Even though it’s winter, someone said to me a week or so ago, “We have to make hay while the sun shines.” I don’t know when that expression started to mean doing something when the time and conditions are right. But it’s a figure of speech that everyone understands, even if they have no knowledge of its origins.
For a farm kid like me, “making hay while the sun shines” was a guiding principle of our summers of producing winter feed for our animals. We grew a mixture of plants: red and yellow clovers, timothy and alfalfa, and depending on the weather, we might get two or three “crops” that we’d cut and store in the barn for the winter. So a lot of what determined the quality of the hay depended upon harvesting it while the sun was shining.
The leaf and seed material in the hay is what determines its quality. My dad did a lot of reading of farm publications, and he knew about hay. We had to mow the hay at the point when the seed heads were not quite ripe and the leaves were at their maximum. Then we’d have to rake the hay into windrows to allow the breezes and the sun to dry the grasses so that the bulk of the moisture was removed but the leafy material was still robust.
If it rained after the hay was cut and raked, the quality of the hay could be compromised. The windrows would have to turned over to expose the grasses to the wind and sun again so that the hay wouldn’t rot in the field. If it happened too often, the leaves and seed material could get knocked off the stems by the handling, decreasing its food value. Seedless, leafless stems had very little nutritional value.
We couldn’t store wet hay in the mows because it could develop rot and mold, creating the potential for toxins to form in the feed, which could make the cows sick. So making hay while the sun shone was a very important part of our summers.
Making hay was different back then. Those were the days before balers and choppers, when farmers loaded loose hay onto wagons and transported it to the barn where big, heavy hay hooks carried it up into the mow. I can still visualize myself standing atop a load of hay, taking the hay from the loader and “building a load.”
There’s a passage in Robert Frost’s “Death of a Hired Man” in which Warren, the narrator, talks about Silas, the itinerant hired man and his skill at building a load of hay. He says:
“I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds’ nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.”
I have very fond memories of my dad teaching me how to build a load so that it wouldn’t shift and fall off the wagon on the way to the barn and of the goofy-looking mechanical hayloader we owned. It was a strange-looking piece of equipment, and it always reminded me of a skeleton of some weird, exotic prehistoric animal. I’m not sure I could explain the machine’s appearance or function in such a way as to make you visualize it, but old farmers like me will probably remember it.
The loader was hooked behind the hay wagon to deliver the cut hay to the guy who rode on the wagon to “build the load” - like Silas in “The Death of the Hired Man.”
As the hay came onto the wagon, the guy on the load had to take big bundles of hay with a pitchfork and arrange them on the rack in such a way as to bind them together so they wouldn’t slide or shift. It was sort of like laying bricks, except the bricks were, as Frost described them, “big birds’ nests.”
Well, I actually got quite good at it, and “making hay while the sun shines” is not a figurative expression for me; it was a way of life!
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