Gone Haywire

Becky Nelson
Bramblings
I am confused. My body is confused. Just a few days ago, I had the air conditioner cranked to its highest to escape the muggy heat that sat in the upper 80s and low 90s. I was still wearing long sleeves and large-brimmed hats to stay out of the sun in the last week of my Lyme Disease treatment, and it was miserable. I felt like I was under water between the evaporating rain ponds and the humidity in the air.

Earlier this week, the morning felt like fall. The thermometer outside the kitchen window sits at 46 degrees, a forty degree swing from just a couple of days ago. I don’t know whether to wear shorts, wear pants and wool socks, or crawl back into bed and pretend none of this happened. I hear the weather is supposed to warm back up and the humidity return, with rain. More rain. More cussed rain.

It just doesn’t seem fair that all it seems to do is rain, but I remember praying for rain last year at this time as the soil cracked and the crops withered under the relentless sun and heat. From what I understand, global warming, climate change or whatever you want to call the newest patterns in our weather will see more extremes as the planet and the oceans warm and the weather patterns we find “normal” are nowhere to be found. I do feel blessed that we have had no wildfires and no floods in our immediate area, and I try not to whine about the weather. I have absolutely no control over the weather, and it leads to great frustration. I worry about the warming oceans, with coral dying and bleaching and warm-climate fish now finding their way north to escape the bathtub temperatures. The oceans are where hurricanes are spawned, and we in the northeast are certainly not immune to an occasional hurricane. But worry gets me nowhere, and I try to keep my attitude positive and my mind active to think of ways to adapt even while the weather has gone haywire.

One of the crops hardest hit at the farm this year is hay. We make quite a bit of hay in a year, and have several “regular” customers who feed their horses, goats and llamas with our hay. Maybe not this year. By this time of year, we are usually making what is called “second cut” hay. First cut is what we make in late June and early July, and like the lawn it grows back and we harvest it a second time. This year, we haven’t had nice stretches of weather long enough to make all of our first cut hay, let alone second cut. Not only has the weather been awful, but the ground under the hayfields is like a soggy sponge in some areas, and we can’t get a tractor on the land without making muddy ruts. Hay certainly isn’t going to dry when cut in a swamp.

Folks with hay-eating critters should be concerned. There is some hay around, but it is not going to last long before someone scoops it up. We haven’t released much of what we have made, keeping it in reserve for our own cattle before we let any go,

So, in the pursuit of hay, we dropped some stalks this week as the weather was promised to be good. It didn’t dry as quickly as we hoped as the skies were cloudier, the mornings more dewy than anticipated, and the ground underneath, as I mentioned, is soggy. We finally had things dry in the morning Thursday, so we raked it up and started baling. The baler conked out in the middle of the harvest, and we had to resurrect a retired baler made in the 1960s to finish the task. Thank goodness the old girl had it in her to finish the job, and we got about 100 bales tucked in the barn. This is nowhere near what it will take to feed our small beef herd through the winter, but it’s a start. We are hoping for more stretches of dry weather coming soon so we can make more hay while the sun shines. And that sun has been a wily recluse thus far this summer.