(Note: The first three paragraphs of this post were written in mid-July. describing the second cutting of hay. Now, several weeks later, we have brought in the third cutting.)
‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is, I used to think, an old saw of a phrase that everyone understood either in a literal or a figurative manner. Shows what I know. Daughter Sophia (who reads a lot and knows a lot) had never heard of it. Neither had son Zach. Well, last week the sun shone, and we made hay, and now Sophia knows the metaphoric meaning, while Zach knows the literal.
Our farm does not have a lot of hay fields. Altogether we have 6 or 7 acres, which isn’t much, but is still a lot when the hay is ready to cut, which it was last week. When we arrived at the end of May a neighbor had already cut the first round of hay, which gave us a little breathing space before the next cutting. As it happens, breathing spaces have a tendency to run out of breath before you know it, which is pretty much what happened to us. This was not a matter of being distracted, or lazy, however. There is this problem of equipment…
When I was a kid, I occasionally worked for a neighboring farmer bringing his hay in. That meant that I lounged around the barn until he showed up with his self-loading hay wagon. Then I humped it for 20 minutes or so until the bales were all stacked in the hay mow. Then I sat around for another 15 or 20 minutes until he came back with another load. Before that, haying meant somebody driving the tractor, somebody on the haywagon stacking the bales and someone (or ones) on the ground, throwing bales onto the wagon.
Before I return to the mechanisms of haying – the descriptions of which were so clearly interrupted by weeks of other things – I want to mention one serious impediment. At least it is an impediment to farmers, and that is the weather.
I first developed a real dislike of tv weathermen last year when we lived in Rhode Island. I was growing a medium-sized garden and that became harder to manage as a serious summer drought turned very serious, then deadly serious. The Providence weatherman prattled on and on about what a great day (or days, or weeks) it was to go to the beach, since the sun rarely failed to shine. I, in the meantime, bought extra hoses to extend irrigation to the garden, and hoped for rain, and cursed the glib weatherman (in my soul).
But now back to haying. Haying is the process of turning overgrown hayfields into useful fodder for grass-eating animals during the winter. To the suburban eye a hayfield looks like nothing more than an abandoned plot of ground, growing up to weeds and whatnot. While there are generally a lot of weeds in hayfields, if things are going well, there are also a lot more useful plants.
Haying – successful haying – requires that weather and the plants come together in a reasonable way. You can’t make hay in the rain, so when your good hay (around here mostly grasses: Timothy and Orchard) is ready to cut, you need three or four days of reasonably certain good weather. In a place where the typical summer weather forecast is for ‘partly sunny and warm with a good chance of afternoon thundershowers,’ that can be hard to line up. So you watch the weather forecast, and cut while the weather is good. And worry that the weatherman might be wrong. Because once you have cut hay you are committed. You can’t go back and undo what you have done, so you have to hope-worry-and pray that things will work out as they should.
That is why haying time is one of the two stressful periods in our farming life. (The other is kidding season, but I will get to that in the winter.)
For both the 2nd and the 3rd cuttings we were successful this year. We cannot take credit for the success, however; we just did what had to be done. In 2016 the drought in western North Carolina was so bad that farmers didn’t even cut their hay. When I looked at what is now our farm in July, 2016, I walked across fields that crunched under my feet. This year I waded through green grass.
To be continued…