeting (and you know what I feel about them) and we’re now doing the Health and Safety stuff. That’s like a meeting but with the additional point that plants become hazards (poison and thorns), animals can give you nasty diseases and even the ground we walk on can leap up and break your ankle. It’s a dangerous old world out there. I hate to think what it would be like if we ever reintroduced wild boar or bears.

You may of course be asking yourself why I’m writing this instead of getting on with work, but the question contains it’s own answer. Most things are better than work, and blogging certainly beats typing up notes on growing wheat. If you ploughed up Wembley Stadium, which wouldn’t be a bad thing in my opinion, you could grow enough wheat to make a sandwich for every member of a capacity crowd. The only problem there is that if you grew wheat on the field you wouldn’t get a capacity crowd. Nobody has spotted that so far.

Now, this is possibly an interesting fact when you first hear it, but I’ve heard it more than once now. I’ve also told them that one of our fields will produce wheat to make two pancakes for every inhabitant of Nottingham and made various other calculations based on the towns and schools that people come from. Using information off the internet I even calculated that the woodland we are planting would absorb the emissions from several thousand cars.

Yes, I did say “using information off the internet”. Some of you will have spotted the flaw there. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. I repeated an error found in several internet articles and produced a calculation that suggested we could solve the problem of global warming by all planting window boxes. This sounded a bit extreme so I did more research.

It seems I was wrong by a factor of several thousand.

I now have 71 hours left and Tim has just come in to tell me that one of the tents has broken in the wind, specifically the tent I’m supposed to be using at the weekend. Will be back later to put photos on.

Later: one pole is bent and another went through the roof of the tent. It’s fixable but we really could have done without spending the time on it.

Meanwhile the runner beans are suffering in the wind. I’ll try to save what I can but I’m going to plant replacements in the polytunnel tonight – fortunately I have toilet roll tubes in the back of the car.

That’s probably the oddest closing sentence I’ve ever used.