Making Hay in Ohio Amish country

I’m still picking the splinters out of my hands this morning and counting up the nicks and scratches on my arms.

The Amish broke a city boy in yesterday.

But it was only about three and a half hours, so I guess they went easy on me.

Hay is ‘made’ in groups.  I think I counted ten of us yesterday–two Amish men, three teen boys, a pre-teen girl, two more boys aged about five and nine, and rounding it out, a little three-year-old along for the ride with her daddy, clinging to his shirttails like reigns as papa worked the real reigns hitched to the two lumbering Belgian workhorses.

Oh and me, the ‘newby’.

This was the last stage of the haymaking process–the owner had already taken care of the ‘hard part’, cutting the hay and baling it in rectangular chunks.  Our job was to chuck and stack the bales onto the fifteen-foot flat wagon as it trundled slowly along the side of the pasture hill.

Cimg7649

We then took each load of about 50 bales up to the barn where we stacked them to the ceiling among a swirling storm of dust and particles.  It would be pretty nasty if you had allergies.

Hay is for horses, and this cutting along with one, possibly two more, will feed the owner’s steeds through the winter.

It took four loads to clear the field this time.  The reward for each load was a swig of icy water from the community thermos.

The last time through, I got the call.

‘Come steer’ they said.

‘You know I don’t have my license for this’ I warned.

Despite my lack of certification, they let me give it a go, and I was amazed at how easily the massive beasts responded to the slight tugs and verbal commands.

‘I think I’m weaving a bit’ I said.

‘We’ll have to check if you were drinking’ replied ‘Eli’.

After knocking out Eli’s field, we headed to the neighbors across the valley, taking the hay wagon off-road through some fields and over hills.  At one point we went across a particularly bumpy stream bed.

‘The ride of your life!’ Eli called back to me.

At the second field, we had to deal with a much steeper hill on the way up to the barn, and the two Belgians proceeded to give out of gas near the top.  One of the teens grabbed a chunk of concrete and stuck it behind a wheel.  ‘Amish brake’ he giggled.

The owner of this pasture, ‘Jacob’, quickly arrived with a triplet of feisty haflingers to come to the stranded Belgians’ rescue.  We quickly offloaded half of the bales onto his wagon and made it the rest of the way.

After finishing Jacob’s field–a little bit of sport, as we took turns dunking and shooting around the clunky hoop hung up in Jacob’s barn.

‘I didn’t realize you didn’t understand Dutch’ said Jacob, referring to the fact that the whole crowd, which had inflated to about 16 participants by the time we worked Jacob’s field, had been chattering away in the Amish dialect the whole time.

‘Well I understood those horses were pretty tired!’ I replied, with everybody cracking up.

And me too–Eli had warned me that I would ‘discover new joints tomorrow’ and I think he was right.

Get the Amish in your inbox

Join 15,000 email subscribers. No spam. 100% free

    Similar Posts

    Leave a Reply to Natalya (talj) Cancel reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    5 Comments

    1. Thanks Natalya, I’m really glad you found the blog. I hope you enjoy it. I have been blessed to have had a lot of contact with the Amish and have really enjoyed the friendship and the different perspective I’ve gotten from being around them.

    2. Natalya (talj)

      I have stumbled across your blog whilst browsing the internet and wanted to leave a comment.

      I live in the UK and until the terrible tragedy within the Amish community I was unaware these people even existed. Ignorant? No. Just never come across these people. But now I have I am interested to learn more and see the world from a different perspective, I am so glad I found you blog and I will be following how you get a long in the coming weeks and months.

    3. Dave Carrig

      Sounds like a cool experience – Any chance they’d let you go to church with them?

    4. Can outsiders attend Amish church?

      Yes, I think at least some would have no problem with that…I had already been invited once a few years ago in Indiana but unfortunately couldn’t make it…this time around I mentioned it to a couple friends and they said it would probably be no problem, one said that they might even give a message in English (since it’s a (high) German language service), which surprised me. So I’m looking forward.

      The services where they don’t allow outsiders are the ones just before the twice-yearly communion service, during which they have to make sure everything is spiritually ‘right’ in the congregation–ie if there has been any serious discord among members they have to get that settled otherwise they can’t go forth with communion.

    5. marge

      Very interesting reading, I have throughly enjoyed your comments. Keep up the good work.