Make Hay While the Sun Shines--we did it

The farming endeavor. As October wore on, I began to wear out.

Every day, hours of physical work—just what I asked for! Still harvesting all month, crops still grew, carrots, kale, collards, broccoli—even tomatoes and peppers until October 20^th at least, because we arduously covered them for the first frost in September. (We’ve got to invent a spiffier way, a thoroughly pre-thought-out way, of covering plants. Old sheets and crumbling wire contraptions just won’t do.) Digging potatoes, garlic, onions—a treat to dig all the successful root crops (something hideous got the carrots and deformed them in scary ways). The potatoes taste incredibly good. Drying winter squash on a tarp on the lawn. Drying garlic and onions: I put them on screens on sawhorses upstairs in the shed where it’s dry and warm (though I had to sneak around very jealous and nasty hornets up there); the old-wood warmth of that obscure shed space is old-Vermont evocative and I felt the abundance as hops replace the dried onions and garlic which got sent to the root cella with the bushels of potatoes.

I realized that scads of mulch would have made my year a lot easier. So we prepared for a satisfying quantity of mulch for next year. And with the time that will be freed up next year, there will be just more and better farming to do...still so much to learn.

Onion sets need loads of hay as soon as they’re planted in early May. The hops need it now—they’re perennial. Winter squashes need it, strawberries, all the things we put out there in the crop field and leave to grow on their own. But also the in-garden tenderer things, carrots and garlic, broccoli and such need it. (And the sea-roses I got from an old Swiss woman who also makes a nutritious green powder from the edible weeds that grow in her yard: plantain, lamb’s quarters, dandelion, pigweed, maybe some others I’ve forgotten. She got us eating these things last June, but then our garden came in and we turned up our noses at them. It’s a spring thing, wild greens, like cowslips, also known as marsh marigolds, you know? Mark’s mother grew up eating cowslips, and she would serve them to her kids in early spring, the practice a holdover from the days when you could not get green things in early spring and you got what you found. Oh, are they bitter! Yecch! A huge patch of them grows in the wet spot I see from my library window beyond the little field by the big apple tree. We will not be eating them again. At least I hope not! We will keep loving their brilliant gold flowers in the April bog, though. Although that’s where Mark is planning on putting the pond—I’ll move them if the pond goes in.)

So in early October, we made hay to use for next year’s mulch. Beautiful days in a string fostered our work. Mark mowed a half-acre of one of our little fields and next day we set out with our rakes and optimism. The way hay was made before machines came along is to rake the long grass you’ve scythed into rows called windrows. Then you move along the windrow with a pitchfork and a wagon and pitch it in. Then you drive the wagon below the hay window up in the barn loft and someone operates the big hook pulley and lowers the two big hooks like pincers into the wagon and grabs up a big hunk of hay. Up it goes, into the window. Someone pulls the hooks in, and the pulley man keeps pulling, making them ride along a rail over the loft floor until they reach the end, where they drop the hay. Hunk by hunk that loft fills up until it becomes that legendary place of strewn, comfortable hay where children leap and teenagers lose their virginity.

About sixty or seventy years ago, they invented bailers. Our neighbors have and still use a bailer, and they did it here for us in ’09. It looks like a large blue metal box which your tractor drags over the windrows (that you had raked into place with your tractor-pulled rake). It sucks up the hay and spits out bales which fly out a chute into the air and fall into the yellow hay-wagon at the end of the little train: tractor, bailer, wagon, red, yellow, blue. It’s great to watch it. Of course now, bigger machines make wider windrows that are rolled into huge balls and encased in white plastic and placed at the edge of the field: the giant marshmallows of modern farms. This is indeed better, you need no huge storage space. You do need bigger equipment and a fork-lift to move the marshmallows. That white plastic technique has also taken over the silage, as you probably have seen. The enormous white worms you might have seen, lying in the back of barns, are filled with silage. The cornfields that border us to north and south were harvested by a big combine in mid-October to make the stuff that goes into the worm. The huge machine looks like it’s two stories tall though it’s probably not; it grinds its way into the fields and mows the corn down, chewing up stalks, corn and all and spewing out the bits into a very large wagon. That’ll be your silage. I don’t know exactly how they blow it into the worm—maybe the worm is like a long balloon. Perhaps you know that the sweetness of the corn cobs ferments it. It gets moist and molasses-y, but as it goes in, it looks as dry and unappetizing as wood chips. Cows love it. I don’t know, though, if pure hay is ultimately better for them. I haven’t learned much about cows yet, though we owe the beauty of Vermont to the cows. We owe them, so I will be learning more about them. Right now, the Armstrong brothers have put some of their herd on their November grazing land, right out our north windows. Pastoral beauty, green fields against fall skies, with cows.

Mark’s and my hay? We found our rakes could not move through the cut grass very well, so we mowed again. “We,” because this was the day I finally learned to use the tractor. Fun! Really fun; no wonder Mark’s on it every chance he gets. It’s easy, too. It made the hay much easier to rake. We let it dry another day, then we went again to the field with optimism. After about six hours, (phew) we had raked our half-acre into five windrows. (Think of them having to scythe it first in the old days,…we are soft!) Next day, we did indeed get pitchforks and toss it into the wagon which we moved around with the tractor. Amazingly thirsty work, haying. And then—we left it in the wagon. That simple. It’s just mulch hay, it doesn’t need protection. And we had a hay ride for some friends, which felt like a big triumph somehow. We’ll dump it when Mark figures out how to use that dump trailer we bought last spring—its new identity is “the wagon.” The word changed naturally. Wagons are for farms.

Love, Josie