Country diary: Make hay while the sun shines? That can be tricky in Cumbria

At least three days of hot, sunny weather are needed to make hay, and good weather is often in short supply in Cumbria. We had been watching our weather apps avidly, and a window appeared. The grass had grown long enough to make hay, the seed had set and there were no nesting birds in the fields, so it was all systems go.

My son had mown the grass and “scaled it out” each day. As the grass is turned and tedded, the seeds can return to the meadow. The sheep’s hooves will trample in the seed and help it germinate to revive the meadow. Unfortunately, the starter motor had gone on the tractor – all our equipment is secondhand, and most of it very old – and I was queueing at the engineer’s parts counter when my son phoned to say that it was raining on the side of Blencathra where he was shepherding, and he was going to race home to get the hay in.

Getting the grass cut, scaled out, rowed up, baled and stored in the barn is one of the biggest and most important jobs of the year. When I arrived home with the part, four friends from my son’s Young Farmers’ Club were helping and had already borrowed a neighbour’s tractor. We are delightfully old-fashioned in this valley; if someone needs to borrow something or needs help to do a job, it is never a problem. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a good farming community to get the hay in when it starts raining.

The bales were getting slightly damp, so they were put into the cowshed and spread out to dry. It will take a week or so, but they will be fine. They can then be stacked in our 18th-century barn until we need them to feed sheep and goats over the winter. The scent of the hay is overwhelming in the farmyard. As soon as you open the farmhouse door, the smell hits you. Usually after haymaking, everyone is so hot and scratched that we jump in the river. This year, everyone was damp, so it was cups of tea for the Young Farmers before they went to play in a football match at Great Asby in the Westmorland Dales.

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