Haircuts all round

Last week was a Festival of Cutting. Starting with getting the sheep shore at very short notice but before there was a risk of fly-strike and the other perils to which unshorn sheep are Summer hostages.

A good few years ago, we designated our four largest fields [total area 11 acres =  4½ ha.] "traditional hay meadows". Apart from making a statement in a determined voice, all that is required is keeping grazers and mowers off the meadow between 15th April and 1st July each year. The reasoning is that, because so many dicot / ungrass wild flowers blossom and set seed in that part of the early Summer, not-mowing will give a boost to biodiversity. Not only the directly affected flowering plants but any species-specific invertebrates and whatever eats / parasitises them in turn. It is quite wonderful at Solstice time to get down among the seed-heads and find orchids and forget-me-nots and clovers under the bright yellow top-storey.

Last year I trimmed the field margins of brambles and in-bleeding ferns with my scythe to encourage the mowers to get closer to the field edge. But quel désastre! the fields weren't mowed as soon as the bracken had dried off and blown away . . . they weren't mowed until October! A sorry sequence of equipment break-down, parts-unavailability, crappy weather, a dose of illness, more crappy weather, a bereavement and more rain put the hay well beyond its best-before. Indeed, a combination of spite and ignorance saw the-field-over-the-river being left unmowed at all at all. As tractorless blow-ins we are dependent on our neighbours and contractors to cut and ted and bale . . . and plough and harrow and till, come to that. 

After last year's debacle, on 1st July prompt, TB The Farrrmer  went to ask whether our most recent cutting-and-baling neighbour was up for it again. He, poor fellow, is going through the wars healthwise and is in any case downsizing as he approaches retirement. So that was a No. But within a couple of hours, possibly on account of arriving bearing cake, a new neighbourly contractor was lined up. And two days later, well after the end of any 9to5 working day [farmers, remember] a medium-to-mighty sized green tractor drove through the yard and started to fell the grass [see above L]. He finished before midnight but after we'd all gone to bed. The following evening, subcontractors with mighty-to-huge rigs came through the yard to ted [turn and gather] and bale and wrap the barely wilted grass+wildflowers:

With the tedding sprongs out-spread, the gatherer-of-windrows is almost as wide as our polytunnel but the arms fold up so that the rig can fit through a standard 12ft = 3⅔m farm gateway. If that gateway has overhanging branches, all bets are off. I was advised to trim back a rather lovely birch Betula pubescens which I had [foolishly?] planted near the gate into the Home Field. These giant machines went through that gate with a handspan to spare on each side. But, because enormous, they went about the task lickety-spit . . . not great in the corners but super-efficient on a straight run. The baler loads up two spools of wrapping plastic which are 1500 m (!) long but still heftable by one person: it's 25μm thick.

We have learned the hard soft squidgy way to insist on getting bales off the field asap after cutting. The one year we left them in a corner until they were sold / required, the getting turned that corner into a set for Passchendaele 1917 from which it never recovered. Accordingly the bales went off  that night before twilight turned to full darkness. Big sighs of relief and a glass of plonk to celebrate a timely resolution to 2024's hay problem.