Villhauer's Farm Blessings: Baling Hay

Woke up at 3am and couldn't get back to sleep....so finally decided to get up and start my day extra early. I am going to do "desk work" first because it is too dark to walk. I don't want to make a habit of this getting up too early. Guess I still have a lot on my mind....and once I am awake enough to start thinking about things....I can’t shut it down to get back to sleep. This time it was a bad dream about Britney that woke me up. I will be glad to have her home from Guatemala.

Well, I now know what baling hay is all about. First you hope for rain so it will grow and then you wait for it to do so. In some areas, like you see below, the weeds are growing better than the grass. To view any of these pictures larger...just click on them.

Once it is "ready", then you wait for it to be dry with no rain in the forecast. At this point, you cut it, as seen below.

Then you wait for it to get good and dry (2 days...unless it rains)
Once it is dry, you rake it.

After some more waiting, (a dry, hot, and windy day is best) .....

.....You finally actually bale it.
The baler is a machine (you want to keep your hands out of) that gathers up the hay, and miraculously spits it out in these nice, tight, rectangular bundles tied in twine (If it is working well). And then the bales are stacked on a wagon....This is where the humans really start to labor.

Once baled you take it to the barn to be stored in a nice dry place. Hopefully this all can happen before any rain comes.

We used a hay elevator to get the bales up to the loft. That's where we "city" folk helped out, after being shown "the ropes". Two of us loaded it on to the elevator and three unloaded it and stacked it in the hay mow.

You can see how dusty it is getting in these last two pictures.

Meanwhile the guys that were baling have headed home. We take a short break, giving us a chance to switch places before getting back to work.

Once done, Joe took the empty wagon to the next pasture for tomorrow.

In addition to learning how to bale hay, I also have a new awareness of "farm time". It has no boundaries.... no start and no finish....no definite commitment to a definite hour or even day. The fence man has told us "maybe next week" for the last 4 weeks. Our man with the baler didn't get here until 7:25pm Monday, (he had predicted 3 and that is when we had our helpers lined up and ready to go). We had 3 or 4 helpers on standby in addition to the 2 guys our hay man had coming with him. As usual, I was nervous about the whole process because it was a first for us. Monday evening they baled our little 2 acre pasture out front, getting 120 bales.

Tuesday, after the dew dried off (11:00am) we started in again. It was cool, cloudy, and windy....perfect for hard work....except I was a little worried about rain. There was a chance for showers in the forecast.
They started on the side pasture, while our crew waited for the first wagon.

One wagon came in and the next went out.....and we were ready to start.

We set aside broken bales and stacked off to the side the bad ones.

And just kept moving them up the elevator into the hay mow.

We actually baled, moved and stacked 660 bales in a little over 4 hours. It wasn't too bad because we had good help and cool weather. Our biggest problem was figuring out where to put all of the hay. We only filled 1/3 of the hay loft because we wanted to keep weight off the parts we need to jack up to get the two barn walls pushed back in line with the foundation. Once the loft was full, we took a break to discuss our options.

We decided to fill the area I plan to use for grooming and tacking the horse(s) and one of the horse stalls.

With 780 total bales, the barn is bulging at the seams. I am thinking we should sell some hay now because we will be cutting and baling again before fall.

The idea occurred to me while I was tossing and turning....to see if Carol wanted to buy some hay. We could buy our horse trailer soon and fill it with hay and take it to her....as sort of a "test drive" of the trailer before actually putting horses in it. Some of the hay is pretty weedy but the good thing is that it is nice and dry. Our next step is to clean the rest of the brush piles and old corn stalks+cobs out of the fields. They really presented a problem to the cutter, raker, and baler. We are also going to spray for weeds in a week or two. The hay man said cutting it regularly will also really help with weed control. It hasn't been cut and baled for 6 yrs.

Now that we have all this hay, I am really anxious to buy a horse..... except our fence isn’t ready nor do we have a tack room. (The way things are going, we won't have this place ready for a horse until well after Michigan. We have been waiting for the two men who said they can do the work, to actually come out and do it.) I have been putting out my feelers about horses....buying, owning and caring for one. I have decided I am very
interested in getting a Paso Fino or

other gated horse. (Oh, I have had two riding lessons with Marj at Wellgreen Farm, 2½ miles from here, and just love the Paso Fino ride. I also really like Marj and her husband Richard and their approach to and knowledge of horses.) But, Paso Finos are very expensive. So, I am not sure what I will actually buy. I think it would be nice to have 2 or 3 horses out here eventually. (2 that I can take in a trailer to go to parks and trail ride and 1 border)

Daniel has been great help around here. He power washed the deck, steps, picnic table and benches and put three coats of a clear deck sealer on all of them. The deck was all green with algae and lichen and very slippery when wet.

He mows the yard and unloads the dishwasher when ever needed, and helps with the chickens and any other chore.

He was great at moving hay bales and has been doing a lot of other jobs for
us, like taking trapped opossum to the

park. His two classes at Heartland are going well, although it is pretty low key in the summer time out there, so we keep him busy.

Here the roosters are checking out the new hay....got to make sure the coast is clear and everything is safe for their "girls" (the hens).

Well, I hear some birds starting to sing and the Eastern horizon is starting to lighten up. So I am going to officially get started with my day. I'll be raking up more hay, sticks, corn stalks and cobs; trimming trees, cutting brush, weeding flower beds and burning all of it. Can't believe the corn cobs and husks are still smoldering. We raked, and pushed with the tractor a huge pile of stuff that had washed into our hay field from the neighbors field. Started the fire over 36 hours ago. The brush pile also has lots of hot coals and will be easy to keep burning.