Let us spray.....

Now the hours of backbreaking work are over!

Finally delivered from the man in Marmande is a power-driven, tractor-mounted mechanical sprayer, with four jets each side of a large fan. There's even a control so that you can spray only to your left or right, so's not to douse your neighbours maize with vine bug-killer. So instead of each spraying taking about six days by hand (which is a bit tricky when you have to spray every eight days) it only takes about three hours!

Strangely, it doesn't seem to have improved the vines resistance to infection, and the leaves are looking as brown as they did last year, and there are an awful lot of shrivelled up grapes, but at least I'm not having to work so hard to produce my measly crop!

In fact, I'm probably more dangerous now I've got a slightly wider tractor and a huge spraying machine on the back, as I can't really see where I'm going most of the time and the whole contraption only just fits between the vines. It was so hot a couple of weeks ago that I could only start spraying at 9:30 pm by tractor headlights, and by 11:00 I think I'd rammed and destroyed more vines than I'd sprayed