Second cutting made in three days

Cut Tuesday, turned Thursday, baled Saturday morning. That is the whole shape of the entry, and if I stopped there it would still be a true record. But the notebook has room, so here is the rest of it.

The river-bottom piece came back after the dry July better than it had any right to. The August rains were small but they landed at night more than once, which the grass keeps better than a daytime storm of the same size. I walked the piece the Monday before cutting and called it ready: first bloom gone on most of the grass, a few heads still, moisture in the stems but not in the leaves. The test I actually trust is the twist test on a handful. If it twists and does not snap, it is still too green to cut for keeping. On Monday it snapped.

Tuesday morning I mowed at six-thirty, eleven acres, with the sickle bar fresh off a sharpening. Cutting in the morning dew looks wrong to some people and it is. The dew goes off by nine and the swath starts curing right away, and you gain the two or three hours of daylight you would otherwise spend waiting. I have kept the numbers both ways over the years. Morning cutting in this climate cures faster overall, and it does not rain on my hay any more often than afternoon cutting does.

Thursday I turned it with the rake, one pass, late enough that the top of the windrow was crisping. Friday was the nervous day, which every hay day has: the forecast said dry, the sky mostly agreed, and I left the windrows alone except to walk them at supper and break a handful open at the stem. A stem that breaks clean with no string is baling dry. At seven that evening it was close. At six Saturday morning it was right.

Baling ran from six until eleven, sixty-one square bales, average weight on the spring scale in the shed door about fifty-eight pounds. Sixty-one is four more than the first cutting off the same piece in June, and seven more than I penciled in the margin of the notebook when I walked the field Monday. The margins are where the guessing goes and the rows are where the truth goes; that is why the log keeps both.

What goes wrong on a second cutting is almost never the weather. It is rushing the middle day. Hay that is baled a half day green feels fine going into the stack and heats in two weeks, and then it is brown hay with a smell to it. The rule I keep, and the reason I write the dates down, is that the hay sets the schedule, not the calendar. If Friday had shown string instead of a clean break at the stem, Saturday would have been another turning day and Sunday the bale day, and the notebook would say so.

The tractor started on the third try Saturday, which for that machine is a good morning. The full sequence I work, mow to stack, with the checks at each step, is written up in the guides under land days. The counts for both cuttings this year are in the table.

Entered the same day.