The weather, oh, and of course the hay

As you will not have managed to miss, we were in the process of making hay last week.

As most of you will know you require dry weather to make hay, so I was keeping an eye on the weather forcast. Rain was due this past weekend, but a quick check on the internet on Wednesday showed that that prediction was brought forward to Friday or possibly Thursday.

This of course left a dilema, do we play on the safe side and get the hay in on Wednesday, and then be left with very "Fresh" hay to deal with inside, or do we risk leaving it till Thursday evening when the hay will have had an extra day to dry outside but we may risk it being ruined by rain.

We decided Wednesday was the evening and, as shown, duly loaded up the trailer and karted the hay inside. This left us with a trailer full of heavily compact, slightly damp hay and due to the early harvest no where to put it as the space allocated to it had not been tidied and prepared. Since then we have prepared the area for the hay (with pallets covering the floor to allow some air to circulate under) and bit by bit emptied the trailer trying to ensure that all the hay is fully dry before is buried. It would be terrible to find that next year, when we come to use the hay for one of our planned livestock projects it has gone mouldy and is unusable.

This whole experience has evoked some new feelings and learnings in me.

Firstly, on the hay. There was something special about what could be described as our first large harvest (all be it small by many standards). When I say large, I mean something that you need a large trailer to collect. Sure it is probably lower value, easier and less work than the wonderful harvests of potatoes, onions, chilli peppers, tomatoes and so on that we were obtaining from our kitchen garden during our last years in Cumbria, but there was something different about this. I guess that this was a part of farming. Here am I, a well qualified, well paid (well not bad anyway), responsible engineer and what gets my mind going.... Feeling like a farmer. Can someone explain that, I'm not sure I can.

Now, on the weather. How does it effect your life. Is it a pain because you get wet, or maybe, too hot in your office and so on. Hardly going to ruin your day, or your year. Here, it has been very dry and very hot for a good number of weeks, lovely weather, if your going to the beach. But when you speak to the people growing the crops, the people who feed us and make a living out of doing it, it's been too dry. The crops have grown weak due to the lack of water, and now this weekends, long overdue, heavy rain has been too much for some of these crops and entire fields are flattenned as though a steamroller has run riot. Now that would ruin your year. For me the weather has been an inconvinience, maybe set the veg garden back a bit, but for some it really does make the difference between sucess and failure, income or no payment for the years work.