baler

Lambing progresses while haying goes on hold

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Annmarie says I need to quit complaining about there being too much hay this year, since last year I complained that there was not enough hay! I told her I am embracing my inner farmer it has just taken me a while to internalize the dialogue. We were going to leave the farm for a whole week and I was super nervous that the hay would just lay on the ground an not get baled. Luckily for me a nasty weather front moved in and it has rained for the last three days! This has put the haying process off at least several days so now I can enjoy my time away from the farm guilt free. Our lavender patch is really shaping up this year. The bees from our hive love it and no plants died this last winter. We are hoping that by next year the plants will be nice and mature. Every year they get a little bigger.

The baler had a broken pickup tooth, so on Saturday first thing in the morning I decided to be a mechanic. Now honestly I don’t like to mechanic, but I do realize that it is a necessary evil. Mr Professional usually does all of the repair work. It was too early to bale so I decided to take on changing out one set of pickup rakes as that was what I was told was broken. Well after having broken a bolt and breaking out the grinder, hammering a piece straight on the anvil and discovering a second broken pickup rake I was two hours into the repair before I had them both changed out. I decided, after searching YouTube for a repair video and finding nothing, that I needed to start recording repair videos and posting them for everyone else who cannot find anything. So I took snippets of videos while I was doing my repair and now I just need to learn how to edit and mash all the snippets together into one video. I may even have to do voice over on the videos even though I did talk while filming the snippets. I am trying to work on a TikTok channel but I am not sure if I can figure that out or not. Somethings I don’t understand well but daughter #1 tells me I need to get with the times.

The girls are managing things while we are away. So daughter #1 and daughter #2 are in charge! Daughter #2 has been watching the sheep and so far it is going amazingly well. We have had triplets, twins, single, twins, twins, triplets. The last set of triplets today the single mother took over one of them! We are so keeping her, if she will foster out an extra baby every year she is worth the effort to hold onto her. It is hard to find a non-picky ewe and having 1-3 of them in the flock is a true blessing. Lambs don’t go hungry when you have a few in the herd. So far this year our lamb productivity is at 200%! This is the best start we have ever had.

Daughter #2 could not start the John Deere tractor this morning. She texted me and I was sure that the battery was acting up again, nope, she did not have it in neutral!

Haying is going as expected, not well

Steve Hardin1 Comment

So the baler was not working yesterday. I came home and helped Mr Professional and we had all the moving parts doing what they were supposed to do in ten minutes. He put it all back together so it was ready to go first thing Friday morning. I had some dinner then went out with the mistress to cut more hay. Since the baler is back up and running we figured it was time to lay some more hay down. I did that until dark. Good old normal hay stuff, all is well.

The plan was for me to go into town early-ish and pickup our calf table that had just come in the day before and to pickup all of our TREX decking for the front porch Friday morning. I would come right home, Mr Professional was going to bale hay then we would switch out and I would bale while he starts picking them up. Naturally everything arrives when I need to do nothing but get hay put up. So now I will need to stack the TREX off into a safe location in the yard! I am hopeful we will get to this in a few weeks. I got notice today that our alpaca shearing blades have been sharpened and are in transit back to our farm. The calf table needs to be attached to a pallet top and bolted down so it cannot be knocked over. I have the perfect piece of scrap board we got last year and saved and using it on the wood pallet is a great use of it. So I am in town picking up TREX decking when an ongoing crisis at my paying job required me to go in. Now I am bummed I will not be baling when Mr Professional then starts texting me. The phone is blowing up. The baler bottom roller is not turning! This is the exact problem we thought we had fixed. Since neither shear bolt broke it was not an obvious issue. I finally just told him to drag it back to the machine shop and call the company, don’t waste time looking for the problem. They stayed on the phone with him for two hours and walked him through the problems and disassembly on the baler. Turns out someone in Italy thought that pressing a central shaft insert into a gear assembly with no welding was a good thing. They must think they have a side deal with a little known entity called friction. Mr Friction Fit failed! Who would do that? So Mr professional got the two pieces exposed and used my welder to merge them. The baler is back together and Saturday morning we test it out. This took most of the day to accomplish and I have more hay on the ground!!

One of my coworker/friends had recently told me about a baler for sale, I hunted it down and am now the proud owner of a very old John Deere 3360 baler. I have been unable to figure out yet when it was made. It does use string and not wire. Again on Saturday, Mr Professional will see if it works. We have the weekend to test it out for purchase. I had to go in Friday night and bring it home with the pickup. The unknowns and lack of stuff is a constant battle. Here’s hoping that Saturday is a perfect day.