Making hay

This post is aimed at everyone who thinks that life in rural France is just one long holiday, like that TV programme Escape to the Sun, but on steroids. Well, it isn’t, not all of the time anyway.

A couple of posts back I explained how mainly due to a long period of wet weather, but also because of the work that’s been going on on my land putting in a new septic tank with all that that entails, the grass had grown incredibly long. Usually by this time of the year my grass cutting programme using my trusty Jonsered ride-on mower is well underway but by the time all of the fates had aligned sufficiently for me to be able to cut the grass for the first time it was much too long for that.

So I had no alternative other than to attack it by hand – or more correctly, using my hand-held brush cutter. This had two results. Firstly, the work was so tough that it broke my old machine and I had to order a new one, and secondly, the long grass that I cut down was left lying on the ground. Before the new machine arrived I had to finish the initial cut using my ride-on mower whether I liked it or not. I didn’t and neither did my machine due to the volume of grass I was forcing it to cut but although its cutting belt screamed and smoked a few times, I got the job done without it snapping.

But that still left the problem of the grass left lying on the ground, a problem compounded by a bit more rain in the meantime. We’ve had a few dry days since and this morning I thought I’d check the grass, which is rapidly turning into hay, to see whether it was dry enough to be lifted, and it was. The farmers around here will soon be cutting all the local fields for hay and they get the job done in a trice using machinery. I have no such luxury and the only way I could get rid of the grass was by raking it up using my lawn rake and taking it away and dumping it in the woods.

Cutting the grass, which usually takes me just a couple of hours or so, had already taken three days of back-breaking work. Today, if I was lucky and worked hard, I thought that I might get rid of the grass in a day which I did, making the total four days for the whole job. But boy, as I type this, don’t I know I’ve done a days’ work… 🙁

I originally thought about taking the grass away in my wheelbarrow but it didn’t take long for me to realise that if I did, I’d end up walking miles and be more knackered from that than from collecting the grass. So I decided to use my small trailer, which turned out to be an excellent decision. Here’s the first load with some of the raked heaps of grass in the background.

I ended up filling three trailer loads of grass in what was a very blustery day with the wind coming from all directions, seemingly at the same time on occasions. But I got the job done and although it was a shame to dump perfectly good, clean hay in the woods, I can still get to it and hopefully it’ll make good compost when I get to plant trees and shrubs later on. The area of the land that I had to rake was about 2000 sq. metres, so not that small an area, and here’s how it looked in the early evening after I’d finished the job.

So the grass is now in about the same condition as it would have been after an initial cut with my mower. The weather forecast for tomorrow is very good – still a bit windy but sunny and a high of 18 degrees C – so I’ll aim to get out there and give it a proper mow, this time leaving a few stripes behind 😉