Posts Tagged ‘hay bales’
Didn’t Meet
I didn’t get to meet our new support person from This Old Horse yesterday as I’d hoped. For unknown reasons, he was a no-show when the delivery of hay arrived. This leaves me uneasy. Our first two experience with the new person have been non-appearances. I hope this won’t be the case when we eventually have a pressing need.
It’s not so much about us being inconvenienced, but it’s that the horses are the ones we are trying to protect from suffering whenever there is an issue.
At least we no longer have any concerns over getting low on hay. It always feels so good to have the hay shed stocked. Plus, I’ve currently got twice the regular amount of bales staged in the barn after prepping for the new delivery, so I won’t need to toss bales again for quite a while.
While we were standing around the trailer talking after all the work was completed, Light nodded off to sleep and fell to her knees like Cyndie and I had seen her do before. It was affirming to have other people also witness it.
I wish I felt more empowered to do something to help Light lay down and get some deep sleep if sleep deprivation is indeed the problem. Our previous effort of adding something to her food doesn’t appear to have done anything beneficial for her.
Lately, all the horses have seemed to have less interest in finishing their grain. Per Johanne’s recommendation, I served up smaller portions at their afternoon feeding, and there were minimal leftovers after they had eaten their fill. It didn’t appear to concern them in the least, so I will continue with that adjustment for the time being.
Earlier in the day, I enjoyed a Facetime call from Cyndie and the kids in Florida, where they were able to boast about the warm weather. When I stepped out to do morning chores yesterday, the wind chill impact made it feel 70 degrees colder than it was a day and a half earlier. It’s getting pretty complicated at the coat tree in our front hall with all the different outerwear I’ve been selecting in order to adapt to the conditions at any given time of each day.
Their decisions are more along the lines of which bathing suit to wear and whether they have applied enough sun protection.
What a difference 1700 miles makes, eh?
.
.
Moving Hay
When we moved to the country twelve and a half years ago, there was a lot that I didn’t have a clue how to do. After a career in manufacturing, you’d think I would have a better perspective on inventory management, but I struggled a little bit in figuring out how to manage turning over our firewood and bales of hay.
“First in; first out” (FIFO) is a classic method of using the oldest inventory first. That can be a trick to do when stacking your wood or hay in storage. The oldest ends up at the bottom of the pile.
For our firewood, I quickly changed from stacking it horizontally across the width of the shed to short rows, back to front. I just use the rows up from right to left and stack new wood behind them as space opens up.
That method doesn’t work for our hay. Since the bales arrive in large numbers all at once, we fill up the hay shed, and the last bales stacked become the first bales used. The routine I’ve settled on requires that we use up almost all of the last delivery before ordering more, which gets a little nerve-wracking since we don’t have complete control over when the next delivery can happen or how fast the horses will be burning through bales any given week.
When we do get close and the delivery is scheduled, I then hustle to move the last of the old bales out of the way in the shed and stage them in the barn. That is what I worked on yesterday, moving the last 21 bales from the hay shed to the barn.
The chance to meet our new handler, Jeremy from This Old Horse, ended up getting postponed yesterday afternoon. However, while I was hauling hay bales, I received a call from a contractor who wanted to come out this afternoon to talk about helping me put up a shade sail. I anticipate it will be a challenge to get a firm quote since there are so many unknowns at this point, but at a minimum, I hope to gauge a level of interest, knowledge, and ability for the project as I imagine it.
I’m expecting new hay to be delivered on Sunday, and if all goes as planned, I hope to meet Jeremy at the same time. It would be great to have another person to help toss bales into the shed for stacking.
It feels like a lot is happening here while Cyndie is in Florida. Of course, yesterday morning, before she left, Cyndie baked oatmeal raisin cookies for me to give the folks stopping by.
The more I give away, the fewer there will be for me to resist eating. Now, that’s inventory management.
.
.
Anticipating Delivery
We were expecting a delivery of hay bales yesterday but by the time rain reached our region I assumed it wouldn’t happen. A chain of four people communicating, including Cyndie who was on a flight to Boston, revealed it was being rescheduled to today or tomorrow.
That was fine with me. I got some reasonable work accomplished while waiting in the morning, cutting the grass along the fence line down the driveway with the power trimmer. By the time I had exhausted the first tank of gas, a mist was beginning to fall.
I took Delilah for a walk and took advantage of an opportunity to take pictures of the aftermath of conquering the leaning poplar tree up near the road.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
That is the one that took me five angled cuts to bring the top portion vertical and then required I head back to get the pole chainsaw to finish. The job is not complete yet. I need to split the cut wood and haul off the branches to either be run through the chipper or tossed on the natural border fence along our north property line.
That will wait for another day. It isn’t raining right now, and I have just received a message that hay delivery will happen this morning. I am a little anxious about how the steep drop-off of our narrow new driveway will work for the turns required to come off the pavement at the roundabout of our hay shed and then back on again afterward.
I hope to be out there before he arrives to talk out a plan that should work best. Overshooting is a given, so I’d like to pick the most forgiving spot.
.
.
Season’s Bounty
As always, we arrived home yesterday with a royal greeting from our animals. After unpacking the foodstuffs that made the trip home with us and then gobbling up some of it for lunch, we granted Delilah her wish and headed outside to survey the grounds.
The first thing I noticed was how much some of the grass has grown since I last cut it. At the same time, the ground seems incredibly dry. Parched and cracked enough that I don’t understand the hearty growth of some areas of grass.
The next noteworthy thing that caught our attention was the incredible buzzing sounds of a striking number of bees busy in the yellow flowering tops of goldenrod beside one of our trails.
Cyndie did a great job of capturing a photo of a couple of the happy visitors.
Not far down that same trail, we made another surprising discovery. Tucked behind a large viburnum nannyberry bush was a volunteer apple tree with an impressive amount of fruit on its limbs. It’s the first time I noticed it, which is surprising because we usually pay a lot of attention to the volunteer trees showing up beside our trails.
We made our way out into the pastures to say hello to the horses and quickly decided they were telling us the flies were bothering them. Cyndie went back and got their fly masks. The growth in the pastures is a mixture of good grass they looked very happy to be munching and a disturbing number of problematic weeds.
I will be mowing the pastures to a pretty short height as soon as I can get to it in attempt to control some of the weed propagation.
I re-stacked the dwindling number of hay bales in the shed to make room for the next delivery, now expected to arrive on Friday. By then, Cyndie will be on her way to Boston with her mother to visit Barry and Carlos. I will be stacking bales by myself.
The last stop for Cyndie on the tour of our property was her garden. She came in with quite a bounty of a photogenic variety of vegetables.
She thinks some of the growth was stunted by how dry it has been, but the overall variety of produce sure looks impressive. Pretty good for a year when her planting was hindered by knee replacement surgery back in the spring.
We’re just happy to have any bounty at all.
.
.
Hay’s In
This year we accomplished our goal in three days. The hay is in. I’m ready for winter.
On the left side of that image, in the front you can see remaining bales from last year. Behind it are the new grass bales just stacked. On the right are the new bales we stacked on Sunday and Monday, from a second source. Those bales have a rougher mixture of stemmed grasses, which our horses showed strong interest for last year.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Working early in the morning yesterday presented a nice change to throwing bales at the end of the day. Stacking to the top of the shed however, ended up being just as hot and sweaty as doing it in the late afternoon on the two previous days.
We hadn’t opened the chicken door on the coop yet, so Delilah was able to hang out with us while we worked. When the chickens are roaming about, we don’t leave Delilah unsupervised, as she has a history of breaking her leash to reach the irresistible teasers.
If our full attention isn’t directly on her, she has a tendency to violate her restraining order.
We collect all the sweepings that fall from the bales to provide the horses a taste test of the menu they will be served for the next year.
I’m told there were no complaints.
That means a lot to us after the year our horses resolutely refused to eat bales we bought from a third source.
Imagine how it feels to have food we offer rejected after the strenuous effort to transport and stack a season’s worth in the high heat and humidity of summer.
Today, we are breathing a sigh of relief over having the hardest part of this chore behind us for another year.
Now, how long ’til it starts to snow?
.
.
Never Dull
There is rarely a dull moment in our lives with acres and animals. Yesterday was a particularly full day. Before I get to that however, I really must post more pictures from our great cow adventure last Friday. These belong with Saturday’s post, but I was up at the lake, and just didn’t have the bandwidth to support my intentions.
Here is my view of the main herd as their curiosity brought them over to see what we were up to at the fence:
I didn’t want them to get any ideas about joining the remaining escapees, so I worked to convince them they’d be happier going the other direction.
This is Cyndie, holding the opening as wide as possible while cooing sweet nothings to woo the last stragglers back into their pasture:
It was a hard sell. The second wire from the top was the only broken one, but holding them open provided plenty of clearance, if only the overly cautious (now they decided to be cautious!) bovine would step through.
After a busy morning at the lake yesterday, tending to minor chores before heading home, we traveled in Cyndie’s car with the top down in the beautiful sunshine, joining a LOT of other vacationers for the trek home.
It was as if our full day had barely gotten started. I was able to connect with our next-door neighbor to borrow his large trailer for hauling hay. Our first source of bales reported a shortage of availability, due to a new client who required 4000 bales. Five minutes after that sorry news, he called back to say his brother had bales we could buy, but needed to get them out of the wagon by the end of the day.
Cyndie whipped up an early dinner and then we set off to begin this summer’s hay bale escapades, the first of multiple expected trips.
Thankfully, due to our previous experience, the loading and transport went smoothly, and we got the load stowed in the shed while there was still daylight.
As the last light faded, I found Cyndie out picking black raspberries because there are still so many berries ripening.
.
From inside the house, I heard branches breaking in the woods. I called out the window to Cyndie and she said she was hearing it, too, but didn’t see anything. She prolonged her berry picking to see if that last stray cow from Friday still might be roaming around, but neither a deer nor a cow materialized before she quit to go secure the chicken coop for the night.
We are happy to report, all twelve birds were safely inside.
Honestly, the fullness of our day was the epitome of the saying, “never a dull moment.”
.
.
Better Sense
It looks as though my shadow has better sense than me about taking a much deserved break in the midst of toiling over non-stop things to do.
After work yesterday, it was another trip in the pickup to fetch 45 more bales of hay. Tossing them off the truck and then hefting them back up, stacked high in the shed, was a little more exercise than I was planning to do.
Of course, the stacks get higher as I grow more exhausted, so I out-smarted the task by placing the last half-dozen on the lowest level for now.
I do have better sense than to over-tax my weary body on one particular activity.
I’m better off spreading the exhausting efforts across several days-worth of projects. After that, my body can catch up to my shadow and take a well-deserved rest for a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon.
About that time, it will be the beginning of another week and I’ll get to start the process all over again.
Luckily, the rewards for our efforts are plenty, and we are richly blessed in this paradise we endlessly tend.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
More Hay
Honestly, I think we pretty much nailed it on the quantity of our hay supply over the winter. The new growing season is now upon us and farmers are talking about cutting their first crop of the year, as soon as next week if the weather is dry enough. We are down to our last rows of the bales harvested from our field last year. There are still a fair number remaining from the batch we purchased 2-years ago from a local farmer, but many are showing some mold and our horses have pretty much refused to eat them.
Given all that, Cyndie still prefers to have a larger backup supply than we ended up with, so we have been in the market for a small batch of insurance hay. We did drive up to check on offerings available from our previous source, but the bales he had left from last year looked too similar to those we already have that our horses don’t eat.
He suggested we consider some second-cut bales he will have later this summer. Second-cut hay doesn’t tend to have as many stemmy grasses, and probably has a few less weeds.
For now, Cyndie kept looking, and on Thursday she drove to investigate some hay advertised in the free Shopper publication that is distributed locally. She said it looked good, and more importantly, it smelled good, so she brought home a small load of bales. Yesterday, since I was home from work, we went together to bring back a larger load.
We had to wait until the rain stopped before venturing out, because wet hay becomes moldy hay. After lunch, she provided directions while I drove. We were given free rein to pick our choice from the barn loft, so Cyndie tossed bales down and I organized them in the truck bed. Using the skills I honed in 13-loads two years ago, I stacked the hay so we wouldn’t need to tie it down. The bales above, hold the ones below in place.
We made it home just as a new wave of precipitation threatened, forcing us to hastily unload the bales into the hay shed.
The task served as a gentle reminder of the work that lies ahead of us soon. Hay season is not far off. It’s a time of anxious weather-watching and intense effort over several long days that are both thrilling and exhausting at the same time.
At least now I feel comfortable knowing how many bales we want to put up to last a whole winter —plus some insurance— after several years of varying results. Simply having that one concern removed from the process makes it all a little less daunting.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Hazardous Conditions
Yesterday, while working outside for long hours in the spring wind, we exposed ourselves to enough tree pollen to cause significant irritation to our delicate tissues. I think I also successfully altered the weather to shut down precipitation here for some time.
While my nose dripped at an ever-increasing rate, I built a barrier of old, moldy hay bales in the trees by our uphill neighbor’s corn field.
During heavy rain, the water comes off that field in a torrent and washes sediment onto our property. Lately, it has started to fill in a drainage trench beside our driveway.
Oddly enough, I actually wanted it to rain today, so I could see if my creation worked as intended, but the forecast shows no precipitation expected in the days ahead.
Given that, I guess my project worked. It has stopped the sediment from pouring into our trench, hasn’t it?
While I was working in the tangled bramble of uncontrolled growth that forms the border between our property and that cultivated field to the north of us, I decided to finally address a remnant of rusted barbed wire fencing that had been swallowed by a tree.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The tree had long ago been cut off, leaving a stump that was about the height of a fence post. Made sense, since the barbed wire ran through the tree, it was already functioning as a fence post.
Removing the rusted fencing was made easier by the fact the tree was rotting to pieces. So much of it came apart simply by prying at it with one of the old fence posts that I found myself struggling near the end, to finish it off in the same manner. Eventually, logic, and my increasingly irritating allergic reactions to pollen, led me to hasten the task by way of the chain saw.
The area looks like it has been through a serious spring cleaning now, with the added benefit of opening up visibility to the area where water flows off the neighbor’s field. It is easier to see if the barrier I built is doing the job of keeping sediment out of our ditch.
Sneeze. Cough. Drip. Stinging blink. It’s the hazardous working conditions of spring!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Bales Stacked
The day after the classic scramble to get a full field of hay baled and stacked under a roof has a disorienting feel to it. There is an obvious sense of relief in the reality that the shed is now stocked with provisions to feed our horses all winter. It’s like everything that needs to be done, is done.
But, it’s not.
It feels sort of comical to now have to mow the short grass of the lawn, a mere pittance of a harvest compared to that hay-field.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Relative Something 