August is the end of my summer. Autumn is on his way, usually more in hint and spirit than in actual weather. Nothing is shouting Fall! into my ear quite yet. Instead I notice whispers vibrating off the squash vines as if from a string on a child’s tin-can telephone. Walk outside for morning chores and take in the heat, but feel the change: there’s less humidity, and the first leaves are already fading and hanging differently.
The garden and the forest itself are heavy with the peak of their growth, like a bowl of milk about to tip over and spoil. Senescence is just around the corner and the breakneck pace of growth seems now to apply only to weeds, which at this point I have let devour much of the garden without fuss.
In medieval Britain they called the first few days of August Lammas, which translates from the Old Saxon as “Loaf Mass.” Since the summer wheat was harvested before other fall crops, this was the official start of autumn in European agricultural societies. It’s understandable on many levels, since people were not only bringing in the first big crop of the year but also grinding it and storing it in casks and sacks to feed their community through the dark months ahead. The wheat harvest became the first of several insurance policies for winter.
Although Lammas was a day of work, it was also a holy day. People baked loaves of bread from the first grains of the year and carried them into their churches to be blessed. They didn’t eat the sacred Lammas bread but ripped the loaves into quarters and placed them in the four corners of their barns. There they sat as happy little sacrificial offerings. A tangible symbol of hope for a safe winter and good luck.
Lammas was a Christian celebration that stemmed from older Pagan ones. (Compared to farming, Christianity is a pretty new idea.) The Celts of Pagan Europe held their harvest festival on the first, in honor of their Sun God Lugh, and they called the day Lughnasadh (pronounced “loonasa”). It was a celebration of First Fruits as well as grains, since apples and grapes played a big part in that ancient story, too. The Vikings celebrated Thingtide earlier in the week. But everyone was focused on the same great burst of energy: grain harvest.
August is such a tease with her shorter days and cooler nights. I wake up expecting to need sweatshirts and wool socks. Lammas and Lughnasadh announce the end of summer and the beginning of the great mystery of autumn.
Hay is baled and stored from June to August, and sometimes even later in the season if the sun and rain offer the right conditions. Here, first cutting is always taken in June and the hay is usually coarser, not as rich in nutrition as the later cuttings. Second cutting is everyone’s choice for feeding hay, especially for horses. That’s what I try to store up for my stock here at Cold Antler.
First cutting is cheaper but it’s always less green, more like straw. Second Cut can cost up to two dollars more a bale, which adds up when you buy it by the truckload, but good hay is an investment in health. It’s like beans and rice versus a pile of potato chips. The sheep will eat the potato-chip hay but they won’t get what their bodies need.
So I suck it up and pay more for Second Cut and never regret it. Sometimes when I fork that beautiful, dry, green grass onto the snow in front of my sheep, it looks good enough to pour some balsamic dressing on and dive in with them.
Hay is green and used to feed animals.
Straw is yellow and brown and used for bedding or compost.
If a small farmer is asked to help with haying, she shows up. Friends and friends of friends call and ask if I’m free the following afternoon. No need to say why. If there’s been a stretch of dry days and you can smell the cut fields as you drive into town, you know it will be about haying.
You help because you can, and when you need something later on, your help is remembered, considered, and appreciated. In late winter, when I’m down to my last 20 bales and the grass is a long way from green, I know I can call any of the farmers I helped hay and soon load up my truck with what they have to spare for a fair price. That availability is a gift in the ice-covered times of the year. Since my barns can’t handle the 400-plus bales I’ll need to get my animals through the winter, when I need to reload my stash, I know there are larger barns on larger farms that can help this little freehold out. Having that absolute certainty is worth a few hot days of toil.
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves
We will come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
— from “Bringing in the Sheaves” National Grange Songbook, 1929
I love potatoes. I love the little white flowers that bubble and pop out of the green leaves like the frumpy girl in high school putting on her prom dress. I love digging the tubers out of the ground a few months later. I love holding their lumpy, starchy meat in my dirty palms. I love the whole reincarnation of the thing — the way a sack of last year’s uneaten spuds can grow warty new roots, singing out to be sliced and placed back into the soil. As long as your chunk of tater has an eye, it might well sprout into a whole new plant. Which means that little chunk can produce, instead of a few hash-browns, 5 more pounds of glorious potatoes. Not a bad second life.
Every year I plant a patch of seed potatoes, and my goal is to plant more every time I do. This past June, I planted my largest raised-bed garden with 33 seed spuds, and as August hails high, they are leafy and thriving, about to flower.
Few people in my small circle of local homesteaders have a tractor. Being the broke traditionalists that we are, this means our hay comes in smaller, square bales instead of those giant 400- to 600-pound round bales you see out in fields, covered in white plastic or curing in the sun. The smaller size means that a person can carry them where they need to be without a gas tank. The giant round bales must be moved on long spears attached to big tractors, and my farm doesn’t have any engine-powered obelisks. And I’m located on a steep mountainside where I would certainly flip a tractor within minutes of starting it up.
So I’m a square-bale woman. I pick up bales in the truck, unload them by hand, and move them around the farm with carts and sleighs. And that’s not horse equipment, but handcarts and the plastic sleighs you find in drugstores. I tie ropes to them and pull or push the bales across the snow or fields. It is a workout, and I like knowing after a morning of chores that I have broken a sweat and made breakfast for every critter in my keep. That never ceases to restore my spirit and make me appreciate simple things like hot-water showers and steaming mugs of coffee.
If a small farmer is asked to help with haying, she shows up.
Patty and I are refurbishing an old farm cart that she found at a local farm auction for five dollars. A little paint, some elbow grease, a new set of tires and rims, and I have myself one smart-looking horse cart.
I found a Haflinger-sized harness on eBay for a hundred dollars and spent another fifty having it fixed up and soaked in oil by an Amish harness maker from just north of the Adirondacks. Patty sold me Steele’s old collar, and William Beachy, the harness maker, sold me some used tack to finish the outfit, including a pair of 17-foot-long biothane lines.
So for the unbeatable price of $285 I have a cart, a harness, a driving bridle, and lines. Considering that a new harness could easily cost $800-plus and a new cart anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000, this is a steal.
Haying is my favorite work of the summer. All winter I will go into my little barn with its fading red paint and pull out bales, one or two at a time, to feed my animals. They depend on it. I depend on it. The hard work of summer may seem grueling, but it is the first strenuous step toward winter contentment. On a snowy morning, to feed your flock the very bales that made you bleed and pour sweat, months before, brings quite the moment of reflection. Then those calm summer afternoons become memories just as winter scenes were as I swayed in the hammock. That’s how you know the wheel is turning and you’re turning with it.
Stay on the farm, boys, stay on the farm
Though profits come in rather slow.
Stay on the farm, boys, stay on the farm —
Don’t be in a hurry to go.
— from “Stay on the Farm” National Grange Songbook, 1929