After a dazzlingly bright spring, with hardly any rain, the grass in the hayfields barely grew at all. I waited through July to give it a chance to make good with a bit of real rain, but it still didn't grow and the rain meant I couldn't cut the hay either! And then there were the seemingly interminable problems with machinery that has been standing in a corner of a field for 11 months with no-one paying it any attention ....
Yesterday however it looked like being dry for around 36 hours, so I finally set off to cut what grass I could find in the first meadow - the one known as the Home Meadow; it's nearest the barn and house, and is particularly attractive. The sheep like it and are always put there in spring to lamb down.  Some parts of the field had no grass at all, just flowers (mostly ribwort, which is highly medicinal for sheep). The leaves of flowering plants are less tough than grass blades, and the vigour of the tractor-driven machinery can shatter them before the baler can pick them up; I do really need horse-power and the gentle pace of its machinery, but of course it's slower, especially as I'm single-handed.  Speed is needed to make good hay (rain is always threatening), but perhaps there would be fewer machinery delays. Last night the tractor broke down in the middle of the field  - a blocked fuel filter that I didn't even know existed . . . . horses don't have those.
So the hay harvest has started! Such a long way to go till it's all in the barn - such a lot of hard work. But the old mixed grasses smell so good as they dry, and the flowers and butterflies and grasshoppers glow in the sun, and the owls and buzzards patrol the field hunting the suddenly exposed voles and mice. It's real farming.