HAY MAKING.

Clutha Leader, Volume I, Issue 22, 10 December 1874, Page 3

HAY MAKING.

Don't dry your hay too much. Hay may be dried till it is as worthless as straw. As a good coffee-maker would say, " Don't burn your coffee, but brown it;" so we say, don't dry your hay, but cure it. Our good old mothers who relied upon herb tea instead of ••potecavy medicine," gathered their herbs while in blossom aud cured them in the shade. This is the philosophy of making good hay. Cut in the blossom, and cured in the shade.. The sugar of the plant when it is in bloom is in the stalk, ready to form the seeds. If the plant is cut earlier, the sugar is not there ; if later the sugar has become converted to woody matter. Hay should be well wilted in the sun, but cured in the cock. Better to be a little too green than too dry. If, on putting it into the barn, there is danger of " heating in the mow," put on some salt. Cattle will like it none the less. Hear, light, and dry winds, will soon take the starch and sugar, which constitute the goodness of hay, out of it ; and the addition of showers render it almost worthless. Grass cured with the least exposure to the dry winds and searching sunshine, is, more nutritious than if longer exposed, however good the weather may be. If over-cured, it contains more woody fibre and less nutritive matter. The true art of haymaking, then, consists in cutting* the grass when the sugar and starch are most fully developed, and before they are converted into seed and woody fibre ; and curing it to the point when it will answer to put into the barn without heating, and no more. The whole science of hay-making- consists of three things : First, cut the grass when in bloom ; second, dry it not much ; third, let it go through a sweating process before it goes into the barn. Vn these three things depend the quality of hay. Hay should be grass preserved. The nearer to the fresh tender, succulent grass you get it, the better. Could we have grass growing in winter, how much better than hay. Grass when in blossom, has ils full growth, excepting the seed. It is yet tender in a measure and it has an advantage which no other stage of the grass possesses — it develops its sugar then. Especially is this the case with clover, whose head when in blossom is a globe of sweetness.