[My comments below are informed by being brought up in a Southern Ontario farming family; while my family was mechanized, many of my surrounding "clan" was not - as a mennonite, many of my friends and acquaintances were much less mechanized: still, even of those mennos that shunned electricity, a great portion were still willing to use an internal combustion engine, and thus at least had tractor driven plows, reapers, bailers, combines, and so on. But, when I was young, there were still farms within walking distance that cut and sheaved hay and straw rather than baling it. That didn't last very long; by the time I was in my teens, nearly everyone was baling, and by the time I was in my twenties, nearly everyone was big-baling.
Oddly enough, I strongly identify the Heortlings with the Menno families I grew up with; probably a bad idea, since Heortlings aren't exactly pacifists 8) but the rural connection is still there.]
In the real world, harvest times vary depending on what you're harvesting, because different things are harvested at different times. To a large extent, livestock harvesting is the more flexible than crop harvesting.
Its certainly the case that actual harvesting happens quickly and is a massive drain on labour resources when it takes place. This is principally so because harvesting consists of at least two or three phases:
(a) Cut/Reap/Dig up
(b) Prepare for storage (remove from stem, thresh, sheave, wash,
&c.)
(c) Store (bring under a roof).
The labour doesn't stop there, though. After bringing under a roof, often post-storage processing has to happen (preserving, cutting, mashing, salting, whatever) before the harvest can be properly stored away for the long term. Step (c) is the not-so-simple task of removing from the field or pre-prep area and bringing to wherever you're going to store the stuff.
For example, hay laid up for feeding livestock through the winter can be harvested twice, or even three times, during the warm months.
Mid summer brings the leafy first cut. The rougher second and third cuts at the end of summer or early fall.
Harvesting hay involves cutting and stacking in the field to dry (you don't store freshly cut hay; that's a disaster waiting to happen). After a few days drying, the sheaves can be brought into shelter and stored.
In the real world, this process must be worked around weather forecasting. It can rain up to a day before you cut, but you probably want a day of clear weather before you cut. You *don't* want any rain at all when the rain is lying to dry, or stacked in sheaves in the field. It can rain again once the sheaves are under cover. If the sheaves (or even worse, cut hay that's yet to be stacked) gets rained on, that means more drying time before you can store it (c.f. comment about storing wet hay -- bad idea).
What this means, practically, is that to harvest hay you need a good three days without rain. In some climates, this is a dicey amount of time. The longer you wait, the more chance it'll rain on you.
In my area of the continent, first cut hay is always the trickiest, as the rains are still fairly regular during that time (late June, early July). Second cut hay is easier to manage, as that's typically right at the end of the dry period (mid to late August). In excellent growth years, if the first cut is taken off the field early enough, then the opportunity for a third cut presents itself, but once again this is a dicey business, as that typically happens right at the end of the summer when the fall rains begin to arrive, and then you're back to the chance of storing wet hay in barns fully of dry hay (very very bad idea).
Most barn fires from this problem happen either in early summer or late summer/early fall.
Cattle consume a great deal of fodder, and haying is a major effort. Because of the time scales involved, I suspect it's most likely that this kind of thing would be done on a clan basis, rather than a stead basis. The faster you can cut, stack, dry, and store hay, the better, and that means lots and lots of hands.
Corn fodder is a different animal, but I don't envision the Heortlings having corn for some reason (anyone? do they?).
Straw is more forgiving than hay, but still, storing wet straw is a bad, bad idea.
I imagine that Heortlings probably have lots of magic surrounding the task of haying and strawing. Apart from the magics to steer that rain cloud away from the field, they must have common magics to help them efficiently scythe, stack, and tie sheaves, as well as common magics to protect their bodies while doing this (handling grasses without covering your skin is uncomfortable to say the least): hands is not really a problem because most farmers' (and thus most Heortling) hands are conditioned to the point of being nigh-invulnerable.
However, forearms, upper arms, backs, chests and abodomens don't have their skin conditioned nearly as well as the hands, and handling grasses is a very scratchy and uncomfortable business.
Harvesting vegetable and root crops (turnips, potatoes, etc) is much easier, because the tricky time juggling involved isn't such a big problem. And presumably Heortlings have magics to let them know when the first frosts will hit, so they don't have that to worry about.
-- Viktor
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