Moon over Martinborough

In our first few months here, the grass in our paddocks grew longer and longer, and then it quickly turned brown. I had no idea those paddocks would soon transform.

Cut hay

We’d been told that untended paddocks were a fire hazard in the driest days of summer, but we didn’t know what to do about our long, dry grass. We had no tractor to cut it and no animals to graze it.

Then our neighbour Duane called.

“Would you like to sell your standing hay?” he asked.

I didn’t really know what that meant.

Duane was having contractors come to his property to cut his hay. His paddocks and ours share several gates, and he wanted to know if we’d like to have our hay cut at the same time as his. He’d arrange everything. The contractors would pay us.

“They’ll pay us?” I asked. Surely Duane had it wrong. As a boy in suburban Michigan, I had made extra money by mowing lawns. So I knew. The people with the long grass were the ones who paid.

“They’ll sell your hay on to farmers,” Duane said. “They’ll buy all of it. Unless you want to keep some for yourselves.”

“Um, I don’t think we’ll need any,” I said. We have no livestock and I was unable to think of even the remotest possible reason why we would want hay.

I thanked Duane and said we’d love to sell our hay.

It solved our problem, and we were going to get paid. Once again, what would we do without our neighbors?

Making hay

About three weeks went by, and the long grass in our paddocks was still there. I called Duane.

“Did they forget about us?” I asked.

“No, not at all.” Duane said. “The hay’s just not ready yet.”

He explained that timing for a hay harvest is crucial. Hay cut too early means less hay per acre and a high moisture content which can lead to rot. But hay cut too late means it’s worth less on the market because it’s less nutritious for livestock.

There’s just a tiny window of a couple weeks when the hay is right for harvesting.

The tractors come

Eventually we looked out one day and saw tractors in our bottom paddock. They were huge, green John Deere things, and they cut the paddocks flat, leaving behind sweeping arcs of long grass in the corners where they couldn’t go. They left the cut hay laying in the field. It wasn’t in bales.

I didn’t know it then, but you have to let the hay dry before you bale it. After a couple days they came by and turned the hay with a kind of rotary rake — like a giant, red blender — which is towed on the back of a tractor. If it rains while the hay is drying in the paddocks, you’re ‘stuffed’ (as the Kiwis say) because it will rot when it’s put into bales.

This is where the phrase ‘make hay while the sun shines’ comes from.

Then, one evening Rick and I came home from work and saw something new out in the bottom paddock. We stood at the edge of the deck and looked out, across the olive grove, through the gap in the macrocarpas. There were strange, round structures down there.

Then Rick yelled out, “Our hay!”

We put on our gum boots and went down to inspect.

In the presence of giant beings

If you’ve never stood in a paddock with enormous, round hay bales, then I highly recommend it. They are wonderful things.

Rick and I stood there in the bottom paddock for a while just looking at them, walking around them and observing them, taking them in. They were like sculpture. They had that kind of presence, that kind of power.

Each was almost as tall as us, and wrapped in spirals toward the center. Around the outside there was a kind of mesh holding everything all together. Most were laying on their sides, like giant wheels from some missing Trojan Horse made of hay.

White baleage

Some of the bales were wrapped in enormous sheets of white plastic and standing on their flat end. These, I found out later, are called ‘baleage’. Baleage makes a kind of preserved feed, which ferments inside the wrap. It’s similar to silage, but made without the silo.

All of a sudden, as Rick and I were walking around the hay bales, we became boys. We began running and jumping up on them. We hid behind them. We chased each other around them. We tried rolling them, but even though they were round, their weight made them unmovable. We laughed the entire time.

Over the next few weeks, those giant beings lived there in our bottom paddock. I went down to visit them many times. I looked at them in the early morning light, in the noonday sun, at twilight. The shadows gathered around them differently.

Once, when the moon was full, I went down to see how the moonlight struck them. I wish my camera could have captured it. The unwrapped bales blended in with the grass. They seemed to be crouching there, waiting for me.

But the white wrapped bales were positively luminescent, like giant glowing beacons spread out in front of my eyes, reflecting back the moon. I jumped up on one glowing bale and watched the stars above me turn, then I looked down at my moonshadow across the grass, tilting away towards the trees.

Later, our friend Donna came to visit from the States. She loved the hay bales as much as Rick and I. We have a series of very embarrassing photos of the three of us doing disco dances on the hay bales, and riding them like rodeo cowboys. I’d post those photos here, but Rick and Donna would kill me.

What is it about hay bales? Countless paintings, poems, and essays have been made about them. So much art has been inspired by hay that there’s even a hay in art database.

The bales are sold

Hay bales

A few weeks later the contractors came, unannounced, and took our hay.

Even though I knew a check was coming to us in the mail, even though I knew our hay was going to a good farmer who needed it to feed his cattle or his sheep, I couldn’t help feeling like something was wrong.

Somebody had broken in to my own private sculpture garden and stolen everything.

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Read the next post: Your chicken killers are here

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 at 8:26 am and is filed under Neighbors, New Zealand, Paddocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.