haying

Haying season finally over, still winterizing

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Well I finally managed to get it done yesterday. I have turned the hay four times and cut it seven days ago. I would really have preferred to have turned it for two more days and then baled it but it is supposed to rain all day on Thursday and that could take me an extra week and up to an extra five turns in this weather to get it dried after a day of rain. The temperature has only been getting up into low 60’s. I turned it, drove that tractor home and hooked up the baler on the other tractor and drove over and baled both the upper and bottom fields. I got 33 bales from the upper field and 55 from the bottom field. There are 50 bales to a ton. I drove the tractor home again and then had to switch out the baler for a three point trailer hitch. I stashed the baler in the machine shop for the winter.

I had to hook the tractor up to the trailer but the trailer still had the mini excavator on it. So I found 400# of tractor weights to put in the bucket to add weight so I could pull the loaded trailer up the new dirt road out of the Naked Gardener’s lower field. I hooked the tractor up and then had to research the internet to get the mini excavator started again. Once was not enough to hardwire the process. I had to drive off backwards and I did not think to swing the boom so it would be able to be extended and act as a third distal support. I learned this when I was backing off the trailer and just as all of the weight left the back of the trailer and was on the ramps the rear of the trailer lifted a good ten inches causing the excavator to tip backwards. Luckily, it did not tip over and I now know to always use the bucket to stabilize and to always come off trailer front first.

I drove over and was able to barely get the trailer to fit down past his barn onto the newly improved road down to the lower field. It was getting dark so I had to use the lights on the tractor to pick up all of the bales. I got 55 on the trailer, put the tractor in 4wd and low and cracked up the RPM and crept up the hillside. I am not sure the tractor would be able to do it with 90 bales on the trailer. Once I got up to the top field I drove around and picked up the last of the bales. I had to make a fourth row in the middle to get them all on the trailer in one load. I told the Naked Gardener to call me if he needed anything otherwise I would not be back till late spring. He has plans to fertilize the fields in the spring and he will need to fix the two lower sprinklers I cut with the sickle bar mower. I need to pick up 25 used car tires to go around the lower sprinklers so I don’t cut them. I am always trying to get too close to them. I kept checking the moisture on the bales and I would say at least 80% of them are under 20% moisture. There are about 10-15 that are higher but supposedly someone wants some hay according to the progeny and I will just have them moisture check each bale they take. Turning it every day helped dramatically with drying it out. I was back at the house by 1930 and haying season is officially over.

Haying and yes it’s October

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Well I finally took another staycation and my list that I put together is probably about three weeks worth of work and I only have one week. On top of that I am still haying! It is a little late to be haying in our area but it was raining last month and I was busy. I have had to turn it twice already and I think I will need to turn it two more times for it to get dry. When the temperature is only getting up to 65F it takes a lot longer to dry out.

I am cutting the Naked Gardener’s fields and I had to take a couple of hours today and work on the access point to the lower field. There is a rock bluff that kept getting more exposed and I just about could not get down with the tractor. I took the land plane over and spent a couple of hours adding a bunch of dirt in the hopes to even out the area. It turned out pretty good. I need it to not wash out now due to rain. Since we don’t get much rain in this area anyways my chances are pretty good. It is even enough now I think I will be able to pull a trailer down to load up hay. I just need it to not rain until Thursday. I will be done haying on Tuesday but Mr Golfpro is coming out on Wednesday so we can work on the garden and get the berries cut and the sunchokes harvested.

I wanted to get a picture of the weight box before I started to do anything with it. It needs a new frame welded to it so the 3-point hitch parts quit bending and tearing away. I noticed that the sheet metal was only tack welded in places so I use the wire feed welder to weld all of the sheet metal joints first. Once that was done I cut my four corners and tried to weld one corner on with the wire welder. I need more rod and need to use the rod welder for this step. I had to ask the son-in-law, Gingerman, for some help and I am glad I did. I thought I was going to have to remove the wire welder hook up, nope, turns out you just have to plug in the rod welder and ground into the appropriate spots and the wire feeder welder portion can stay attached! I would have spent 30 minutes swearing and removing the wire feed portion. The Gingerman was looking at me sideways when I asked for help converting it. I don’t think he realized I had never done it before and prior to taking the welding class at the local college a few years ago I had never welded. I can do a lot of things but that is a fairly new endeavor. I don’t really want to say skill as I am not very skillful but stuff does stick together when I weld it!

I made my death pepper this weekend. I ground up the hot peppers that have been drying on the breeze porch for the last year and grind them into a dust. This is always painful. This year I did take a damp tea towel and place it over the grinder. This worked great until I had to check on the spicy concoction. It had two or three types of hot peppers and I managed to not puke. It was so hot I had a couple of nasty coughing jags from inhaling it. Annmarie left early for her trip after coming into the kitchen. She did not want to be in the house. Every time I do this she reminds me I should actually wear a protective mask. I think about it, but my sinuses were really clear after I was done!

Cleanup day 1

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This has been a long week for me. I have been working at the paying job during the day and fixing haying equipment and haying after work. I cut the hay on Sunday and then turned it on Tuesday after I got the tire for the new tractor repaired and installed. I had to tighten bolts on the power rake so I could rake. I was able to do that with a little bit of tractor light. I spent Wednesday after work on repairing the baler. I was able to get most of it repaired but on Thursday it still took me two hours to finish it. I had to clean up hydraulic fluid from the entire outside so I could get to the hose with a micro-hole in it replaced. The dirt and dust and hay had formed quite the layer of gunk all over the baler. I baled Thursday night until 0130 when the grass started to get super wet. I did not manage to get the baler as silent as it used to be but it worked like a charm after I replaced the guts.

Friday morning the Quiet One was coming over at 0700 or so I thought. Annmarie told me that she was here at 0630. Turns out I had said 0600 and forgot. I was out the door and working by 0705. We worked on getting the greenhouse finished. It took us until 1300 to get it all assembled except for the front door which I can do alone. The Quiet One was going bear hunting and wanted to get up there early on Friday afternoon. I needed to finish baling hay so I did that after dinner and was home by dark. I had made arrangements to have a couple of teenage brothers come out on Saturday and Sunday to help me clean up. The plan is to get the yard all ready for the grandson’s birthday party. I won’t have the bricks laid on the floor in the Gazebo but all of the trash and stuff will be put away. At least that is the plan. It will depend on how hard they work. I am sure their father has warned them about my work ethic and expectations.

The boys came out this morning and we started to work immediately. I had them bring lunches so we could stop for lunch and they would not have to go anywhere. Especially since they are not driving and had to be dropped off. My plan was to just start out by the driveway and slowly work our way toward the house. I figured it all has to be done but doing it this way creates a systematic plan. Plus, to clean up the driveway we had to empty out both broken cars that are going to the scrapyard. The pickup we were able to tow with the tractor. I tried to start it and it actually tried once to start so when we towed it to the machine shed I put the battery charger on it. I would love to drive them both to the junkyard. Weeds got pulled, trash got tossed, vehicles cleaned out, scrap moved to the burn pile or metal pile. The bags of soil that I had not taken out to the garden got loaded into the tractor bucket and taken over to the garden, cut open and both troughs are now full of soil. After a couple of hours on the driveway we hooked up the flat bed trailer to the tractor and drove over to pickup all of the hay I had just baled. They picked up almost 90 bales of beautiful grass hay. We are going to trade the grass hay for some large alfalfa bales that can be easily fed to the cows this winter.

Mr Toad was on the front hillside just jumping around. I might have disturbed him when I was pulling up thistles.

After we had filled up the troughs with soil I noticed a couple of buzzards flying around and landing in the apple tree. I love the buzzards. We did not used to have any and it was hard to tell if something had died. Nowadays I can always tell when there is a carcass on the farm as they show up and circle it. Today was no exception, there was an old dead ewe under the apple tree. We left her and I said we would come back later today and take care of her.

After lunch the vehicle items migrated into the house or out back of it to be addressed at a later time. I am sticking to the plan and cleaning as we go. I had been working on knicknames for them all day long. I had Mr Shady (older brother) doing weed eating after they cleaned up all of the branches. I had the T-shirt Bandit raking sand in the gazebo. The sand had gotten all blown up against one side of the gazebo. I looked over once and he was on his cell phone. There was a round of verbal prompting on the correct location for the phone and it was never an issue for the rest of the day. After he raked it was time to go deal with the corpse. I was able to get the tractor bucket fairly close to the corpse. The T-shirt Bandit kept trying to hold his T-shirt over his nose like a bandit would in an old time stagecoach robbery. I think he thought it was going to make things smell better, it did not. It was pretty rank.

Once we got that carcass dropped off we came back to the yard and beat up on the trumpet vine. I am trying to get it to grow on its trellis so we wound it around the trellis and tied it up in several places in the hopes that it would grow where it is supposed to. I cut away every thing that was growing against the house. Occasionally, I get a little overly excited and cut out too much of the vine but it cannot grow under the expensive siding we just got done last year!

We still have some holes to fill in yard and I am going to clean off the old house porch plus clean up the garden area in the back of the house. We are doing so well I am thinking about trying to get the rock wall completed also! Mr Shady kept his sunglasses on the entire time and just kept working. It was refreshing.

Granary progress

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Well the granary situation has improved dramatically. It was going to cost almost $700 in sheet metal and welding wire to make another 5x5x5’ bin and one of the nephews sent me a link for a local person selling two large upright bins! I did not need both of them despite their willingness to sell me both. So for $750 they delivered it to the house on Friday. I had cleared a spot and dropped a bunch of gravel in place but after looking at the container I think I need to level the area and then drill five holes in the ground, add some wire and fill them up with concrete. I can take a piece of all thread and put it into the concrete when it’s wet. I don’t think I will try and line up the holes with the grain bin. I will just weld some plates and bolt them in place.

I also managed to get some paint sprayed on the finished bin I repaired and got the slider door installed. Of course when I used a chain to roll the bin I bent the brand new door. I crawled inside and beat it back into shape with a hammer. It works now, it’s a little stiff but that is not a bad thing as I want opening the door to be an intentional act. It looks like the bin has a ladder built into its side so someone can climb the bin and open the top when filling it. This is a good thing as long as you are not scared of heights. I will have to get the cap removal process down before we lift it into the air. I would like to stand on the ground while learning, not holding onto the ladder with one arm 25’ into the air while fighting the lid with the other.

The Naked Gardener called on Thursday to say that he thinks his field is ready to cut again. I swung by on Friday and he is right, it is ready. So I spent most of the day Friday tearing the baler apart. I figured out that it is a lot easier to work on if you remove the front arms and some extra pieces. It took about an hour to disassemble the front but it was a lot easier getting to everything else. There was one guide piece I could not remove but I just worked around it. I was going to have to grind the nuts off and it is just not necessary as I am not replacing it. I replaced about 1/3 of the pickups and tubes. Anything that was bent got tossed in the trash. I have about an hour left to get the races lined up and then I can spend another hour putting the front all back together. I also need to replace a hydraulic hose. The entire thing is covered in hydraulic fluid. It needs a wash down.

Unfortunately, I am on a timer now. I went over and cut the field this evening. So the new tractor “Juicy” has had a flat tire for two weeks in the upper field, I had to go up and remove the tire tonight so it can be fixed. The hay turner is on the back and it needs about 45 minutes of TLC before I can go turn the hay. Once that is done then I will need to spend three hours with the baler to get it up and running so I can bale the hay!

I also will need to install the two new gates on our stairs to prevent the grandchild from crawling up and falling down from the bottom or falling down the stairs from the top. This is what happens when your grandparents work in the hospital and see bad stuff all the time.

The new chickens area settling in nicely. All of them are staying out of the yard which is good for them as being a play toy for the dog tends to an eventual slow death.

We now have three kittens living under the old house porch. We have installed a temporary fence to keep Mouse away from them as he is a definite kitten killer. He only comes on weekends with the kids. Of course, the kittens don’t know this so they were going through the fence as they are now starting to become very active. So we now have a plastic chicken netting zip tied to the fence so the kittens cannot get through the fence. Milo likes the kittens so we will work on socializing him to them. He still does not like their mother and barks at her whenever he sees her.

Haying done for now.

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Well we do actually go on vacation occasionally, we spent a week in Cove at Ascension summer camp. I am the nurse and Annmarie is the priest. I spend the week working on my jewelry as I am always too busy at home. I was able to complete three chains that were in various stages of completion. While we were away the Quiet One mowed the entire property again to knock down all the cheat grass a second time. It takes two mowings to get it knocked down. They did all the main fields. I spent one Sunday mowing around the buildings and along the road and up top a single time around the CRP. They had already gone around twice on three sides. This helps keep the weeds from creeping in from the fence lines. I did not see a single rabbit while I was mowing. We did have a second calf born while we were away, it is a little buy and he is already bigger than his three week old sister. He is a beautiful brown color. This is the second boy that has been brown.

I did try and mow on the back side of field #1 but it is tough. I just knocked down the high stuff. There is still a tipping point from the old hole that I did not get completely filled. So you have to be careful with the tractor or it will tip over. I really need to get the Gingerman over here with a dozer and cut a road on the back side so I can fence off the stream-bed. We might even be able to even out the side to the point that I could grow some grass on this side. I might be able to get 1-2 acres planted in grass. It’s a long term goal. It is going to require a dozer. I wouldn’t mind planting a couple of trees back there also.

The chickens have been getting decimated so we decided to upgrade our security. We now have a Ring camera on the backside of the old house and it watches the coop and entire ram pasture/back of barn. We should now be able to see coyotes, raccoons and other predators. It is a lot easier to review footage when it gets marked because something is there.

Our garden is pumping out herbs and we just picked all our fall planted garlic. The nice part was it was free! We saved garlic from last year and planted it in the fall, we will do the same thing again this year. We use an entire large brown paper bag of garlic over the course of a year. Garlic is a root vegetable, not a spice. We are picking raspberries also. We are getting about a quart every day now. Annmarie has started to freeze some for use during the winter. We are not going to get much tree fruit this year. The late freeze killed the buds, plus last year was a bumper crop and the trees like to rest after a great year. But our thornless blackberries and the wild blackberries are incredible this year. I picked almost 25 gallons last year. I will probably have to fill in the missing fruit with blackberries this year so I suspect I will need to pick at least 40 gallons this year. If you equate that to the price of buying fruit we probably save $800-1000 in fresh fruit by freezing our own. Plus, I don’t mind picking blackberries, it is fairly relaxing.