Our second round of haying has begun, and I am back to obsessively checking the weather! With the days getting a little shorter all the time I feel like we are in a race against the clock to get all of our fields cut and baled. Every moment of sun counts right now. Unlike the “dawn ’till dusk” schedule of our June round of haying, second cut fits the same amount of work into bankers hours. We wait (im)patiently until the fog burns off and the night’s dew dries before heading out to fluff the hay, the we race around baling until the late afternoon shadows start creeping into the edges of the field. All the while, I am checking the written forecast, the pictorial forecast, the radar and the occasional visitor for news of what the sky will bring us. Sun, please!!!
On the plus side, the shorter daily haying window gives us plenty of time to harvest the scads of tomatoes that are ripening in the greenhouse right now! The stretch of sunny weather has also offered the opportunity to cure our storage onions in the field, rather than spreading them over every horizontal indoor surface of the farm for a week! So, if you’ve been in the habit of doing rain dances lately, kindly hold off for the time being. We’ll call on you after we’ve spread our fall cover crop seed in the next few weeks!
Until then, on the harvest!