The First Hint of Deep Summer

Dirt is on vacation this week so we’ve been a bit loungy in the morning.  Monday morning when I got my coffee and came back to my wonderful new room (it will be new for a long time Dear Reader), I slid my big window open so I could hear all the sounds of the early morning farm a bit better. 

Before I knew it I had some company for coffee-in-bed. 

A sweet little wren that had been sitting on the rose arbor decided that my lovely swirly green walls looked like an inviting thicket and flew on in.  My camera was in the other room and it didn’t take long for him to discover that the forest only went so deep and that he needed to skeedaddle out the way he came in.

My screens went up later that day so unfortunately I won’t be having anymore morning unexpected guests.

Yesterday morning while lounging, I cruised our newest sample edition of Stockman Grass Farmer publication reading a few bits out loud to semi-snoring Dirt.  I had expressed interest last fall in their publication and they occasionally send us a sample to get us to subscribe.

It is all very inspiring as we slowly move toward MIG or MIRG (managed intensive grazing or managed intensive rotational grazing) but we haven’t bit on subscribing to the publication because it focuses mostly on cattle, one animal that we don’t run more than one of around here, and we pretty much we get the concept.

Two articles caught my eye yesterday.  One was one on how grazing sheep in low growing willow stands results in fewer intestinal parasites than sheep that are regularly wormed with anthelmintics.  Wow, that is pretty interesting.  Bet and I just put in some low growing willows in the front hedge row area.  Both of them benefit from regular pruning.  One puts on new stem growth that turns bright red in the fall and on through winter and the other puts on super long, super straight new grow.   After the leaves fall off both are used for indoor arrangements and the red just plain looks stunning in the bleak winter landscape. 

Yesterday afternoon when I went out to look at the hedgerow plantings that Bet and the girls did while Dirt and I were gone, I told Bet about the article and we began plotting the different spots on the edges of all the pasture areas where we could put in some long stands of either of these two willows.  Grazing after all would be a lot like pruning.  Dirt’s sheep would get the benefits from the willow stands and so would Bet and I, we wouldn’t have to prune to get the pretty new growth.

The other article Dirt and I read was about arranging your grazing so as not to need hay in the winter.  That is such a foreign concept to us but certainly entertaining.  I am a bit suspicious as the fellow who puts out the publication farms in the south, do they have winter down there?  His article did hint about the concept working up north as well.  Dirt isn’t even at the level of needing suspicion yet.  But like I said the concept is entertaining.

We don’t own our own haying equipment and we need more winter hay than Norrine’s fields out back produce, not much more but a bit.  So to not hay certainly has its intriguing draw.  Dirt and I are looking forward to incorporating much of the MIRG practices into our farming and Bet is getting on with her pastured poultry set up this week with the arrival of her poultry electro-net fencing yesterday.

But to not ever hay again?  The article sure was convincing that it certainly makes sense to move in that direction, most propaganda, whether true or not, is very convincing.  Propaganda aside, Dirt will be very slow to move in that direction, the direction of not ever putting up hay again.  He doesn’t do change well and especially in an area that he is already sold on.  But for me it caused a bit of guilt actually, guilt for resisting that much of a buy-in to the whole MIRG thing.  I mulled off and on yesterday what it would be like to not hay every year.  This year with the weather being so utterly poor and once again the grass looking ripe and ready long before the weather cooperates for cutting, raking and baling, the idea of never having to worry about hay season…

I was wondering about it still last evening when Dirt asked if I could help him work on the driveway.  He was using the tractor and blade to scrape the major portion of the driveway, to scruff up the weeds and get the gravel back where it needs to be, but on the other side of the loop he needed help. The blade was just not cutting into the gravel and weeds, it needed some wieght.  It is a bit disheartening when you’re asked to help ’cause your the fat chick on the farm and your mass is needed to increase the efficacy of the equipment.

Luckily the nerve damage in my feet, and the fact that I had flip flops on, made it impossible for me to stand on the top of the blade as Dirt drug the driveway.  So we switched jobs, he did the fat chick job and I drove the tractor. 

I love driving tractor for just about any job on the farm.  The sound of it, the feel of the hard steering wheel, the difficult shifting and manipulation of the clutch, all of the many different nuances that the farm tractors bring.  I especially like when I have to put it in third gear to move quickly go to a different area!  Woohoo zipping right along with the wind on my face and in my hair! I just need my white silk scarf and then I could feel like I’m the Red Baron.  Or a bright colored chiffon scarf and I’m a fifties’ starlet riding down the coast in a convertible, careful that my scarf won’t kill me like Isadora Duncan’s did.  

If we didn’t hay that would be one big job that the tractors wouldn’t need to do any more.  Thinking on that as I come around the corner of the driveway again.  What a lovely warm evening it was, we had eaten dinner early, I love getting dinner early and coming out to do more farm work, and this evening and the lingering warmth and long missed sun finally having clear skies to set in, all was marvelous.  Then the scent hit me, the scent that washed away all the guilt for resisting the idea that we ought to work our way out of haying.  Dirt had weed whacked earlier all around the edges of the farm and there was a distinct smell, not the new-mown-lawn smell, but the smell of cut field grass curing in the warmth of the sun.

One of those many fragrances that transport me.  This time transporting me more into the corners of my adult life than my childhood.  I smelled that smell often as a child, being farmed out to the various cousins who fortunately lived on farms.  But the deeper more poignant memories provided by the aroma are from here at this farm and the surrounding farms where we would go help hay.  Or the places where we would pick up our hay in the field, trip after trip, until our barn was full for the coming winter. 

Then the fragrance concentrates and becomes the overwhelming temptress that pours out the barn door beckoning the passerby to come in and lay among the bales.  To come in and climb to the top, up to the rafters, to where the barn swallows live and the bats tuck in tight.  To sit and breathe in deeply the ultimate perfume of summer.

The guilt for not wanting to give up a long time farm practice, practiced by farmers long before Dirt and I began to try our hand,  practiced long long before Dirt and I were children visiting farming relatives, he in Arkansas, I in eastern Washington and Idaho, washed away in a sudden wave of farm perfume.  Maybe we will get there or perhaps Bet will when the farm practices become her call, her and her husband’s perhaps,  but no one is in any hurry to stop haying now, not even with the vexing weather pressing on us this year, making it all so very uncertain.