As I start writing this evening, it is sunny outside ... and ... raining! Now, gardeners are probably glad of this after these long, hot, dry days but for our local farmers who are still working all hours to get the last of the hay baled and stored in the dry, it's a shame.
This morning we headed for the boundary between the commons and one of my favourite fields. When I posted "Between stone and steel" the hay was due to be harvested, but this belongs to the farmer who is awaiting spares from Germany for his machinery, so today another farmer was helping him out by cutting the rest of these acres of hay.
There is quite a slope to this field and today there was a fairly strong breeze, rustling the leaves of the beech trees as well as drying the newly mown hay. But even as we walked along the boundary the skies were changing. Everywhere I could see and hear tractors working desperately hard trying to get this valuable crop harvested before the rain forecast for the week ahead. The air was sweet scented and around us flocks of different birds were doing aerobatics catching insects above the grassland. Newly fledged skylarks and meadow pipits were practising flying, bees and butterflies were foraging it was lovely, but the clouds were already appearing.
Clouds were gathering in the sky and scudding across the landscape beneath them. The air was cooling and much as we were enjoying the change in the weather my heart went out to our hard working farmers who were working so hard to harvest a very valuable crop.
At times it seemed as though the rain was going to arrive early as darker clouds gathered overhead and overshadowed the newly mown hayfields, but as yet ... no rain.
At least for this farm some of the hay is safely baled and stored. I love these fields with their guardian beech trees where the hay has already been mown, baled and safely stored. I say safely for a reason. These farmers crop in the big round hay bales.
Now ... it seems to amuse some local folk to set these huge bales rolling down hill, often into deep ravines were the bales are beyond recovering. They don't seem to realise all the hard work involved in gathering this annual harvest. And for most of our farmers they simply do not have time to watch what is happening in the Olympics, they are too busy working hard through the daylight hours or too tired to catch up with all but the briefest of news. For them, The Olympics is something far removed from a days hard graft. Many of them were also miners when times were so hard that a farm could not support a son. Now many of them face retirement but still carry on because their sons or daughters are not interested in the hard graft and long hours of farming. Yet we still need their produce on our tables.
They deserve their own medal!
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