This summer's heat wave saw our hay meadows cut, dried and baled in record time - and advice from 16th century poet Thomas Tusser still holds true:

Let hay still bide,
till well it be dride.
Hay made, away carrie,
no longer then tarrie.

from Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie 1580.

December 2006

Winter isn't far way and the rain seems endless, but what a lovely summer we had. . .

That beautiful season  . . . the Summer!
    Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
      Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline

February 2007

A winter's dawn greets Woodside . . .

I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hay at last!

Despair in July, Joy in August. Some of the best, and latest, hay we have ever made.