Friday we went to an estate auction and got a few trinkets. One of the best things was an old fashioned counter/clicker! There were two of these and I should have bought them both instead of just one. I can now officially count hay bales and sheep easily. I used this to count the hay as I loaded it up into the barn. I can only throw the hay bales about eight feet high. I have to have help to stack them higher. One person throws them up and the other stacks them higher. I spent two days picking up hay bales and then unloading them into the barn until I had all 170 bales in the barn. I can only get about 30 bales into the back of the pickup. So it takes a few trips for me to get it all loaded and unloaded.
I ended up having to feed about nine bales to the boys in Alcatraz. The bales were too wet. I used to measure the moisture content in the bales but I can pretty much tell by picking them up whether there is too much moisture in the bale. The wet ones just get fed to the boys. They love the green grass and eat them before they spoil.
The next thing I need to do is to get some spray on the neighbor’s field. I need some on ours also so I can do them all at the same time. As fast as the grass is growing I will be getting a second cutting in 6-8 weeks and maybe will get a third cutting in this year. The grass is really growing. We are working on getting water out of our irrigation ditch and onto the field next to Donna’s. This will give us about 3 acres of irrigated land. We are going to pile on the water and try and get the cheatgrass to sprout so we can accelerate killing it. I would like to see it sprout three times this year.
Sunday I did not really want to move bales so I went down and cut on the broken apple branch that was blocking the gate. I cut on it until I had a path for the animals to get through. My hope was that if I opened up a path and locked it open the four alpaca would come into the area near the houses. Otherwise I am going to have to chase them in so they can be sheared. We are going to shear this upcoming weekend.
All three of our bee hives are still alive! We are having to feed them for a short time between flowers blooming. Pretty soon the blackberries will start to bloom and the bees will not need any supplement. But for now all three hives are getting some.
I needed to get all the baled hay from the neighbor’s place moved into our barn. The real problem is I needed to move the hay from two years ago out of the way first. We have an overhead walkway in the animal area that I keep “straw” on for the barn floor. We have just started to use the oldest hay for the floor covering instead of buying straw. It works pretty good and keeps our costs down. The only hard part is getting the bales up onto the walkway! I cut a bigger hole from the walkway to the second storage room and just started grabbing bales from the top of the last two rows. As you can see the raccoons are having a fine time in the barn and have created another huge poop pile. They are so annoying. They make a mess of the barn. I will need to get up there in a couple of years, next time the hay room is empty and clean all of that poop off the stacked wood. What I should really do is just remove that wood and stack hay on top of that hallway. The raccoons don’t do that in the other hay room because I store hay on top of the walkway.
I only managed to smash my head twice on the roof beams. Luckily, I did not knock myself out. I only had a cloth tied over my bald head so I ended up with two big abrasions to the top of my head. It is too hot to wear my safety helmet. Honestly, I did not think it would be possible to hit my head while I was on top of the pile. I got the overhead walkway about 80% full and then moved all of the old hay in front of the doorway. It will be the first hay I will be able to pull for feeding. I may even just pull about 15 bales once I have the floor cleaned off so the sheep can spread it around and I don’t have to pull it from the overhead walkway!
There was a lot of sweating involved for this old man to get it all moved around. I still have a pile of netting that will need to be taken out of the barn and tossed into the trash. I gotta get all of this old hay moved around before I can bring any of the new hay from this year into the barn.
I do need to go around and fix my 12v overhead light system. The damn raccoons pulled some of the wires loose. I need to use those zip ties with screw heads so I can anchor the wires in place. This needs to happen this summer as it was very inconvenient not having lights in the hay rooms.
Well, I did it, I managed to get all the hay baled. It was not a smooth process. I wish it would just happen but it just doesn’t seem like that is possible. I am sure that the key to being a farmer is to expect that stuff will break when you want to use it and stubbornness is a necessity to succeed. I was headed over on Saturday by 0715 to bale with some moisture on the hay so it would be “sticky” enough to bale. I was headed up the last little hill that has a horrible washboarded section when all of sudden I heard a loud clanging and the tractor shifted. I slammed on the brakes and looked behind me. The baler had jumped off the tractor pin hitch and was sideways in the road. I had bent half the pto shaft under the tractor and the hydraulic hose and pull rope had come disconnected.
I ended up using the broken pto shaft as a wheel stop and pushed the baler with the tractor to get it lined up with the road. I had used a small strap to tie the two 3 point arms together so I used those to lift the tongue of the baler so I could put the bent pin back in and limp home. Once I got home I ran to town and got a new PTO shaft. Unfortunately, I picked up a shaft for a 3 point hole auger. Those have one connection that is different so I ended up pulling apart a short one I had and using it on one end and the new one on the other end. It worked great. I got a new bigger pin and drove over to get some baling done at 1030. I was just pulling into the field when it dawned on me that I should check the hydraulic dump on the baler. I managed to shoot hydraulic fluid all over the tractor and myself. I had torn apart the hose and not noticed the connection broken at the baler. So I once again had to drive back to the house and unhook the hose and take the parts into town to see if a new end piece could be attached to old hose. For $25 they were able to repair the hose! I have lots of extra hose so I can break the end off a few more times before it becomes an issue. It was now 1430 and too hot to bale hay. The hay will have to wait till Sunday. I was able to get some of our front hillside weed eated. I also got the water hooked up for the hillside and the lavender and put on timers.
Sunday I was out the door by 0515 with water, breakfast sandwich (cheese, tortilla and precooked sausage patty) and coffee. I was able to finish the top field pretty quickly but when I went to the lower field I started snapping shear bolts. I ended up going back up to the top field and stacking bales to the outside and in a few piles then went over the entire field again picking up the sloppy edges. Once that was done I went back down to the lower field. I really should have turned the lower field a third time. I need to remember that it needs one more than the upper field. I ended up lifting the back half of the round baler and using it like a rower to fluff five rows so I could bale them. I think there are about five bales on the bottom that I will have to leave out of the barn and test for moisture content. It is not hard to tell which ones are wet as they weigh twice what every other bale weighs.
I ended up with a total of 170 bales made. We feed 6 bales/day in the winter so I have one month already done. Now the hard part starts. I have about 100 bales in the second hay area that are 2 years old. They need to be moved onto the overhead platform to be used as bedding. I will then clean out the hay room and get the new hay into this room. I alternate rooms every year and we always feed out of the previous year’s hay. So I will be moving hay most every evening until this gets done.
I have turned the hay twice during the week after work. It took about 4 hours the first time to get it into rows and then it took a little over 2 hours to turn those rows. The first pass took a lot longer as I had to move all the poison oak to the outside of edge of the field so I would not bale it up. The tractor has a pretty good light system on it so I can keep working after dark.
I knew I was going to have to bale on Friday. Usually I don’t start baling until around 1000 in the morning. I like to let the morning dew dry off a little. The hay is super dry on the upper field! I was at it for two hours and kept having pickup problems due to the hay being so dry and slick. I finally gave up after I had about half the field baled and went down to the lower pasture. It is down by the river and holds moisture longer into the day.
There was a lot more moisture down below. I kept pulling in slugs of wet grass at the last minute. I broke three upper shear bolts and two lower shear bolts . The lower ones require multiple covers to come off and are harder to get at. I also had a lot of dried grass trapped under various covers. After I broke the last bolt I just gave up. I took all the covers off to remove any loose hay and will change the shear bolts at home. I am definitely going to need to blow out the entire baler with the leaf blower tomorrow before I get started. I will need to replace the shear bolts also. My plan is to get up and outside by daylight and be baling by 0630.
Annmarie called me, while I had baler covers off, to tell me that we had a bee swarm in the raspberries. After her arm got swollen to twice its size last week I didn’t really want her fighting a swarming hive. I got done as fast as possible and was home in under 30 minutes but the swarm had taken off! We did not really need a fourth hive, I do have a spot for it out in the barn lot but again we don’t need it.
We are still fine tuning the garden water. When we add in more troughs it takes a while to figure out what types of sprayers are needed. I will need to get the front hillside hoses laid out and the lavender garden hooked up to auto timers also. We have multiple auto waterers all over the yard for every little thing. Once they are all set up it makes the rest of the summer go smoothly.
I had to call the microhay equipment dealer today and order a new hydraulic hose for our Abbriata M50 round baler. When I called the company stated that they no longer sell them. There is a cheap Chinese knock off that drops the price point so low that no one will buy an Abbriata. He said they would have to sell them for over $16k now, but they still carry all the parts for them. They had all the parts I needed on hand. I had to order some new netting also there were only two new rolls left in the shed and I had to take an extra today. I managed to not change out the roll but I will have to put the new one on tomorrow.
Our sheep are now allowed onto the back hillside in a specific spot behind our house. They love to go up there just before noon and do a little grazing then fall asleep on the rocky warm hillside.
As in all wise things one should probably look both ways before opening your mouth. I had finished putting together the baler, unfortunately, I missed a lower sprocket that drives the entire front end of the baler. It took an hour to extend the chain and fish it through the correct route. The route I had actually marked with arrows on the machine. Now we were ready to do until I tried to open the dump back and the hydraulic line blew a hole in it! It was the weekend so I had to wait until Tuesday to get the part built in Pendleton, it was Memorial Day weekend. I ordered the correct part first thing Tuesday morning from the Midwest and found a place in Pendleton that actually had metric fittings. Unfortunately, the new hose is bigger and it has a more robust end that means it’s more rigid. We had to put it on three times to find a way to feed it to the correct spot where it did not get pinched when the dump was raised and were it actually fit through the gaps. I had purchased a wrap to go around the outside. We had to remove that over a portion of the hose to get it to fit. We also had to stabilize it with some zip ties as it would not feed through the small opening the original tubing did. It works and it works like a champ! It sounds so much better and I only had to dig it out twice while making 300 bales (6 ton).
We have loaded 112 bales into the barn already, 100 bales went to Sarah and Gingerman for their horses. We have about another 150 bales that need to be picked up and put into the barn. We were pretty picky this year. The cheat grass is bad this year. So we only cut the good stuff. The Rejuvra is working, field one had some bare spots where no cheat grass grew this year. The orchard grass will slowly keep filling in. We are going to spray field 2, all around the machine shed and down by the school house with Rejuvra in the fall.
I think we are going to have to actually plow under the cheat grass. We could burn it but the risk is so high of it taking off that we will just turn it under, disc it then smooth it out.
I finished baling field two yesterday. I wanted to get started on cutting field 1 but I had no sooner gotten into the field when I hit a hidden piece of metal. This caused the blade to bind up as two teeth had popped off and lodged in place crooked to seize the blade in place. I had to go back to the shop, pull out the tooth bar and loosen up all of the clamps. I had the new teeth but the wrong size rivet. I was hoping that D & B carried the correct rivet as I knew that they had some over in fastener section. I found the rivets, they were longer than necessary but I was going to grind them down anyways so it didn’t matter. They had five different sizes of teeth for the mower and none of them will work, they are all too short. Luckily, I only needed the rivets.
I have never had to install teeth onto the bar before. I know you just pound out the rivet, set the new one, put it on a firm surface and bang on it with a big hammer, once flat then just grind it smooth on both sides. Sounds easy. We had an extra bar that got replaced last year so I went ahead and repaired them both. I had to use a 2.5” crescent wrench as a lever attached to a 22mm end wrench on bar guide nuts. They were incredibly stuck and would not come loose. I of course do not have a socket in metric bigger than 20mm. I managed to get the bar in place without cutting my fingers or gloves and it sounded great.
I managed to get once around the field before a different blade popped off and bound up the blade. I drove back, took it apart and was back in the field in under 45 minutes! Not bad, when you figure it takes me almost 8 minutes to drive out to the field. I managed to continue cutting all of field one until 2300. Half of the field is thin and the other half is very thick.
The mower has a guide on the end that is supposed to push the cut hay back into the middle but it was not working and my weld job lasted about ten minutes the first time. I struggled with it the entire time I was cutting field one. So this morning, Gingerman helped me out, I took it off, he welded the bolt in place from the other side and I straightened the piece out with a vice and 3# hammer. Then cut a support and bent it to fit. He welded the crack in the guide then welded the patch in place. He also welded the bolt hole smaller. I drilled the hole back out and put it all together again. It looks like it did originally and it appears that it will work accordingly. We just use any color of spray paint after any welding or repair job, it just so happens that there are a few cans of black out in the shop.
Mr Rainman should be able to get all of field one baled this week. A couple of the fields look good enough that we may be able to get a second cutting on them if we can get a little rain soon. Preferably after Thursday of this week.
Stewart Creek Somethings 