Weed Hay

     Making hay from tumbleweeds caused me to remember the 50’s and even the early 60’s when for at least a couple of years, we found ourselves approaching Fall and Winter with not enough hay to get our cattle herd through the winter.  So, we cut tumbleweeds in the wheat stubble and used it for cattle feed.

      The process was a little different then, no 30-foot swather, no big round bailer.  For some of those years, we used a five-foot horse drawn mower, drawn in this case with the “Old D” John Deere.  The sickle was driven by lugged iron wheels on the mower.  Lubrication of the pitman bearings was done by dripping oil into spring-capped oil cups filled with cotton.  The iron seat on the mower was superfluous since the operator had to sit on the tractor instead of sitting on the mower guiding the horses.

    Some time later, Dad bought a John Deere No. 5 mower, the 7 foot sickle driven by the tractor’s power takeoff shaft, and with no seat.  The “D”, lacking a PTO, was reduced to pulling the horse-drawn dump rake.

      The seat on the rake was not superfluous.  In some ways, replacing a horse with a tractor was a step backwards.  Even though the horse had been replaced by the tractor, the rake still required a rider to hold down the foot pedal that kept the rake’s tines in position to gather the hay, and to step on the trip lever that raised the rake tines and dumped the gathered hay.   With the tractor, it took two people to do the raking.

      Riding the rake wasn’t the desirable job.  It was dusty and the hold-down pedal could kick up when the rake went over uneven ground or a rake wheel dropped into a chuck hole or rut.  Your right knee was always in danger.  At high speeds (6 mph with the “D” in high gear) the rake tines could fly up and hit the bottom of the seat when you stepped on the trip pedal.  Of course, there were always insects such as flying ants and gnats to aid and abet the dust and pollen in the hay field.

     After the hay was mowed, we raked it into windrows with the dump rake.  Getting a windrow and not just a bunch of random dumps was important.  The rake operator had to step on the trip lever at just the right time so that the dump lay in line with the previous dump.

     When all the hay was raked into windrows, we went down each windrow and raked it into a series of piles.  The rake operator got a workout then.  He had to trip the dump lever frequently and even help the rake to dump by shoving down on the handle used to pull the rake tines up by hand.  The handle was designed to raise the rake tines and hold them up when “roading” the rake.

      When the hay was raked into piles, Dad would use the farmhand with the hay fork to pick up the hay and bring it to the stack, near the corral where we would keep the cattle during the winter.  He would pick up a few of the piles until the fork was full.  He would set that first forkful on the hay stubble and back away from it.  A second forkful would be deposited on top of the first, and a third forkful on top of the first two. 

      When the pile was suitably high, Dad would back away several feet from the pile, throttle up and take a run at the pile.  If all went well, the fork, back end a couple feet off the ground, front end riding on the ground, would hit the pile and come away loaded.  At just the right time, he dropped the rear end of the fork and raised the tip, then raised everything and headed for the stack without ever stopping.

     Standing on the stack, you heard the tractor throttle up, and you knew a load of hay was headed your way.

     I was too young to help with the haying before Dad bought the farmhand.  I guess you either threw loose hay onto the hayrack, or if a binder was used, threw the bundles on the hayrack and hauled them to a stack near where the cattle would be fed in the winter.

     I was old enough to stack hay hauled in with the farmhand.  I remember coming home from school, changing clothes, and heading for the haystack.  One person could easily keep up with the farmhand, depending some on how far the farmhand had to go to fetch the hay.  What I remember is a haystack with its entire length covered with piles of hay that needed to be stacked, a rather depressing proposition for a kid with a pitch fork in hand. 

     The main idea of a haystack was keeping the water out.  Moisture would cause the hay to mold and rot.  Having a neat, straight stack was secondary, but still important.  Having straight edges and square corners was not as important as having a straight vertical wall.  Slanting towards the middle of the stack would result in hay sliding down the side.  Slanting away from the center would result in the stack caving off when it got higher and heavier.  Either deformity would result in having to rebuild the stack.

      When I was still small, I remember being on the stack with my brothers.  The loaded farmhand fork approached the stack headed straight for me.  I tried to move out of the way, but the hay was still loose and my leg fell into a hole and down I went.  The hay from the fork came tumbling off and I was covered up.  It didn’t take long for me to scramble out from under the stuff.  The stackers and the tractor operator laughed as I crawled out.  I didn’t laugh.

    Usually the hay was millet and wasn’t bad to handle, no stickers or chaff.  The exception was when pig weed or red roots infested the millet.  That seed head was stickery and hard to get out of socks and cuffs.

       The weed hay was another matter.  The fire weed had a yellowish pollen that got everywhere.  Worse was the Russian thistle which had a stickerish branch that scratched any bare skin it could find.  How could an animal eat such a thing?  But they did, and apparently liked it. 

     One year, to ensure the cattle would eat those weeds, Dad bought rock salt in bags.  When a layer of the stack was complete, we would go along and scatter rock salt all over it.  A few stray pebbles from the salt bags found their way into my mouth.  Not bad.  (We used to take a few licks off of fresh salt blocks before they were put out for the cows, too.  It’s a wonder I don’t have hypertension.) The cows throve on the salted weeds.

     The most vivid memory of haying involved the horse-drawn mower coupled to the “Old D”.  It is also a painful memory.  We were mowing millet in the “field by the road.”  We had a stray dog who wandered into the farm yard one day and adopted us.  He went everywhere we went.  Somebody called him “Billy Whiskers” and the name stuck.

     Two or three of us were riding on the D, my oldest brother driving it, the others clinging to the fenders.  Billy was running along, sometimes behind us, sometimes off to one side or the other of the tractor.  As we came to the northwest corner, my brother turned the tractor.  Billy was standing in the millet where he would have been out of the way if we had kept going north, but of course we couldn’t keep going north because that millet was already down.

      So he was standing right in line with the mower when we turned east.  The sickle was invisible, being hidden by the standing millet in front of it and covered up by the cut millet as it fell, so Billy didn’t see the danger. 

    Uncle Ricky grabbed the D clutch and pulled.  It almost stopped, but a characterisitic of the old D was it didn’t stop on demand, especially when it was lightly loaded, as it was with the mower.  It made a final lurch, and Billy’s left hind leg was gone.

     Who was in a greater state of shock, Billy or us?  Billy yelped, tried to jump up on the tractor with us.  He couldn’t make it, and he was bleeding.  I’m afraid we weren’t much comfort. Taking a stray dog, even a loved pet, to the vet wasn’t a thing we even thought about.

     Eventually, Billy crept off, where, to die?  We continued on with the mowing.  What else could we do?  The next morning, Billy surprised us by showing up for breakfast as usual.  We thought for sure he would have bled to death.  But he was the same old Billy, only now he was a three-legged dog.  How long he lived after that, I can’t say for sure, only it seemed like quite a few years that we had a three-legged dog.

     The hay business came to an end in 1972 when Dad had a heart attack.  He was advised that the strain of caring for cattle during the cold winter could be fatal.  In a way, he was relieved by that advice, since dealing with cattle was never his favorite occupation.  He became a wheat-only farmer.

     For the last 40 years, the pasture has been rented by the same neighbors, and any hay that has been made in those 40 years has been put up by neighbors on shares.  Our share got sold and hauled by the buyer.