We were trying to get things straightened out mid June on the farm so we could go on vacation for a couple of weeks. We were going to leave the country and visit our other daughter, Monica in Glasgow where she is going to college. Mr Rainman and I were trying to get all of the hay put up before we left but the rain was not cooperating. Nor was the paying job as it kept me away from haying. Despite Mr Rainman attempting to get all the hay done before he went on vacation also we had to leave 1/3 of field #1 on the ground as it was too wet to bale.
The Gimp came out one day while I was working and helped Mr Rainman pickup baled hay from field #1. They put it all in the lamb shed as the barn was ready to stack from seven foot to sixteen foot height and The Gimp did not want to lift bales that high. I appreciate the help and we need hay out in the lamb shed this winter anyways so it kills two birds with one stone. The Gimp did express some muscle soreness occurred the next day. They are no longer suffering from a bum leg but nicknames do not get changed, they are assigned on the first day and last forever!
While we were out of the country there was a large fire adjacent to our property. The neighbor’s field directly across the gravel road caught fire. Sarah did not call us because it did not come onto our property, someone else told us so we called her. She was taking care of feeding the animals while we were gone.
The puppy, Chance, is turning out to be a very pretty girl. She is very smart and probably our most athletic dog we have ever owned. She can jump the back yard side fence in the yard and now when she wants to eat the cat food off of the elevated table she no longer jumps up with her front paws only. She just jumps up onto the table like the cats and gets easy access to all of the food. She does the same thing in our raised garden beds. She is a menace, the only good thing is we have not taught this one how to go over/under/through fences. I am still amazed we did that the first time, it was convenient when we were out in the fields but so problematic when it came time to keep the dog in the yard!
Haying is still going on every day and night. I am able to crawl on the tractor in the evening and work into the night to get the hay cut or turned. Mr Rainman comes out and does the actual baling during the day and I am able to do all the prep work after the paying job. It does make for some long days. Of course since we are haying it has decided to rain some more. It never fails, if I want it to rain I just need to cut some hay and get it on the ground.
It of course rained today delaying the baling process for a few hours. Mr Rainman tried to get the wrapped hay into the barn to get it out of the rain. So when I came home tonight we used the moisture tester to sort out the dried bales from the damp bales and moved the damp ones out of the barn to sit upright outside to dry. I decided we needed to go to the ceiling with the next batch of hay. Mr Rainman did not want to walk on the edge of the leaning bales. So I climbed up on top of the bales and started to stack the pile higher. It was time to get down off the pile and Mr Rainman was outside getting more bales off of the trailer when I decided to get down. This was a good and needed decision, except my method of getting down is fairly questionable. I decided that jumping off of a seven foot high pile to land on a 18 inch wide bale. I was able to land on top of the bale then it promptly squirted out the side and I hit my right elbow, left arm, middle of back and right hip. I did NOT hit my head! I did make a fairly impressive thumping sound as I hit the floor and bounced off. Mr Rainman came running hoping I did not hurt anything. He was afraid of all the flack he would catch if I injured myself. The wife stated later she would not blame him for anything I did on the farm. She figures I will have done something to deserve it.
I am going to hurt in the morning. I can already feel all of the muscles tightening all over my back, right arm and side. I hope I can get to sleep tonight easily.
Annmarie is getting a migraine so the weather is changing. She would have made a great weather witch. She knows a few days before the weatherman that rain or a storm is coming. It’s supposed to rain by Friday. I cut two small fields and 1/3 of field #1 today. I will turn them on Tuesday and we should be able to bale them on Wednesday. The two little fields will have around 25 bales in each field so about 1000# of hay in each one. I am hopeful the 1/3 will get us around 150 bales. At this point it is all a guessing game.
I did not have any trouble with the little sickle bar mower, but it is noisier than the other one and noise tends to equal soon to break issues. My hope is to get all of field #1 cut without breaking the mower. But now that I know its going to rain, courtesy of Annmarie, we will need to get all of the baled hay out of the fields and into the barn.
So tomorrow after work, Annmarie and I will have to go out and pickup a 100 bales and get them into the barn. I had to sleep downstairs last night. I moan in my sleep once I start getting my physical activity up to hay speed. My shoulders and back do not appreciate the workout. I am able to stack the bales to seven feet without climbing anything but it is a shoulder workout.
Calling the mommas in at night
Our lavender is looking great and should start blooming soon. I went through it today and pulled the few weeds that are growing in it. It really needs a leaf blower used in it before the blooms start but I am not sure we have time for that. Both bee hives are still alive, we thought the original one had went kaput but it snapped back and there are more drones now. We are looking at another flower area to the left of the lavender so we can time the blooms accordingly. We need something to be blooming at all times all summer long. The quail are in pairs all over the farm. I have not seen any babies yet but I expect them to start crawling out from everywhere soon.
Yesterday was sheep sorting day. We have a bunch of skinny mommas and we need to wean off the lambs that are old enough, we need to worm everyone, create two herds (edible, keep) and turn the Ram loose in with the mommas (keep). This seems simple enough on the surface but nothing is ever simple when you are working with animals that have not been touched in three months. Most of the lambs have only been touched once in their entire life which makes them the most difficult group to handle. We started by having to dig trenches in the barn to be able to move the panels around and create chutes and three large pens in the barn. Once that was done I found the oral drenching tool and our wormer. I did not have enough oral drench so Annmarie volunteered to go to town and get more while we tagged and banded. I had about a 1/3 of a bottle so we could start while she was in transit. Mr Rainman and I then attempted to push the sheep into the barn. Nope, they would not go, no matter what we did, they kept breaking free of the pile and would not go into the chute into the barn.
Mr Rainman went and got Chance, border collie puppy, and he attempted to get her to move the sheep into the barn while she was on a lead. She would not really listen to him and since she is learning you have to be patient and strict at the same time. I took over and she was baling them up well but they would not go into the barn. She would be within four feet of them and they would not budge. One broke loose and she dived for it, I had a hold of the lead rope with just my hands, no gloves. I had to clamp down and grab rope to jerk her back for a correction. I ended up with a two inch rope burn on my middle finger! But I did get the puppy stopped and corrected. We had to go get Mouse also and squeeze the sheep from both sides and push them into the barn with the dogs. They just would not go on their own, and before that would work we had to open up the barn so they could just go through the door, once in the barn we pushed them to the far end so we could run them through the chute. We were still having trouble getting them into the chute so Mr Rainman started to just catch the little ones and then I could tag and band them. We had about ten lambs that needed tagged and banded still. On one of his snags he caught a pink tagged big lamb that was a ram! So it got banded, which was not easy as the testicles were so big I had to pop them through the bander opening one at a time. I have not made this mistake in years, so it was a great catch by Mr Rainman.
We used the oral drenched but the little clip that holds the bottle to the belt does not work so I tie it upside down under the belt with a piece of cord then it will work. It’s fairly redneck but it does the job and using the drencher hand pump is so much faster than having to measure out a syringe every time you need to dose a sheep. Once we had two groups of sheep we had to run them through the chute again to count them! Here are the final numbers: 46 ewes, 10 babies (too young to wean) , 1 ram in the first group and 40 lambs, 1 cull ewe, 13 eating size in second group for a total of 111 sheep. We are going to be taking the eating size ones to sale soon to see how they do. The ram is now in with the momma herd and we are keeping them in the orchard for now so he doesn’t have to chase them all over. We are bringing both groups into the barn lot every night to keep the predators at bay. One group in the front side and one group on the back side. They can see each other but not mix. There is an amazing amount of noise for the first few days once we separate off the lambs.
I hooked up the sickle mower onto the Kubota and tried to cut the orchard but the space is full of trees and metal rings around the trees. I did not even make it around the field once before I hit a cow panel and popped off a tooth from the bar. So I had to go put that sickle bar up and put the rake on the Kubota and set up the smaller sickle bar on the John Deere. We did not use it last year so I had to make some adjustments and get it all greased up. The Italians that designed it put one essential grease zirk where it is near impossible to access. It took me 30 minutes to get the thing into a spot where I could access it with a small grease gun and a 90 degree elbow. It is of course exactly where the bolt fails every time so it has to be done. I can pop the other mower apart and redo the rivets but that will take time. So it will be something I need to do after hay season. I had to pull the break away bar from the mower and beat on it with an eight pound sledge hammer to get it back into some semblance of shape and function. It’s not perfect but it is much improved. I am now ready to cut more hay today. The plan is to cut 1/3 of the leftover ground today and turn it on Tuesday. Then bale it on Wednesday. I will cut more hay on Tuesday, another 1/3. We have managed to bale 346/900 needed bales and 252/900 are in the barn. I was able to scavenge another 20 bales yesterday from the leftovers.
It is time, haying season is officially here. I went out and inspected the fields last week. The cheatgrass is a menace. Fields that I tried to replant in the fall with new grass are nothing but solid cheatgrass. Fields that were full of cheatgrass last year are not this year. So we are mowing the cheatgrass down wherever we find it and just haying where I can find big patches of good grass.
The lower schoolhouse pasture looked pretty good this year so it got cut on Sunday. The new sickle bar mower cut through the whole field in under two hours. I then turned it after work twice in the late evening. I was able to finish just as the sun was going down so I did not have to use the work lights on the tractor. Wednesday it was ready to be baled.
Mr Rainman came out Wednesday to start baling. He had to wait until it warmed up a little and burned off the dew. He managed to get the first bale made but could not get the net wrap to roll out like it was should have. I came home to trouble shoot it, I should have known that the first time operating the baler for the year was not going to go smooth. I was hoping it would! I washed the feed roller, no go. I then verified net was installed correctly and finally I just pulled some of the netting loose from the roll. The roll was very dusty as it has been on the baler since last year. I think I may need to cover the baler with a tarp this year after we get done and get it cleaned up. Once we got the first roll wrapped the clean netting worked just fine on the next bale. He was off and going and managed to bale the entire lower field, 133 bales in a about 3 hours. I came home, we hooked up the flat bed trailer to the pickup and went out into the field and picked it all up. The first 83 bales went into the barn. The next 50 bales made it to the barn lot but not inside. Their were about 3-4 bales that had a moisture reading over 20%. So we spread the bales out on the trailer so the sun and weather could heat them up for a few days.
The weather was cooperating fantastically until last night. We had a storm come through last night and drop 11/100” of rain on us in under an hour. So now the bales will need to stay out in the weather a little longer. I had big plans on cutting new hay down yesterday but I had to prioritize the paying job an spent most of the day working. When I came home I was tired, took a nap in the yard for an hour and then Annmarie told me to just do it the next day. I took her offer and by the time the rain showed up I was grateful that I had not cut any grass. I will have to wait another day now before I can cut hay. This rain should give my field #1 a needed boost. That is going to be the field I cut last. There are 50 bales to a ton this year. The bales are 40-45# this year. The grass looks great and since we are only doing small batches it is very green and lovely hay.
Stewart Creek Somethings 