About our Hay
Hay is made just once a year usually June or July and then stored for the rest of the year, one of the key factors to quality and incredibly important is the weather, when its growing and when it is made, these two major factors dictate the quality every year whether its good and plentiful or not so good and in short supply. So in some years this can make the quality of hay we demand pretty hard to find.
Our Soft Hay comes from long established meadows that have not been ploughed and re seeded for many years, this type of hay has that wonderful fragrance we associate with fresh cut hay and is likely to include older type grasses like Cocksfoot Fescues Crested Dogstail to name a few. It has finer stems and slower growing. Due to the poor summer we had last year we are using second cut which is has more leaf and a slightly different fragrance to previous years.
Stalky or Seed Hay is from fields that have been re-seeded with a more vigorous grass variety mainly from the Rye family of grasses, this hay will have thicker stem and more of a yellow colour, smell will be different too but has a higher feed value and especially good for wearing teeth down.
Standard Hay For those who would like a middle of the road hay that’s not too soft or too stalky then this one is a safe bet. Nice green new season hay with good fragrance. A good all rounder.
English Timothy Hay grown in the UK has a thick stem too and has large seed heads so also a good feed. It can be quite hard to grow here and needs especially good weather to make properly. Should be noted this years is not as green as last years,
American Timothy Hay grown in Washington State USA is the same as the English version but they seem to have a better growing climate, cold winters and hot summers, so this has a much greener colour and is favoured all over the world for it’s consistent quality.
Meadow Mix is something you will not see normally as we mix this with meadow hay grown here and American Timothy, just an experiment to start with but seems to be going down well, we think it’s a bit more interesting for your animals as they forage.
Short Hay If you have a concern for your smaller animals sustaining an eye injury from the long hay this may work for you, these are short strands that have been cleaned through our dust removal process. Loose filled into one of our boxes so you can get out easily.
Straw is the stem from the cereal crop in this case barley and we usually use spring sown as the straw is softer. The cereal has to be sown every year and when its ready to harvest a large combine harvester separates the grain from the stem or straw, the grain is used for brewing and animal feed while the straw is a good source of roughage but can also be used for bedding.
may suit if you are concered about eyes getting poked with the long hay.
Finally is for smaller animals that may stab themselves in the eyes with the long strands, we hear of this and although this won’t suit everybody it may help if you have a concern about this. Approximate strand lengths 50mm and less and is a miix of several types of our hay and is loose filled into one of our boxes, approximate weight 1.5 kg.
We try to keep as organic as we can, this means we use no chemical sprays to control weeds so occasionally the odd dock or cow parsley may get though our screening system.
This is a brief summary of the hay we supply, to further assist and to get an idea of current stocks there are videos of each hay on the Video Page, click on these to run and you can see exactly what we have. We try to keep these up to date with the hay we are sending out.
Our business provides the choice of different textures, full length and not chopped and in addition to this our unique dust removal process eliminates practically all the harmful and damaging air borne dust, its possible to mix and match on different types too either for a variety or just to trial one type that may be preferred over another. But please remember it’s a natural product and it will vary all the time.
(Click here to see videos)
