We didn’t have much rain over the last 10 days but the drop in temperature, lengthening nights and some fresh moisture have all given a fresher look to the place.

As I mentioned, we still have not taken a second cut of silage, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well the newly reseeded ground has bulked up.

It’s too heavy for grazing so I will definitely book our contractor to cut it over the next week or 10 days.

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We are in the middle of grazing out some of the paddocks we intend reseeding this autumn so gradually, we are getting back to normal.

We have been fortunate that we have had no water problems.

Both wells have been fine but two of the streams on the place have dried up completely.

It is not the first time it has happened but it takes a dry year to show how vulnerable we could be.

We have one spring that feeds an old-fashioned watering hole. It is reputed never to have dried up and it has continued to give pure clean water this year as well.

As we are not on the local authority mains supply, that spring would have to be our fallback position to get stock watered if all else dried up, regardless of regulations preventing cattle from drinking from watercourses, but it hasn’t come to that.

One of the consequences of the exceptionally dry warm summer is that the spring beans, the last crop to be harvested, are shorter and more open than I would like. The recent moisture has stimulated a sudden burst of weeds. Beans can be a nightmare to harvest with weeds. A few years ago, bindweed wrapped around the reel and had to be cut manually every few yards. In this kind of case, it would be very useful to have the likes of Reglone available. We got the crop finished but it took ages with a lot of pressure on man and machine.

We have purposely delayed planting the oilseed rape in the very dry conditions we have had up to now after warnings of poor germination and patchy emergence but the aim is still to get it sown and rolled before 1 September.

The grass weeds and volunteers that I would like to have tackled before sowing will have to wait a while.