Count the pennies and the pounds will .......

Ländle, as it's also called, is nowadays a "cultural" area stretching from Stuttgart in the west to Augsburg in the east and roughly 50km north & south of this line. It is in the states of Bavaria and Baden Württemburg with about 8 million inhabitants (10% of Germany) but is not an official district - the part in Bavaria is officially "Bavarian Swabia" with a certain amount of devolved responsibility.

Two main characteristics of the Swabians are their dialect (said to be 40% understandable to a standard German speaker) and their, let us say, "economic prudence", a trait Mrs Merkel praised a few years ago during the financial crisis. North Germans would say Swabians are "stingy, overly serious or prudish petty bourgeois simpletons" while the Swabians would describe themselves as "frugal, clever, entrepreneurial and hard-working".

Farmer Franz is a true Swabian of the latter description. This morning he phoned to say he had yesterday cut the grass on the sides of a 100-meter long track that divides two of his maize fields and we should come over and collect it to make some loose hay for the horses.

There was no way I was going to do it during the day and so went over at 7:30 pm with the small car trailer, rake & pitchfork. Franz luckily joined me, he mastered the raking technique about 50 years ago. I suspect after an hour or so we had raked & loaded about the equivalent of one, possibly two, small (traditional) hay bales. However, we did have an interesting chat in the beautiful evening sunset. We couldn't quite get it all loaded and I promised to return tomorrow.

I will always remember one of Franz's first visits to us over 10 years ago to pull down a large tree with his winch. When he returned a few days later to see how we had got on with clearing up he was mortified to see all the thin branches and twigs we had put in a pile and were about to torch on a bonfire - "the branches make the best heating wood". Since then we have adopted many of his Swabian traits, even if cost/benefit calculations don't seem to want to give a positive result.


....for the non-English mother language readers, the full sentence of the title is:

'Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'


This idiom only applies if you don't have pet dogs, cats, chickens, horses, sheep or similar. The vet, farrier, feed supplier, pet shops, farmers etc look after all your pounds for you.