November 17, 2023
Our pastures are done for the season, which is always a bit sad to see. We do, however, have a barn full of hay and a barnyard strewn with pumpkins so life is still pretty awesome. A full hayloft is truly a beautiful thing - it has the same zen-inducing-magic as a well stocked pantry. The intense self-satisfaction though, when the produce is of your own making, can start to slide into smugness – and I’m totally there!
Our inaugural haying season was epic, as we had to figure out everything from scratch. Cutting and collecting unbaled hay in New England is a practice long abandoned, so it took a lot of reinventing, recalibrating, and plain old head scratching. It also took a fair amount of labor as we needed to rebuild a section of Hill-Stead’s horse barn before we could ultimately store our hay in it.
Normally in Connecticut, there are two cuttings of hay. The “first cutting” is usually in the beginning of June, and the “second cutting” comes sometime later in August. Unfortunately for us, and this winter’s hay supply, we didn’t get the repairs to the barn done until September, so we missed all of the first cutting and much of the second as well. Even so, we managed to put up more than half of what we’ll need for the winter. To make up the difference, yesterday, we got a load of haybales delivered, and added it to our own supply of loose hay. Our hayloft now, truly runneth over.
When we feed haybales to the sheep, we just spread the hay on the ground out in their pasture. The loose hay, though, is harder to transport so we are trying to come up with a design for a hay feeder right below where our loose hay is stored.
A lot of shepherds with “fiber flocks” shear their sheep in the fall before they start feeding them hay. That goes a long way towards keeping their fleeces clean as hay chafe is next to impossible to get out of a heavy fleece. For several reasons we opted not to shear our sheep this fall, so we have to figure out a feeder design that keeps their wool as clean as possible. So far, we’ve been through half a dozen iterations, but I think we’re getting close.
We now have a design which;
Even though, due to a very late start, our inaugural hay season fell short in terms of the amount we harvested, next year we’ll have everything already in place and ready to go well before the first cutting in June. At the risk of sounding like every other farmer that’s just too stubborn to ever give up - we tell each other.
You never know, perhaps it will.