The Larkin family - Pop, Ma, and their brood of six children - reside with a thriving menagerie on a small farm, where they live and love in amiable chaos. Rattling around in a gentian-blue thirty-hundredweight truck, doing a little of this and a little of that - picking fruit in the summer and hops in the autumn, wheeler-dealing, selling flowers at the roadside - they revel in life's simple pleasures. Then along comes Mr Cedric Charlton from the Inland Revenue, determined to assess the tax owed by Pop. But his plans are thrown into confusion by the eldest Larkin daughter - the entrancing Mariette.