A Tuesday Hay Day

Ah... there's something so satisfying about cutting hay. Tonight I sit here tonight thinking about all that beautiful lush clover wilting and hopefully *fingers crossed* drying in the field, waiting to be raked tomorrow. Haying is one of those things that makes me feel like a real farmer. It's the kind of farming tasks that makes me feel connected to thousands of years of agricultural traditions. The only comparable experience that I've had has probably been digging potatoes in the rain. Even though I know potatoes didn't make it into my ancestral agricultural traditions until after Columbus, it still makes me feel transported to a time when a successful potato crop meant the world to a small farmer.

Haying is a tricky thing. You have to find a window of three days where the sun shines hot and bright enough to cure your fresh grass into dried hay that won't spoil in your barn. This is not an easy thing to find in the Northeast, where the weather changes at the drop of a hat. Even if your weather forecast says sunny and hot, a quick rainstorm at just the wrong moment can ruin your whole cutting. Not only will damp hay grow mold that will make your animals sick if you feed it to them, it's also said that hay that is too wet will decompose and produce methane, causing barn fires... although there has been some speculation among our staff that this old farming wisdom might just be a rumor started by irresponsible farm hands. "What? I don't know how the barn lit on fire! I bet the hay was just too wet... (I mean, it couldn't have anything to do that cigarette I lost while I was giving your daughter a tumble in the hay... what?)..."

Already once this summer we've lost our hay to mold. Our first batch of hay got drizzled on as we were raking it up onto the wagon. About a week after we triumphantly unloaded all that hay into the barn, the sweet, fresh smell suddenly turned musty and we ended up dumping it all outside in a sad pile to make room for our next cutting. Fortunately, it's being put to good use in our lower acre, keeping the weeds down in our beds of winter squash... my favorite vegetable.

I'm optimistic about this batch of hay however. Today, the farming gods seemed to be on our side. Bill and Lou were beautifully behaved all day, performing tight turns with ease. Except for a brief but exciting ride on a runaway mowing machine, the day went off without a hitch and we managed to cut the last of our "first cutting."

The July "Catch-Up"

I started off my season at Cerridwen Farm with so many plans. Back in May I remember professing that I would make cheese every other day, learn to spin, stay on top of all the weeding, read a hundred different books on sheep health and plant breeding, create an experimental garden, go contra dancing every other weekend... and of course, write this blog. Now it's nearly July and except for a few chapters of Gary Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat and three batches of mozzarella, I've checked none of those lofty goals off my summer to-do list.

But hope is not lost, for the month of July is the ideal "catch-up" time in farming. Sandwiched between the rush of spring and early summer planting and the explosion of produce in August, it's the perfect time for building bunny hutches, mending hoses, and other non-urgent projects (as well as some much needed off-farm diversions). It should be interesting to see how many of those July plans turn into winter projects or things to shoot for next season. Is the idea of staying on top of things on the farm really such an impossible dream?

Today seems like a fitting day to start my sojourn into the blogging world. I spent the majority of my day sitting inside on the computer instead of outside in the drizzly muggy mess because I managed to pull a very important muscle pretty badly over the weekend. This experience definitely taught me that I should be a bit more careful with myself. If I want to be doing this long term, I've got to take care of the body I've got. I only get one. The day of office work also reminded me that there's quite a lot more to running a farm besides the obvious planting, cultivating, and harvesting. There's marketing, managing, researching, organizing, recording... it's these things that make a farm into a business. And you know what, today I even learned that I'm okay with that. Who would have though office work could feel like a nice little break?