Summer at The Lint Mill
As summers go, 2024 has on the surface, been a disappointing one. After such a wet spring we were feeling hopeful about a good summer…long, lazy days with only the humming of the bees to disturb the peace! Sadly, apart from some crucially good days at the end of July, the weather feels more like autumn than summer.
However, we did manage to bring in our hay! We last (and first) made hay in 2018 and it was somewhat of a disappointment because the grass wasn’t well-grown (we’d left the sheep on the fields for too long), so we got very few bales making it a very costly exercise.
For a smallholding like The Lint Mill, unless we were to embrace the full bucolic dream of hand-scything the fields and hand-building haystooks, we rely on farmers who have the machinery to help us, to fit us in at one of the busiest points in the farming year. Most farmers are cutting silage as well as combine harvesting the grain crops so to ask them to come and cut a half-acre field is a big ask. To complicate matters, we need our hay making into small, square bales as we don’t have the storage for the large round bales that have become ubiquitous in farms up and down the country. This meant that we were looking for someone with a square baler, which these days is an ‘old bit of kit’!
Nonetheless, on Sunday 28 July as we realised that EVERYONE had started cutting their fields we thought we better get on with it. We asked one farmer who was too busy making their own hay so they gave us another farmer’s number to try. They were also too busy so they gave us the number of a young farmer Graham and for us it was third time lucky.
Graham came over from Blackmount where he farms hill sheep to cut our field on the Sunday evening. Then, like everyone else, we prayed for hot, sunny weather with a breeze to dry the hay sufficiently to enable it to be baled.
Graham came with his tedder twice a day on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday which uses moving forks to aerate or ‘wuffle’ the hay to speed drying. Then on Thursday, baling day, he turned it twice more before coming back with his haybob to row the hay up into windrows ready for the baler. Then Russell arrived with his 45 year old New Holland 376 baler which he had bought new in 1979 and it was clearly well cared for.
Half an hour later we had 78 bales of delicious meadow hay to feed our livestock over the winter. Russell said that it was the best hay he’d baled this summer and Graham explained how thick the meadow growth was and how it was full of flowers. Russell said that this was, ‘the guid stuff, you just cannae buy hay this guid‘. It was a proud moment for us after all the work we had done to restore this old hay meadow to its former glory.
The farmers bid us farewell and we were left with 78 bales to move from the field to the barn before sundown. As we were contemplating the possibility of not being in bed before midnight, a couple of German cyclists appeared saying that the couldn’t find anywhere to stay and could they camp in our field, that they would be happy to pay. We said they could exchange their labour for free camping and so Simon (our German guest) loaded the bales into the trailer, I drove them to the barn where Colin unloaded them. It took us 10 trips but with help, we finished in double quick time. We were grateful and amazed at how the universe sometimes just gives you exactly what you need! We made sure our cyclists had a hearty breakfast before setting off again the following morning.
It felt auspicious that we gathered in our hay on 1 August, Lammas Day. Traditionally, Lammas is the first day of the harvest season and a time to celebrate the earth’s bounty and to give thanks. On Lammas, the first sheaves of grain were cut, and by that night, the first loaves of bread for the season would have been baked. The word Lammas comes from an Old English phrase that translates to ‘loaf mass. In early Christianity, the first loaves of the season were blessed by the church during mass. It’s also a timely mid-solstice reminder to begin planning for the autumn and winter as Lammas marks the end of the summer season as the sun’s energy begins to wane.
The Lint Mill reminds us of all these connections with the traditions of the past and the concerns of our climate crisis as we move towards our future. It helps to try to respond to the changing energies of the seasons. It helps to observe traditions and to invent new ones for ourselves. So perhaps with this deepening understanding, summer 2024 hasn’t been a disappointment at all. Perhaps it’s given us exactly what we needed.
Lammas blessings.
