7/5/12   Remember this story from a few years ago??  At least tonight's baling shouldn't be such a nightmare!

"I’m finally somewhat recovered from my weekend at Barleycorn Labor Camp…  I already told you about the work we did on Saturday with planting the shrubs and my reaction to either the juniper oils or the new sun screen.  We watered all our 40-some trees on Sunday and lugging the hoses and buckets is not trivial work!  So by late afternoon I was bushed and ready to stop.  I was washing the sweat, dirt, plant fragments, and wind off my face when Fred raced into the house and said, “Nancy, we need you to drive the tractor!”.  Our farmer friend’s hay baler wasn’t working entirely right and the mechanism that kicks the bales back into the hay wagon wasn’t doing its job.  This meant that each bale was simply dropped onto the field and would have to be manually picked up and tossed into the hay wagon.  I was supposed to drive the tractor, towing the hay wagon, slowly up and down the field while the guys “tossed” the 40-60 pound bales 3 feet up into the hay wagon.  I’ve driven the tractor exactly once in the past three years.  It has 2 brake pedals on one side, a clutch pedal on the other, a hand lever accelerator, and a gear shift with 5 vague gears.  My foot can barely cover the brake pedals, the seat is not adjustable so I’m reaching with both legs and arms, and the gear mechanism is very sticky.  I was fine until I started to go uphill and wanted to shift gears.  I could not get it into gear!  And the tractor was rolling backwards downhill, getting ready to jack-knife the hay wagon… (Look for us on the evening news…!)   I’m pushing on the brakes but sliding backwards in the seat, so the brakes weren’t terribly effective.  Fred is racing across the field shouting at me to put it in park (like I could just do that!).  I finally got it stopped and into park, at which point Fred reached me and said, “I’ll drive!”.  So then I was supposed to be on the ground, flinging the bales into the wagon.  Right.  Like I have the arm strength to fling 50 pounds up three feet into a moving target!  My third and last option was to ride in the hay wagon and stack the bales the other 2 guys were tossing in.  I could get them stacked up about 3 layers high, but no further.  Each bale is about 3 ft x 1 ft x 1 ft, and wrapped twice around with thin plastic twine, and don’t forget the weight!  Not an easy object to toss about.  At one point I felt like Lucy in the chocolate factory, with bales coming in from both sides!  At some point in this venture, the farmer left and returned with a different baler with a working kicker, so he finished the rest of the lower field with that.  However, he did the upper field with the broken kicker, so we had to go pick up those bales, too.  Then, we had to unload and restack all the bales in the barn! It was not fun.  We have a barn full of sweet-smelling new hay and that’s nice, but we’re anticipating that about 1/5 of the bales will go bad.  The cut hay really didn’t have enough time to dry between the cutting and the baling, but we were running into a rain threat so didn’t really have a choice, once it was cut – had to get it baled and off the field or risk losing it all."

The new equipment John (the farmer) is using stacks the bales in nice layers of 12 and drops them onto the barn floor.  If we had the room, the loader could just turn around and drop them onto the hay storage deck, but we don't, so we do have to restack them by hand, but that's a lot easier than tossing them out of the haywagon!  The kicker tosses the bales, willy nilly, into the hay wagon and it's like playing Pick Up Stix to get them out.

7/7/12  Update: for some reason known only to God and his angels, John left our bales in tidy piles in the field!  We had to take the tractor down to pick them up, trundle back to the barn, dump them and then stack on the hay deck. I couldn't believe it....  It was a small cutting, so only about 30 bales, but still!

There are only two nests of baby birds left to fledge, then I can take the boxes down to clean them (pour boiling water all over them!).  I hope the TRES use the new boxes next year!