Hay harvesting weather

This hot, windy weather brings back memories of haying seasons. My first experience in mowing was after my Father, Ed. Rupert, had let me ride many an hour with him on our horse drawn mower. It was a tedious job, but we had a team that was well trained. You had to be sure the swath was straight, (that means each cut of the mower had to be straight leaving no uncut hay beyond the cutting edges of the mower.) You would usually start in the mornings before it became too hot, as it could take a day to cut one of the fields with the horse drawn mower. The mower was a two-wheeled implement; seat attached to the middle of the frame and a long scythe bar extending four-foot long from the center of the machine pulled by two horses. The cutting bar of the scythe had individual; three-inch tapered, triangular teeth attached to the bar with ribbits. This bar had to be very sharp to cut through the hay, so you would have to place the bar in a vice to sharpen the blades whenever they became dull, or replace them if they broke.

Sometimes the oats would be so high it was above the heads of the horses. If you had planted vetch with the oats, you usually had to get off the mower and move the cut hay whenever it was real heavy before proceeding. Alfalfa was the easiest to cut, but had to be cut at the beginning of the bloom for the best hay and raked and shocked before it became too dry.

The next step would be to rake the hay using a large two-wheeled implement with a row of large of teeth that were a half circle more or less and again pulled by two horses who were attached to the rake by single-trees and a front yoke hooked to a long tongue. The driver would sit on a seat in the middle of the rig and use foot power to dump the hay as it had to be raked in rows. At each crossing of the field you would dump the hay in each row. Trying to keep the row straight as it had to be shocked in individual stacks to be loaded onto the wagon to deliver to the barns. It was very important how evenly you loaded the hay for hauling a large load to your barn. Then the hay would be picked up off the wagon with a derrick attached to ropes and pulleys. One of the ropes ran outside the barn to another horse and that horse would pull the derrick load into the barn and then who ever was in the barn would yell when it was time to dump the load. Then that member would spread and stump the hay down as the derrick was pulled outside by another rope as we continued unloading the wagon.

The jobs were dirty and hot, the whole family might be involved. What a work ethic. Usually the day would end for the people involved with a swim in the big irrigation ditches to relax and cool off. Looking back through the years we should appreciate all the improvements that have been made to hay harvesting. A later article will explore some of the improvements through the years.