One of the tell-tale signs of summer is putting up hay.
The Farmer woke up one cool, cloudy morning and decided that he was going to
start cutting hay. The weatherman made a prediction of low clouds but no rain,
and The Farmer believed him.
Not me...I had often been duped into believing that the weatherman could
actually predict the weather here in Missouri, and had finally come to the
conclusion that whatever was reported on TV was never what was going to happen.
So being the “supporting” wife, I informed The Farmer that if he
insisted on cutting hay on a day when every physical sign pointed to a wet
weekend that I would emphatically say, "I told you so”, when he was raking
up wet hay.
Fortunately, The Farmer was right (must be farmer intuition). He pressed on,
even under the pressure of low lying clouds and an unyielding spouse, and was
able to get the first field cut, tethered, raked, and baled before the rain
came.
Cutting grasses while they are young and tender is best because the
nutritional value is at its peak. It also makes more tender and tasty hay
during the winter months (so I’ve been told).
The ideal time to cut hay is on a clear, warm, summer day, but sometimes
that’s not possible, so The Farmer tethers the hay to dry it out faster. A
tether machine picks up the hay and scatters it around to allow the hay to
aerate. This step isn’t always necessary during really nice weather (just sayin’).
After the hay is cured, it is raked into windrows and then baled.
We stack our hay and then cover it with a tarp. This
is the first field and the first cutting. It really looks like a good year for
hay, which is encouraging, because we had to buy a lot
of our hay last year because of the drought.
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