There was a certain morning every year when my father would jubilantly exclaim, upon opening the bedroom curtains, that: “Spring has arrived, Mother!” Rubbing his eyes, he’d have observed the grass, green and growing, in the Front Lawn field and the flowering daffodil letters for each of his six children.

There was a T for Thomas and a G for me and so on. They’re still there but poorly because like us they’re becoming old with over 50 years a-growing.

Now, Dad was not an early riser, despite being hugely productive and a workaholic, so the sun would be well up on the morning of spring’s arrival.

If I may digress for a moment, Dad always told me (being the first to rise in the house) that Irish people don’t get up early – almost as if to ask, “Why in the name of Jaysus, were you up and in the yard at an ungodly eight o’clock?”

This of course was a myth – it’s just he was never up to see them. And I remember when I was a long-distance tractor driver, heading off at 5am to Cork in the Fendt Zylon, to collect a Farrell F15 trailer dryer. Going through Kildalkey at this very early hour, who did I see but a farming neighbour, the late Noel Conlon in his jeep, already out and about.

Sadly, I couldn’t delight in telling this to Dad, as he had died a couple of years previously.

I did think the milder weather last weekend was spring-like after a raw but drying week. However, I don’t think that Dad, if he was around, would be making his announcement just yet.

Nonetheless, it’s good to be out in the fields again and especially so when it’s a tad earlier than usual. While compound fertiliser was spread on the barley and oilseed rape in the middle of February, I held back on the forward wheat and oats until the first week of March and we’ve been busy since.

The oilseed rape has had its second application of fertiliser and is now up to just over 100 units N per acre.

The bloody pigeons fleeced the crops, hence the N loading.

The slatted tanks have been emptied and the slurry spread on stubbles destined for beans and farmyard manure has also been spread by a contractor with a big new Bunning muck spreader.

Do you remember when Top Gear dumped a Volvo car into a muck spreader to see how it would cope? It flittered it, and that was a Bunning. So, as you might imagine, it flings muck far and wide o’er dale and ditch into the next parish.

The land is ploughing up slightly slabby and sticky so it needs to dry before tilling. We seldom min-till after 20t/ac of farmyard manure or 3,000 gallons of slurry as there’s just too much soil trafficking.

Am I happy to plough? Yes, in the sense that it’s a reset button, particularly for the fields in question. No, because of the cultivation needed to create a level seedbed.

While your ploughing may well be better than ours, the headlands become unlevel and more like a lunar landscape. Whereas with a couple of years of min-till the fields become really level, which it needs to be for the tined Horsch Sprinter.

Our Bateman sprayer with its archaic boom technology is also not good on these bumpy headlands and the boom is Dancing with the Stars and all over the place. To tackle this levelling issue, I’ve bought a 5M Samco Soilmaster which hopefully will address the problem of headland humps and hollows.

I can’t wait to use it and hope it’ll be the business. Maybe spring will have to arrive first.