press (hay)

1. verb, to compact hay; 2. noun, ‘pressing’; 3. adjective, ‘pressed’

1.
“Did you ever press hay?”
“Dad pressed. He and Tom, they used to go around pressing as a team, like jumping hay. I imagine that’s why he had a bad heart.”

“Tie a horse to the- hook them up to the tongue, and they’d just keep going around in circles all day long while they were pressing the hay or straw, whatever they had to press.”

“He used to truck hay, or, you know, draw hay over for Smith’s, ’cause they always pressed hay.”

2.
“My grandfather actually started the farm on the Island, and in the wintertime farmers would augment their income by baling up these big bales of hay, called pressing, and they’d bale up the loose hay that they put in the barn.”

3.
“Well one winter the ice was no good, so what they did, they had all this hay pressed up, and my grandfather bought a little barge and a tug and ran it up on the shore at the end, at the concession roads, and farmers’d load the hay on, and he’d ferry it across to the States, and they’d put it on the trains, and it’d go to Pennsylvania.”

“Tell her about the jumping hay.”
“Well there was this big, like, a box affair. It was quite big, and they’d throw the loose hay in it, and then two men would be in there jumping, tramping it down, and when it got so hard, they’d put these wires through it and tie it, and then they’d shove out a pressed bale, and they used to draw that all over to The States in wintertime and sell hay.”