I can show you literally hundreds of photos of where one of our owl chicks has been a nano-second previously. But none, alas, of a chick itself. Let alone one looking obligingly at the camera…

Four olive harvests-worth of leaves later, while mulching’s no longer regarded as borderline insanity, it’s still regarded as some slightly eccentric English preoccupation. But Italian pride – and the notion that a non-farmer might have an idea worth taking-up – means it’s forever destined to be a minority horticultural practice…