Bramblings: Summer Wind-down

By Becky Nelson
Bramblings
The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity here at the farm. Trying to take advantage of the extra hands our high school helper provides, we have been picking, pruning, cleaning out past plantings and finally, making a little hay as summer winds down.

For all those folks with a backyard goat, sheep or horse, this is going to be a very rough time to find enough locally-made feed to take care of critters. We have just barely been able to contact the first of our hay customers on the list to provide some hay for her horses for winter. The seemingly endless days of rain and wet have taken a toll on production, and most of us farmers with herds of cattle or barns with horses need to make enough feed for our own animals first.

Haying here at the farm was tough early on. Most of our equipment is old…some of it fifty years old or so. We had a couple major breakdowns in our first round of making hay bales, and were forced to buy some replacement equipment. Though our “new” equipment is old, too, we still have gained a couple decades in our modernity. For the first time at the farm, we are making a few round bales. We were thrilled with the success and ease of use of our new baler, and have a few round bales tucked away for the winter months for our beef cattle. We bought a “new” square baler as well, and have made some square bales for our regular list of customers and those that drop by the store for a bale or two at a time. For this, we are thankful and appreciative that Mother Nature gave us a run of a few days to make hay while the sun shone. We are woefully behind in hay production, however, and are holding out hope for some dry weather to come in the next month or so.

Part of our focus has been on pruning the raspberry patch. We had a tremendous crop of raspberries this year, but still were down on berries picked by almost a third, hitting us with some tight times. The rain, the mold and the discouraging weather for you-pickers put a damper on our returns for the long hours of work put into the field, and sends us into the fall with a bit of trepidation. Having lost our apples to the late freeze, we are heading into fall with no you-pick crop. We are hopeful that the pumpkins will come along, but they, too, are very far behind. The fields were too wet and cold to plant when they should have been planted, then the endless rains set the plants back and may have a detrimental impact on production on that front as well.

I still am thankful, not having lost full fields of produce to flooding as some of our neighbors near the river have done. But it still hurts. Unlike most producers of products who occasionally have glitches due to supply line disruptions or labor challenges, we farmers have these challenges as well as the most unpredictable challenge…Mother Nature. I cannot describe the difficulty of farming without making it sound like an insane career to ever pursue. The rewards for us have never been monetary. We farm because we are farmers. It gets in your mind and your heart and under your fingernails and to leave farming is the hardest choice a person can make.

I pray that our New England farmers can hang on. This year has been so very difficult that I will be surprised if some don’t throw in the towel. I pray not, but farmers have to make a living, too. To help support your local food sources, I urge all of you to make regular trips to the farmstands around you. Buy local meats. Buy local fruits. Buy local produce. Please help your neighbors who are making food by buying local.