It’s hay making time – after a long and rainy summer, the farmers have been sitting gloomily on their stools at the Farmer’s Arms, wondering when the weather will break. The hay is tall now and standing in the fields – and on the one warm and sunny day we had, there was frenzied activity everywhere.

Hay in the field

Rich came home announcing that he was going to go out and cut our fields – but when he went over to borrow the hay baler from his friend Mike, he ran into another bloke whose tractor had broken down while he was trying to mow a field. So Rich went over to help out, and didn’t come back to our fields until past seven. He quickly wolfed down some food that I had ready for him (I had planned a barbecue, driven a little crazy by the unexpected sun, but of course as a city girl hadn’t realized that sun doesn’t mean barbecue, it means hay making, and everything else gets pushed aside in the frenzied rush to get the hay in before it’s spoiled!) and went back out to turn the hay with a special attachment. He went around the outside of the fields and baled the heavy grasses into haylage bales, which are heavier and richer and wetter than hay, designed to ferment inside their plastic wrappings.

Benjamin in the hay

He said he needed our help, and so Rich’s father Taid, (Welsh for grandfather), Joli and I went outside into the soft blue and pink evening. Ceris was inside with Benjamin, putting him to bed.

My heart sank as I looked down the hill and saw the massive hay bales, each weighing around 80 pounds, dotting the perimeter of the field. How on earth did Rich think that he was going to manage to wrap all these bales and get them into the barn, with only an old man, a woman and a little girl to help him?

But manage it we did…

Taid drove the old Land Rover, hooked up to the flat trailer. He drove slowly down the field, while Rich and Joli and I somehow heaved and wrestled the big bales, one by one, onto the back of the trailer. Then we climbed on top and rode on top of the fragrant hay back to the shed, where the borrowed wrapper was waiting, hooked up to the big blue tractor.

Benjamin and Rich in the big blue tractor

Rich and I together heaved each bale onto the cradle of the wrapper, while Taid sat at the controls. With a screeching sound, Rich pulled out the end of a roll of plastic, a little like a big roll of cling film, and tucked one end of it under the twine holding the bale together. Then Taid turned on the wrapper and it rocked and rotated the bale around, wrapping it in plastic as you would wrap yarn into a ball. It made a thumping, screeching sound, and was entirely hypnotic – as often as I stared at it, I could never make out exactly how it was the the machine was managing to turn the bale so that it would be wrapped so perfectly into a cube.

It didn’t always work perfectly – sometimes the bale would be too light, and would be tossed off of the wrapper. Then Rich would curse and haul it out again, resettling it very gently into the cradle.

Meanwhile Joli and I dragged and rolled the hay bales down the length of the trailer, getting the next one ready to go onto the wrapper.

It was repetive, physically demanding work – long before we were through I was floating with tiredness, my fingers raw from handling the cords and sharp straw, my legs pricked with the razor ends of the hay. But it was strangely exciting as well – the banging and screeching of the wrapper, the race against the darkness and the rain clouds we could see gathering. There was no one to tell us to work harder, or that we could stop – it was obvious that we had to get the hay in before night fall, or we would lose it all.

We wrapped that trailer load and went out for another one. Rich had only baled the hay around the edges of the field – we simply couldn’t manage any more, with the limited hands we had.

But we got the hay in, every bale, all 47 bales. Rich lugged each one on his own off the wrapped and into the barn – I begged to help him but he wouldn’t have it, said he was better on his own. I looked at the mound of bales and thought that his back would never stand it, but he got them all stacked…

We were out working until almost eleven. With a sigh of satisfaction we examined the pale green, plastic wrapped bales stacked neatly in the barn, protected from weather and mice, birds and damp, and staggered back to the house, to wait for morning and hope for sun…