HAY SEASON ON THE FARM

June is a paradox for children who grew up on farms. It heralds the end of the school year when there are no more books, no more homework, and no more long bus rides winding through the rural backroads ten times a week. It is also a month when the hard work on a farm gets even harder.

June is haying season. It’s a time when hot summer days bring temperatures in the 90s, and farm kids work a job that’s hard, dusty, and endless.

Outside, mowers clatter along in the fields slicing swaths of sweet smelling clover, timothy, fescue and other grasses to be dried in the sun. Later, the hay is raked into fluffy windrows and collected and hauled to the barn’s haymow, pronounced “haymau” with the “mow” rhyming with “cow.”

Before we owned a baler, we collected our loose hay onto an old flatbed milk truck pulling a hay loader. As the dried hay was swept up onto the truck bed in an endless ribbon, Dad spread it evenly around until it reached a heaping full load. Often he let out a sharp whistle to the driver to stop while he pitched out a snake who took a free ride up with the hay. A whistle would also ensue when part of—or an entire—load slid off the bed on a steep hillside with him sailing along with it.

When fully loaded without mishap, the truck was pulled into the haymow where a two-tined hayfork on a track running along the barn’s peak was dropped by a pulley and rope and inserted in the hay. Pulled back up by another rope, the hay bundle slid up and along the rail to be tripped and dumped at the proper location in the barn’s loft.

The words mowing away hay to a farm kid's ears will bring a series of grunts, groans and weary-sounding expletives as a retort. On a hot day, mowing hay meant tearing apart the big heap of hay with a pitchfork and spreading it out to all corners of the loft. The mow was often several temperatures higher than outside. This exhausting, sweltering task went on again and again until the truck bed was empty. 

I often mowed hay for my dad. And I can truly say, I uttered a relieved sigh each time the last forkful was dumped, spread, and I could escape the itchy hayseeds and broiling heat to get a cold drink. Then it was back to the hayfield to do it all over again, constantly searching the bright sky for the smallest hint of rain—the farmer’s worst enemy during haying season. 

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CELEBRATING BARN DAY – July 10th

The second Sunday in July is designated “barn day,” when the importance of barns in the farming communities in the United States is observed. Barns are historically the center of the farm, built to accommodate animals, grain, hay, and equipment. The word barn originates from the Old English word for ‘bere,’ or barely, and ‘aem,’ which means storage space.

           Throughout our lands, there are many different types and styles of barns, built and designed to reflect the type of farming that occurred there. In northeastern Pennsylvania, where I grew up, our dairy barn was a bank barn which meant it was built into a bank allowing for easy ground access to both the upper and lower floors. The upper floors accommodated haylofts where first loose hay and then baled hay were stored for the cattle housed on the lower floor.      

          Most barns in northeastern Pennsylvania were constructed of hemlock, a very hardy wood which seasons to a light gray color. The eastern hemlock is the state tree of Pennsylvania and large, plentiful stands existed in the 1800s.

        By design, our barn was fashioned after a design called the Dutch Barn with its hip or gambrel roof which had two symmetrical slopes on two sides, with the lower slope steeper than the upper one. However, the barn itself was more rectangular, like the English and German barns, and the broad expansive side had wide doors on tracks that opened and allowed for wagons to enter directly into hay loft, making unloading the hay load easier.                                            

How did they get the hay into the barn? A long rail or track ran along the inside length of the roof, from peak to peak, and accommodated a double harpoon hay fork, pulleys, and trip rope. Once the fork, with its two giant tines, was secured into a bundle of hay, a horse—and later a tractor—pulled the stack of hay up and onto the track. After delivering it to the proper location, a yank on an attached rope would trip the hay fork to release its load. I often worked the mow. Using a pitch fork, I dragged layers of hay to the far corner and edges of the loft to even it out.

         Because we found newspapers from the Civil War, used as insulation in the attic, we knew the barn was built before 1861. However, we also knew the Irish Potato famine of 1845-49, brought many skilled Irish immigrants looking for work when they arrived in the United States. It was said they went from farm to farm, seeking shelter and food—and in return, cleared stone from fields and built the stonewalls in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We have many of these sturdy walls still standing on our property.

So what do you do on Barn Day? Why not take a ride in the country and go looking for old barns? They are a disappearing structure on our rural landscape as the farming industry has slowly faded over the years and the barn buildings have gone to disrepair. 

  

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HAYING SEASON ON THE FARM

July has arrived this year after a blistering June which ended with temperatures in the 90s. Growing up on a farm, the muggy nights and heat waves during the day were part of farm life.

The scorching summer weather meant it was haying season. It meant that farm kids had the hot, sticky job of handling and storing those prickly rectangles of bound hay, tied with twine and full of itchy hayseeds, called bales. There is a particular smell to a haying operation. It’s the inviting sweet scent of dried clover and other grasses, tinged with the scent of gasoline from farm equipment. The work is hard and tiresome. We handled hundreds of bales kicked out from a baler, pulled by our Farmall C tractor.

If we were lucky, the baler was hitched to the tractor and the hay wagon hooked behind it. We only had to pull the bales up onto the wagon bed as they popped out and stack them four layers high before hauling the load to the barn for storage. Two-string bales can weigh anywhere from 40 to 75 pounds, depending upon the type of hay, how seasoned or dry it is, and how the baler is set to compact them.

Before we owned a hay baler that fed the bales onto the wagon, they were dropped onto the ground. Then, we’d have to toss them up onto the hay wagon first before stacking and carting them away.

In the barnyard, an elevator with a chain mechanism and paddles took the bales up to the very stifling mow where they were…(wait for it)…restacked once again. If I was lucky, I had the job of feeding the elevator below in the hot sun and would get a break from working the even hotter mow. Needless to say, we all vied for that open-air spot.

My father was particular about how he wanted his hay stored. The bales had to be stacked cut-side down in the mow. I always felt we were giving more attention to this hot sticky—and somewhat finicky—stacking routine than I cared to give.

Why cut-side down? Because the strings/twine will always be on the side of the bale when you look at the stack. It is said to also deter mice from gnawing on the twine, but it also allows moisture to run down through the stack to the bottom layer. Much

later, baler twine was treated with a chemical that discouraged barn mice. I do admit, come winter, when you have to throw bales down the shoot to feed the herd below, it was easier to walk on a layer of hay uniformly stacked.

Someone once asked me if I miss summer and haying season on the farm. A friend, who’s a farm kid as well, put it more eloquently than I ever could: “Be careful of the past, it always looks better than it was.”

Here's hoping July and your summer is a good one!

 

  

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HERE COMES SUMMER..with its sights, scents, and sounds!

In June, I patiently search for the first signs of summer.

Listen closely, and you can hear the birdsong at sunrise. It’s the doves at our house who start the calliope of song if we leave our bedroom windows open. The nosy robins are back, nesting under our deck and in the rhododendron. Their first fledglings have already been booted out of the nest and intermittently (and annoyingly) squawk, calling for a parent. The brazen sparrows have also returned and have kicked the bluebirds out of their nesting box. Only one lone hummingbird visits our feeder.

Rain in June is a silver spoon as the old adage goes. It’s the month when vegetation emerges and gardens in the North are planted which will yield bountiful crops throughout the next four months and into fall. This year, my bucket garden has been watered quite often by the gray clouds hovering in the sky. I decided to change it up a bit. I’m growing some herbs: lemon thyme, rosemary, oregano, and parsley. Every year I grow a plant of basil on the patio.

The flower of June is the rose which is my favorite because of its soft, layered petals and delicate scent.

I was lucky to be born on a scorching, 90+ degree, June day—the last one of the month—right in the middle of haying season, as my Dad used to point out with a slight grumble in his voice.

When June arrives, farmers push hard during the sweltering sunny days to get a hay field cut, dried, and baled. The sweet and intoxicating scent of newly mowed grass fills the air and forces everyone near to pause and enjoy it, even if the work of cutting, baling, and storing it is hot, intense, and tiresome.

Do you have favorite sights, scents, and sounds of summer?

As poet James Russell Lowell so aptly writes about the month:

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays: 

Whether we look, or whether we listen,

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten…

                                    ~ James Russell Lowell – 1819-1891

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HELLO, APRIL!

 I’m the first to admit that I enjoy April.

April is when all the flowers from bulbs beneath the sleepy earth emerge. Daffodils, crocus, wind flowers, and small grape hyacinths bring color, scent, and life back to the flowerbeds.

I think back to my childhood and how my mother loved plants and bushes of all types. We were a  farm family, and  it was not unusual to visit a neighbor’s house and go home with a piece of a bush, or some shoots wrapped in a wet rag, or a bundle of roots tied up in a burlap feed bag. Mother always found a place to plant her treasures and nurse them to maturity. And the favor was returned when friends, relatives, and neighbors came to call and left with a clump of rhubarb or day lilies.

At the front corner of my house, I still have trumpet vines from cuttings my mother gave me decades ago. Every fall we chop them back to stubby trunks, and in the spring they explode in a flourish of leaves and blossoms that entice the hummingbirds.

In the back yard, I have a bed of rag roses from around an old stone foundation of a house built in the early 1800s and situated along a well-used route westward. Everyone always referred to the cleared, often muddy pathway as “The Old Road.”

And, my favorite from our farm is at the side of my house—a large clump of Jack in the Pulpits my mother coddled in one of her flowerbeds.

April brings back lots of good memories. It’s a time of warm days, a time to get ready for spring planting and, for those of us who like to play in the dirt, it’s a month of sheer joy.

I’ll end with a colloquialism that the farmers often used in northeastern Pennsylvania: “So long, March. Hello, April!”

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