Our neighbour Roger has been flat out for the last month, first with getting in a bumper hay crop and now with the wheat harvest. It is a juggling act for the farmers around here to get the hay in before the cherries need picking and to cut the wheat before the apricots and peaches are ripe. Many of them now prefer to make early silage, or bale “green hay” and to grow maize for silage, which is harvested in the late summer. That needs a lot of irrigation though, so Roger sticks to the more traditional routine. He just got his last straw baled yesterday when the heavens opened and we had a very welcome downpour lasting all night.