The 1st of June
The first spell of dry, hot weather, and the hay harvest has begun, with every farmer in our area sharing equipment in order to get their hay safely in. Gino, of ice cream and rescue tractor fame, was one of the first to get going. In the 10 acre field at the bottom of our paddocks, the hay was cut over a week ago. It lay, exposed to the warm sun for a day, and then, at around four-thirty one afternoon, with a flurry of shouts and tractor roars, the hay-making gang arrived, parking their van in the centre not far from where we were tilling our own soil. The first piece of machinery to arrive was shaped like a spiky Ferris wheel. This shook and sifted the cut grass into tall thin rows. The gang leader did a lot of shouting at this point; clearly he wanted the rows just how they should be. Once the Ferris wheel had done its job, the tractors arrived; one pulling the box-like machine that would suck the hay up and spit it out of high funnel; one pulling a massive, open-topped crate. The two aligned and moved slowly over the field, pouring a continual stream of hay into the crates. One by one, the crates were towed out of the field, replaced by new, empty ones, ready to be filled.
Within two hours the field was shorn. They had finished well before the sun had set. For the next week, while the sun has burned down on us here, the farmers have been sharing the work of a successful hay harvest. I remember that Julius Caesar, in his famous treatise on the Britains (as he found them...Celts, we were then, Celts, are who live round me now...) stated that...they have two harvests, one in midsummer, one in later summer...This is very likely the hay and corn harvests. Although, through the centuries, the methods of collection have changed, become more streamline, the need for a barn of hay has not. The cows still need their winter fodder.
The field now looks like a skinhead whose number one went a bit wrong – a thin and patchy layer of green on brown. Today the birds arrived, attracted in hundreds by the exposed invertebrates. The crows arrived first; murders of them. Then the birds of prey caught on. Despite the food being a very scant feast, they wanted a piece of the action. Red kites and buzzards are much bigger than crows, but the crows attacked with venom; cawing loudly, flapping blackly and nose-diving on the larger birds until they gave up and soared away like the kings of the high sky that they are, until their wheeling cry could barely be heard. Then the gulls arrived. They were just as keen to share the meal, and, it seemed, a little more determined than the birds of prey. But the crows were not going to be beaten by a load of fisher-birds. They worked together, using our ash tree as a watchtower and runway, rising in squads into the air and attacking the gulls with what seemed like relish and resolve. Caws and shrieks filled the air.
Finally, there seemed to be a sort of truce. The field rises in the centre, a little hill. The gulls settled on the far side of the rise; the crows on the near side. It reminded me of a chess board. Jim used to teach the children to play chess by telling them to think of the board as a battleground that rose in the centre, so that the Grand old Duke York’s men might march up and down. Now, here were the black crows and the white gulls, eying each other in the lull of battle as they tackled the one-day growth of field stubble.
The last three days have been incredibly hot; a true start to flaming June. We’ve had to layer on the sunblock as we worked. Our first vegetable plot is finished; a motley collection of seeds and seedlings lie in tidy rows. We’re so proud of it. We gaze on it like a mother on her sleeping baby and water it like it is suckling milk. Now we’ve started on the polytunnel, marking out the 4 by 8 metre site and lifting the turf. The kites are still squealing and soaring above us in a glass-blue sky.
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