Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
The early Spring started out with a decent amount of precipitation; cool nights that kept the moisture at ground level, soft rains in the evenings at least three times each week and an occasional soaker that shut down Sundays so that we all stayed inside playing board games or doing puzzles. The grass came up blue in May, saturated, nitrogen soaked. Every time I looked at the cows their heads were down, methodically making their way in a picket line across the pasture, apricot colored lawn mowers busy with life.
Around the middle of the month it was as if an unseen hand turned off the tap and that was that. At first the grass went riotous in response to the ever present sunlight, shooting up an inch or more per day. We cut hay over at The Interval and the bales were so heavy with brix content we could barely load them with the Massey. Thousand pound rounds of fresh cut blue stem, timothy, fescue, clover and brome. We stacked the huge white marshmallows of feed for Winter in double stacks along the back of the barnyard, one on top of another, hay wagons chugging up the curving drive every hour or so, the John Deere struggling to move each on in place.
Tipping them into position by hand took two of us, one with a bad back the other with a wrecked arm but we got each one where we wanted it and the air was redolent with the scent of fresh, mowed baleage. In the first week the new spikes of green shot up from the stubble and the hay fields resembled expansive, well-tended lawns. As the temperatures began to rise in the middle of June the color went from Dartmouth green to russet. The stem tips went dry and the roots, eager to hold on to the little moisture left in the soil went deep and spared the expense of sending up new tendrils of leaf. Grass, when stressed, immediately begins to produce seed from a single stalk and everywhere you looked there was a haze of wispy seed heads floating just above the ground.
Continue reading “PRAY FOR RAIN”
