Make Hay while the sun shines!

All over northern Europe farmers and smallholders play Cat and Mouse with the weather every year, to ensure they have sufficient hay to feed their livestock through the winter.

Here in northern france, we are blessed with a long and glorious summer season, but, like other ’green and pleasant’ lands, whilst the intermittent, and often heavy, summer rain makes that grass grow, it can also ruin it!   A shower does little harm, but once you’ve cut and turned, heavy rain can wash out most of the goodness and reduces palatability to ‘fussier’ animals, and baling when damp causes mouldy forage with all the inherent problems and lung diseases to stock and man.  Incorrectly dried,  stored hay can potentially cause a fire in your barn from internal combustion as it ferments.  So depending on how much land and helpers you have to hay, you need a good  4 to 5 days of fine drying weather to bring it all home in best condition.

Our closest neighbour Pierre, (known affectionately to us, but not to him, as ’Reg’ due to his surname being Perrin!)  who is an excellent judge of weather, far more accurate than any ’meteo’, kept telling us to wait until ‘the weekend’, as, despite glorious tv forecasts, he was sure of heavy rain.   Whilst  another neighbour who cuts, turns and ‘roundbales’ over 15 hectares more or less singlehandedly, had already cut and twice turned, over half of it!

We had to drive a middle line, as the kind new english friends that gave permission to hay their otherwise redundant fields were keen to clear one large area for family camping and garden use, and persisted in getting it cleared.   So we cut, but did not turn, just this amenity area of about half an hectare, and crossed everything that Reg would’ve got it wrong!

Old farmers are NEVER wrong of course, and it chucked it down for five solid days.  It was that same week that Spain and Russia were on the news as suffering devastating floods.

As ours had not been turned, despite the impatience of the landowner, due to a warm winds and sunshine it fortunately still dried ok and with made serviceable hay, (although the horses would probably turn their noses up!) and of course, we still had the lions share to cut.  The following week was glorious and showed temperatures of over 35°C,. It was exhausting to work in, but we did it, with the help of good friends, and are now stocked to the gunnels with sweet smelling winter feed!……..Andrés on the other hand, is now dried and roundbaled but still standing in the fields, with the green of new growth surrounding it….he isn’t a happy bunny, but tells me that his cows will still eat it….”they will eat anything Susie!“ .   You may have seen the photo in a previous article of our old and very serviceable Fordson Major tractor?  Well,  an ‘absolute bargain’, as Pete assured me, came up from a french friend who loves collecting and running ‘old motors’ as much as he does!

It had sat at the back of an old haybarn for years, was dirty but not too rusty, had two good back tyres, a three point linkage, turned over straight off, and demonstrated immense speed around the vendors field, if a bit noisy from a cracked exhaust. The wiring and lights actually looked fitter than the old fordson which is of similar vintage!

Of course, we had to have it, two tractors are better than one at haymaking time, and the ‘olduns’ are the best!   Well for all you tractor buffs, its a Renault 72,  1957 with a 2 cylinder air cooled Deutz engine, and I have to admit that it really is rather bargain!

It isn’t heavy enough to pull our International small baler, but pulling the turner was easy…..its therefore been now been christened ‘Turner’ by Andy who drove it to this task!    It also manages to pull our farm trailer up quite a steep hill to the fields, an absolute boon in the winter to take hay to the horses.

Of course the first job after it had proved its worth on the hay track,  was a fresh coat of  traditional bright orange paint, its only other requirement being a repaired exhaust and a jolly good service!

Meanwhile, a very expensive brand new ‘garden tractor’ bought to cut an acre of garden by an english friend, has broken down three times in the last month, and whilst his grass grows, the dealer makes excuses and assures him its top of the range!

The busy season of fruit picking, jam and chutney making is now upon us!  We have four mature desert cherry trees which yield boxes and boxes of three varieties of cherry.   Kilos of these will be made into jam and soused in alcohol to restore the cupboards for winter, but we do a good job of keeping the wide variety of birdlife in fresh fruit for several weeks, as we just cant reach the top of the trees!

The veg plot gets healthier every year, but the weeding still beats me after prolonged periods of heavy rain.   The shallots are ready to be picked and pickled, and the new potatoes are yielding a really good clean crop this year, thanks to repeated manuring over the last three winters.  Our soil is rather acid, which they like, but when we arrived there was a heavy build up of pests and diseases.  Thanks to chicken and duck ranging in the ‘dead months’ have been brought under acceptable control without resorting to too much chemical control, and of course the fowl love the opportunity to be of help!