The Standing Stones field was cut today. I just popped out to get wood for the stove. The wind has dropped and the air is heavy with dew. Suspended in it is the intoxicating smell of wheat. I’m going back out to get drunk on it.

Lovely poetic turn of phrase, but not as intoxicating as Stella Artois or any number of other alcohol containing beverages.

You’re an artist and are therefore allowed a bit of artistic licence, but don’t push your luck… 😉

When corn carting one of the best things was being brought food for a impromptu picnic. 4 harvesters 4 trailers all parked up for 20 minutes no noise, dust, pressure just 8 blokes enjoying the food. Good times 😆

Oh Yeah 🙂 This is in the fields by the house. Only an ickle combine but it’s not many fields. Friend has a PROPER combine that I hoped to get to drive this year but didn’t work out. Next year then!

My favourite part of harvest time is the harvest festivals that primary school host. Nothing beats the thought of hungry pensioners throughout the land tucking into a hearty meal of tesco value beans and tinned peaches. Brings a tear to my eye it does (excuse me, but it’s rather dusty in here)

Not living on a farm anymore.

Pigface – Member

When corn carting one of the best things was being brought food for a impromptu picnic. 4 harvesters 4 trailers all parked up for 20 minutes no noise, dust, pressure just 8 blokes enjoying the food. Good times

I worked on a farm briefly in Orkney. I recall exactly that picnic vibe during the silage harvest.

Another corn-carter here.

Best summers ever were hammering through a cotswold village full of grain. 110hr weeks, flat out. Not much time to absorb it all, but I used to love chooning into Pete Tongs essential mix late on friday or saturday nights with the combine and all the tractors with all the working lights on full blaze, burning the black nights in the middle of fields on the horizon. Like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Sitting on the warm bonnet of the tractor, soaking up the close nights.

And earlier in the season we would help bring the hay bales in on a neighbouring farm in fair exchange for a picnic supper and a lot of cider 🙂

The 50s and 60s for me, the flower power era 🙄
Watching my dad on the binders stooking corn. Then on the mill
It was new fangled bales/balers by the time I was allowed onto a tractor @ 10yrs old 😆

Yep not spending every daylight hour and some of the dark ones working, harvest is hard work…

Ex fruit farm employee here. Least we had 6-8 weeks to bring everything in, nicely staggered without too much overlap.

Miss driving the MF.

Prune harvest from the windbreaks was erm… “fun” though 😈 . Stuff H+S.

Hay bales, there’s a memory. Square ones, launched with a pitchfork up onto a trailer. Carted home, offloaded onto an elevator then stacked undercover. Hard and rewarding work. I remember skin hardened like leather by baler twine and forearms like Popeye’s with the bale scratched tattoo.

I love the 12days on two off, and the constant 12 hour plus shifts

Hay bales, there’s a memory. Square ones, launched with a pitchfork up onto a trailer. Carted home

And then returning to the farm sat on top of a stack like that – brilliant. H&S, I don’t think so.

Best thing about harvest time is living somewhere where you can tell its harvest time.

“mind the strop”, I’m old enough to have played on farms were stuff was driven by a 40ft flapping canvas band – I was not not allowed near that but I was allowed to drive the tractor aged about 3 (*well keep it in a straight line as the men lifted the bales), when older, dropping bales onto the conveyor and running if it rolled back at the top, stacking the trailer in the field – it always gave me a satisfaction that my adult ‘technology’ job does not – you really did finish something – field cropped, last load, gate closed. Last night I was cheeky bimbling thru the heat haze, amazing smells, all the textures and colours, watching the various harvesting dust storms as people used the good weather and light and coming home into the blazing setting sun, this morning low lying mist, with the sun blazing through, amazing – in one field there is a sort of layered bombhole with several distinct layers – the mist appeared to be sitting on each layer with the same drop as the layers – beautiful

This is bringing back memories of a 2 yr trip to Oz, handballing the square bales on to a full size artic flat bed. Standing on the back, driving around the field up in Northern Territory near Katherine. Those trucks haul a lot of bales at one go…. then handballing them off again, but double pay…

Hard work, great times, minimal H&S b.s. plus picnics midday and beers at the farm in the evening…

Blown out biceps and forearms, calloused palms and baler twine rash… oh yes..

thank goodness I live in a city and dont have to worry about all this seasonal randomness

Best thing about harvest time is living somewhere where you can tell its harvest time

That indeed- wish I still did

The sudden rise in dead mice (and weight gain for local cats) & the thick layer of dust over everything tells me the combines have been busy.

Are tattle picking holidays unique to Scotland?

Are tattle picking holidays unique to Scotland?

Too late to edit, that should be tattie.

As far as I know there is no official tittle tattle holiday,

A mate of mine is not so keen, did 105 hrs last week!

I remember going to where the tattie truck used to arrive at 5 in the morning, loads of rough as **** men and women standing waiting, women were far scarier than the men. I got told I was too wee, and sent home!. That would’ve been around 1990, and the pay was 15 quid a day for a 10 hour shift.

Thank god I never got picked!.

I got told I was too wee, and sent home!.

Jeez? How big were the women?

EDIT
Greg – YGM re single malt.

Another corn carter… my main memory is of how difficult it was to match speeds with a combine to get a nice even fill in the trailer without loosing half the grain to the field. Other people made it look so easy…. Sitting in tractor in field waiting for the next run.

I drove the corn carts one year, with a really grumpy old combine driver that moaned if you kept him waiting.
Once I got to him before he was full, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself, until he pointed behind me, where my trailer was after the tow pin broke. Even worse, the tow hitch on the trailer had buried itself into the ground, and needed a jack and lots of wooden blocks to get out.

mcmoonter – Member
I got told I was too wee, and sent home!.
Jeez? How big were the women?

It was ardrossan Pete, they were monsters!.

Went up to see friends and family for a couple of weeks in northern Fife this summer next to Cupar, the place was heaving with farm machinery from morning to night and then through the night. Ah Pitormie strawberries the best I’ve ever tasted.

I do miss the harvest, I love the smell of freshly combined wheat and the satisfaction of getting the job finished!

The huge long hours during harvest you can keep, (although I’m still doing 12 hour days in my present job!

From a recent holiday in Norfolk. Looks like damned hard work.

thank goodness I live in a city and dont have to worry about all this seasonal randomness

Either cold and wet in spring, autumn and winter, or stifling, sweaty and gritty in summer.
Sounds wonderful… 😐

Ah Pitormie strawberries the best I’ve ever tasted.

I could be wrong, but I have a recollection that the folks who run the fruit farm at Pittormie are descended from the guy who built our stable yard back in the mid 1800s. He was wine merchant who sadly died before he saw the project reach completion.

tattie picking. £5 / day when I started, sun had barely risen, fields still under layer of frost. 1978/80..
Hardest job I have ever done; up here still get 2 weeks holiday, tat tie holidays but all mechanised as far as I can tell.

Just finished combining the last field an hour ago. It has been a fairly pleasant harvest this year, its the first time in about five years we haven’t had to worry about the combine being stuck in wet holes.

My favourite job during harvest is round baling on a hot afternoon with the shuffeling sound of the baler picking up the straw, with the bales just popping out of the baler every hundren yards.

I used to work for a local pig farmer during the summer holidays carting straw for him. Dawn ’til dark, pitching five courses by hand then elevating the last four, the work used to last for about six or seven weeks, first the barley where you’d get the haulms under your skin, the the wheat which would cut your fingers down to the quick of your nails. Fantastic fun, bloody hard work, and I have shoulders and chest to bear testimony to the sheer hard graft of it all. Every day used to finish at the local pub where we’d have a few beers before dragging ourselves home to an agonising bath. The pay was great, and as a student I paid no tax, so it was all cash in hand. No time to spend any of it, so I was always absolutely minted by the start of term.

The farmer had several hundred thousand head of pig. He had agreements with virtually every arable farmer in Warwickshire and some in Hereford, where he got the straw for what it cost him to bale and cart it. Occasionally he wanted some of us to nip to Hereford to help out there, and flew us in his Jet Ranger to save time.

As a small child, hearing the roar through the darkness of the combines in the next field, and then their huge lights.

As a child then teenager, helping local farmers with the straw baling and then riding home on top of the loaded trailer with the straw we’d earned to bed the horses over winter. Same with the hay. I remember the baler twine burns all too well.

As an adult, going for a small jaunt on my bike (first time in months) the other night past the random collection of round bales, square bales, silage.

But, being veg growing country where I am, there are a series of harvests, depending on what’s in. The fields are sharp with the acid aroma of onions right now.

Most of all, however, it’s in the next month or so when the flinkin’ maize in the field at the end of the garden is cut down and we get our view back. It’s nine feet tall..!

(PS hello again STW.)

He’s back! 😀