Jul 2
Making Hay!
Posted in Farming Techniques The Weather , Farm Machinery by David Wilson
We've mown some grass and started tedding it (spreading it around to get the sun on it). Although the weather is not completely settled it's good enough to risk knocking some grass down. We mow it with the doors on the mower open which means the grass lies flat on the ground, then you give it a day or two and you turn it once or twice a day until you've got hay. Just before you bale it, you use a rake to get it into a nice neat row. It's a pretty sight if the sun shines, but it's a horrible sight if it rains as it all goes black. If that happens we can wrap it up and make silage which has a lot of advantages in terms of the short time it takes to make - a couple of days or even less.
You need a good five days to a week to make hay, but it depends on the intensity of the sunshine. The old saying, ‘You need to put sunshine into your bales' is very true. If you get cloud cover for a couple of days it can slow things right up. If it does look as though it will be wet sooner than we thought we may bale the grass early and wrap it as silage. However, we're trying to make less of it because it uses lots of plastic to wrap it. It is a useful option to have though and it can also be stored outside which is an advantage. A big bale of silage weighs half a tonne, the same size bale of hay weighs less than a half of that. We probably make 500 - 600 bales of hay each summer which we store in a barn.
