General Chat

Watching a local news programme the other night when the weather forecast lady was showing some photographs people had sent in and it made me realize just how rural life has changed in my lifetime and how people think it is something it is not.

She said, and the presenters replied in a dreamy kind of fashion, that this time of year is the time of haystacks as she showed a photograph of some of those large straw bales.

Well, no, those bales are not ricks, they are bales. The old, small bales were stored as ricks but these big ones generally are not and the round ones, some of which she showed, just would not be. They were designed to fit in those round feeders or maybe it was the other way round.

She didn't show any hay either, the first cut of which is even before the barley harvest and I don't think I have seen a hay rick in fifty years.

Even when I was growing up half a century ago, bales were stored in barns rather than Stacks. Locally the straws are turned into round bales, usually wrapped in black plastic.
Someone, somewhere, must be producing the rectangular variety if Country File is to be believed.

If I remember, I’ll ask a farmers -daughter friend next week. Both her brothers are still farming.

I can remember the odd rick being thatched but Dutch barns were beginning to come in when I was growing up.

There was no additional capital outlay to build a rick and no need to dedicate a piece of land to it for more than a year and threshing was beginning to be done at harvest.

Hay never has been straw though!

No hay locally. Any pasture would have been eaten by cattle, sheep or horses. Could ‘set aside’ be a contributing factor?

Grain is grown in rotation with other crops, hence the straw. Mind you, hundreds of acres have gone up in smoke this year, before they were harvested.

The latest development at the end of our road is soft fruits in acres of poly tunnels. Down in Thanet there are purpose built buildings growing tomatoes all year round. Land previously used for grains, lettuce & brassicas has been taken out of rotation.

Out and about a few weeks ago, we saw some stooks in a field, can't remember the last time I saw those!

What were they, Sheila?

I would imagine they had been grown for thatching.

I remember my uncle telling me about some strange crop, might have been linseed, that had been grown on the farm where he had worked that needed to be cut to just lie on the ground (I think that was the detail).

Anyway, they were trying to work out haw to reap this crop and he suggested they get the old reaper binder out and run it without twine. That reaper binder had been converted from being horse drawn but it did the job.

I think stooks were small stacks of about six hand-bound sheaves, stacked together by hand for bulk collecting later - frankly hazy memories of west of Scotland in the early 1940s!

When we moved from city to a village when I was young I was friendly with a farmer's daughter. How we used to enjoy climbing up the haystacks to slide down them .... before we were chased by her father. :-D

Great fun for us but not for him.

They were known as shocks as well.

A bunch of wheat or whatever was gathered was tied into a sheaf, these were stacked into stooks which would be made into a rick until the slack period after harvest when it would be threshed on the floor of the barn.

That would leave longer straw than a combine would cut so it might have been grown specifically for thatching.

Yes, they may have been for thatching, it was in Marlborough downs area, lots of thatch round there.

Hay over here is now in long rolls wrapped in white plastic, which seems to either be left in the field, or gathered together outside the old barn. The plastic used to be black, but there started to be a change about 8-10 years ago.

Darn - forgot to ask friend about Bales. Started to then got diverted into problems the hot weather has caused them.
Apparently they've been irrigating like mad, then it rained heavily. The heavy rain caused a 'crust' to form making it difficult for additional rain or irrigation to soak in.

.We are so lucky to live here and now.

We will eat.