Hay.
It's either too hot or too cold. Either too dry or too wet. There are good years and bad years, and in the skimpy years, prices rocket. We, thus, have always attempted to grown our own. With all the hazards that involves. This year, the hazards included a month of November during which it hardly stopped raining. Our 4 acres of dedicated hay grass grew and grew ... the haymakers' diary got all his November work crammed into December, along with December's work .... and still it rained. And the grass began to (over)-ripen ...
New Year's day dawned bright and sunny, and hallelujah! mid-afternoon the haymaker rolled down our drive ... I was having my post-prandial snooze, so I missed the action ... by the time I emerged: acres of thickly mown hay!
Surely one of our most sizeable crops ever!
January 2nd: 30 degrees! A perfect hay-drying day ... now two or three more like this, then it can rain all like likes... leaving us with only one problem ...
Will it all fit in the barn!
Postscriptum: It will. But only if we take EVERYTHING else out! Last midnight the sounds of the baler were heard, coming down the drive, and by 2am the baler-fairy had magicked the cut hay into ninety-six big, square bales. The monstrosity of that feat will be understood when I say that in seventeen years of haymaking, the most the those meadows have yielded was, I think, forty-eight! And that in the days when we had over thirty race horses. Now we have ten elderly munchers ...
And the end of the haystory ...
The apprentice haymaker carting hay
And there it is ... our all-time record crop. No hungry horsies this winter!!
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