This has been quite a funny summer weather-wise.
In fact, I have been really grateful many times this summer that I am not currently trying to farm a market garden, because the little garden we have this year is floundering miserably! I can't imagine having thousands of pounds of veggies due to go out with the weather we have been having!
We have had tons of rain and not a lot of heat. It has been pretty hard to get much hay made at all!
Haying Round One was at our place. We got a couple hundred square bales off the fields and saved the rest of the land for pasture for when the cows come home. In hindsight, all the grass we hayed has come back beautifully so we could have hayed everything and still had pasture. Every year is a learning year!
Round Two was when we hayed half of our leased fields. We got just enough sun to make about 70 acres of hay, with a bit of rain on the last small field we cut, but thats ok, we like to have bedding hay for calving time too.
We were really impressed because we fertilized these fields in the spring. So far, we are set to double the amount of hay we got last year when we didn't fertilize.
This haying has been such a whirlwind. I don't think I have ever seen Matt so tired before. He would get up at 5:00am, and go early to his day job, get off at 10:00am, go hay until evening dew and then go to the pastures and fix fences/try to repair the water system. It was peppered with mechanical breakdowns, threatening weather and exhaustion, and some how he still made bits of time for his family.
Quite the man. That is the definition of Handsome in my books.
He kept this up for a week when the weather changed.
There is such an urgency to haying time, that it plays out like a nail biting adventure story, but the stakes are a little more real for the farmers. I would love to take time to share it all but I am a busy momma these days!
Round Three has begun and is hopefully not going to be quite as much of a marathon for him because he is able to take time off of his day job this time!
