Donald Emery on Hay

Autumn and Winter we’d be ploughing, the Spring would be cultivating and sowing.

Then it was sort of fairly quiet. Then we’d be haymaking and then harvesting and then back to ploughing and the Winter again.

You know it was a fixed cycle really, plough in the Winter, sow in the Spring, make the hay in the Spring and silage ‘cos we had to make silage then too that was a new thing to us.

And then your harvest time. Initially you see it was binding and then the combines were already beginning to come into general use and then it was horse combine so you had then your harvest … when I remember the harvest as a youngster, there’d be a tractor driver, somebody riding the binder, and about four of us standing all the sheaves up.