Lest we forget, it was snowing in April. But it’s got to July and it feels like forever since it last rained. The stream bed dried up completely, so the pipes no longer run water out to the sheep and I’m shipping buckets up to them every couple of days. At least we got them shorn in June, and I managed to rework some fencing to give them a bit more shade.
A couple of weeks ago the roads were alive with tractors moving hay. The first one I saw, I thought it was a weird time to be feeding anything hay, then I realised that it was being taken off the fields to be put into barns rather than taken to livestock. I went up the hill to help a friend out getting his bales in. It was slightly less hot than the day before and the day after, and across the valley there were tractors working their way across the fields, baling. In normal years, haymaking is a frantic attempt to cut and dry the grass before it rains, but this year the grass has fried in the fields, and my friend ended up baling it up a day earlier than he’d initially intended. He said the bales were much lighter than in the years he’s done it in late August. We worked all afternoon, three of us including his wife, and then we retired to the pub for a quick refreshment before the football.
In the days of yore, they say this was a job for the whole community, with everyone hustling together to get the hay inside before it rained. It still feels like being connected, even if it’s a smaller scale affair – the trailers on the roads, the sound of machinery ringing down the valley all serves to remind you that the same work is being done in farms across the country.
Coda: Fortunately, we’re quite high up so whilst the water is a bit of a problem, the grass is still fine. Some of the lowland farms seem to have found their grass has stopped growing in the heat, so whilst they’ve cut hay in June, they’re now having to feed it to their animals in July.