letter from a small corner of far away

Dear Lynn, dear Everyone,

It’s very hot here today, and quiet after the onslaught, because two days ago we got the last of the hay in the barn. Yesterday I positioned the hay making machinery ready to push back undercover, took water to the field and moved Lucy’s electric fence so she can eat the odd bits of hay left on the ground and clear up the fence lines where the mower didn’t quite reach. Otherwise, avoiding the heat has been the order of the day, and allowing my tired muscles to recover.

In recent years, hay time here has been squeezed into a few dry days, so having over a week of clear weather ahead seems like a luxury, so hay making this time has been a relatively relaxed affair. Nonetheless, I still started early, before the weather had warmed up. I cut the first strip on Tuesday morning when the grass was damp and the morning cool, and the rest on Wednesday morning when it wasn’t quite so cool. Since mowing was going to be a one horse job this year, I deliberately chose to divide the cutting over two days, and regularly rested Lucy because the four foot six cutter bar on the no. 9 mower is a strong pull for a single horse. She still got pretty hot, so I used the watering can to cool her down in the middle of the cutting session and again when she had finished. With moderate winds and increasing temperatures, the hay started drying nicely, but because of her exertions, I left a couple of hours between finishing the cutting and yoking her up again to turn the hay. The hay was turned and tedded on Wednesday, and again on Thursday, then just turned on Friday, when, by mid afternoon, the first patch was ready to get to the barn.

When I first made hay for myself, I turned and tedded it with a horse, back when Molly was still young, but I got someone else to cut and bale with a tractor. Then I progressed to a horse drawn mower, and after a couple more years when we bought our own land, I tried stacking some of it loose outside. Although much more demanding than throwing bales about, I had worked on stacks of wheat, rye and oat sheaves, so the building of a waterproof and solid stack was not totally new. After the first success, in following years all the hay went into outside stacks. I like the changing views and the temporary agriculture architecture of the haystacks, but shoving hay in a barn is quicker and demands less skill, something which is not a given with young family members, or even amongst otherwise practical people.

Then eight years ago we built the barn, designed to incorporate a hay trolley system. This was a bit of a shot in the dark, as barn trolley systems weren’t used over here and I had no experience of them, my only knowledge coming from the SFJ and ‘Haying with Horses.’ But it seemed like a good thing to do. I made the track from scratch by welding two strips of angle iron, held apart with little bits of steel every 18 inches, through which the bolts pass to secure the track to the ridge of the barn.

The trolley and pulleys I bought from the US on ebay; they were made by the Meyers Company who probably were the most popular brand back in the day. The only missing part was the trip block, which holds the trolley in position whilst the grapple load of hay is being raised, and on the return journey, releases the trolley as it rolls back along the track once a load has been dumped in the barn. This was made of half inch thick steel, copied from a poor quality photograph, and has been the tricky bit, particularly last year when the borrowed tractor we used to pull the rope caused one strand of the rope to snap when the trip didn’t work. Leaving any remedial action too late for the first hay in June, we had to fork into the barn by hand, but soon afterwards, my son and I borrowed some scaffolding to reach the trip block high up under the projecting ridge of the barn. The problem was difficult to assess, because the trolley, carrying no weight, could be released reasonably easily, especially when the rope was pulled with a little speed or when the trolley started from the far end of the track, before the swelling in the trip block, which gives the trolley a second chance of releasing the pulley when the haul back rope is pulled a little further. But when the jaws were hard up against the part of the block which prevents the trolley from moving, a pull on the rope wouldn’t always release the jaws when the pulley reached the top. This must surely be the problem, but why? We checked the widths, that everything could move, removed the surface rust, which perhaps helped a bit, but it still wasn’t right. So I decided to change the angle of the trip block which holds the jaws. This is the part which, if it was a fishing spear, is where the barbs would be. I originally made the block with these at ninety degrees, but soon after I filed them to around 87 degrees to make less surface and therefore friction for the jaws to move against. With hope more than expectation, this year I filed just a little more metal off, so the angle is perhaps around 85 degrees now, but the pressure required for the trolley to trip is much less. Covering it with a layer of grease, it seemed to work OK, but I was fearful it could trip too easily before the hay reached the top. But after threading a new rope through the pulleys and lubricating the moving parts, it seems to have done the trick – not once did it function less than perfectly – it makes you realise how much detailed knowledge of adjustments was understood by the manufacturers of such devices a hundred odd years ago.

And so the hay is in the barn for another year. It is always a sense of relief, being the hardest work of the year and perhaps the most important, and I am certainly glad I started when I did, when the mornings were still cool, before the wall to wall sunshine of the last few days. There are plenty of others round about who cut their hay only when it was already hot, and although hot sunshine certainly is great for finishing the drying process, too much can quickly lead to bleached out, straw-like hay. Whilst tidying up this morning, picking up an odd forkful here and there which had been missed in the corners and throwing it over the fence to Molly, it seemed that most of the ’nature’ had gone out of it, as we used to say back where I come from – all the green and a good part of the nutrition. It is one reason I like to make hay loose, because it can be stored safely when containing more moisture than baled hay, keeping a bit more of the goodness.

Take care,

William

William Castle is a violin maker, farmer & SFJ contributor who lives in Shropshire, England.