Dodging BBs

The guys are facing an uncomfortable dilemma. Thanks to endless showery rain interspersed with heavy storms, our harvest this summer is at least three weeks behind.

This spring, as usual, the boss planted barley, oats and field peas as a nurse crop for the new hay seeding. The big burly plants crowd and shade out weeds and are harvested about mid summer, having given the delicate alfalfa, clover and grass seedlings a chance to get growing.

Normally, this is a simple matter of mowing the stuff down with a diskbine and chopping it up for the cows to eat or to store it with our AgBagger.
Enter that three week delay.
All those nurse crop plants are ripe instead of green like they are supposed to be. (You should see the grins on the beaks of the turkeys and crows as they help themselves to the bounty of free grain).

Have you ever gone to the store and seen those pea soup mixes?The ones consisting of little green half-peas that are hard as quartz and just about as tasty? Well, glue a pair of those half-peas together and you have a field pea. When whirled through the spinning blades of the diskbine you also have a not-quite-deadly, but certainly uncomfortable missile. Glue hundreds of thousands of them together and you have a hay field here at Northview.

The other day the boss and Alan were hustling to get the cows fed and some stuff in the bag ahead of yet another rain. The boss was mowing and he was under constant assault from a barrage of field pea BBs. The darned things leave welts. (He showed me.) So he signaled to Alan (driving the BIG tractor to chop. It BTW has a CAB). Sure enough the kid had left a nasty old hooded jacket in that very cab. They met in the middle of the field to pass it over. Then the boss donned it, hood and all, despite the clinging heat and humidity that is characteristic of Upstate NY summer afternoons.
Despite the stink too. Objects left in tractor cabs during summers like this mildew more than just a little. Especially when the doors and windows are off...and it is hot after all.
And despite the enclosed spiders...they love to nest in old coats. And to crawl all over and nip the tender parts of folks who are intrepid enough to put them on.

The boss is nothing if not intrepid. And when he was going against the wind he could stand the smell and the itchy heat...or at least it was more bearable than the BB attack.
Going with the wind he had to take it off. It was so hot his head was spinning (I think this is why most of us don't wear coats in the summer up here, but then most of us aren't being plugged from behind by round balls of petrified vegetable matter). Somehow he managed to finish his mowing just before the next deluge.

Normally I figure that when the men are doing field work and we women are in the barn milking the cows, they have the better part of the deal. Back when I used to chop, despite the complicated nature of the job, I always loved to get out of the barn and into the beauty of the fields. The swooping barn swallows, the perfumed breezes, the gold and green vistas hemmed in by dark green mountains...it is pretty nice out there even if you are working hard.

However, now that they are under constant attack by small stinging missiles, I guess I will stay in the barn and let them have at it...poor guys.