Perfect Form....

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Hay, It's what we do..............



We mow the hay, we ted the hay, we rake the hay. Sometimes we ted the hay twice, and rake it twice. Then we bale the hay.

I think.

Sometimes the Amish ask us for balage. We ususally deal with small hay bales, the ones you can throw with your own two hands.


We used to make balage (hay wrapped in plastic).

That was many moons ago in a different lifetime.

Lately though, the Amish families who bought our balage (many moons ago) are asking for more because they say they can't find the good stuff.

Trust me, there's no secret recipe. I'm pretty sure it has to do with all the shale around here.

You have to have a lot of shale to make good hay.

Right?

I could be wrong, but with the amount of shale we dig out of our hay, I'm pretty sure that's the secret!

You need a very large square baler for this job. A large round baler would work too, but with our hills around here, it's not pretty or much fun trying to gather round bales from the bottom of your soy bean field.

So you bale your hay into large, big cubes.



Get your son to stand on one for reference.

 Your youngest son who's taller than you at eleven years old.

Your baby boy who would like a new facebook picture of himself standing on hay bales.

*Sob*

Your littly guy who's wanted a heart tattoo with an arrow through it and the word "Mom" inside from the time he was four.

Sorry, where were we?

Oh, yes.

Then you get your other sons to drive the hay truck and the tractor and pick all the bales up out of the field.



At this point, you may hear a lot of yelling, but that's okay, they just can't hear each other over the tractor and truck noises.

I think.

I'm not sure what that last word was but it rhymed with "gutlead".

Now you're ready to unload the bales from the truck and wrap them up tight.


Using your awesome 1026 International Harvester and a wrapper you are borrowing from your neighbor that your husband actually built for another farm (the wrapper, not the tractor, the tractor is like a right hand man on this farm).

Weird sentence, I know. Even weirder story.

I'm sorry, I am a horrible person, I did not get the action shot of my guys wrapping bales because everytime I took them a drink, or supper, they were doing something else.



This is what they look like when they're all wrapped up.


Kind of like giant marshmallows.


They may look like fun to jump on, but if you get a hole in one of these buggers, it's ruined, the whole marshmallow is just going to mold.
Then you will never be able to sell it or feed it to your animals.
Plus you have to figure out what to do with a large moldy marshmallow.


This concludes the end of our hay wrapping journey.

We will be back to small bales, and even harder work in the next couple of weeks.


Really hard work.

Love, me

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Just a couple of things.....


This is what my son says after I crank at him, and his brothers for throwing off my meat wrapping groove to take them water. Then I apologized and told them I'd make them cheeseburger stromboli!
Yes, I was listening to "Pocketful of Sunshine"!!

I
Love
This
Picture.


I also love going to the hay auction.


My kids love the dog.


They love this dog too.


There's a new guinea pig in town. Meet Hurley.


My mom's house is almost done!!


My nephew's baby is soooooo cute! I miss the rolls. Oh my.


This is my baby. I'm running away now.

Love, me






Tuesday, May 17, 2011

On Spaghetti up a nose and other things............



Spring.

That one word can strike fear and elation into this farmwife's heart.

It means the hay starts growing.


For the record, this is rye, not hay.

Spring means the rain doesn't seem to stop falling+the moat around my house=an even dirtier floor.



It also means tulips, daffodils, and all the other flowers start blooming. Scratch off my tulips, my deer ate them all.

The weeds look like they are on steroids.



Mother's day!!



Warmer weather is nice, but not too warm yet. Get the memo, 80 degrees is Summer weather, not Spring.



The days, oh, the days are so much longer!!



And my son stuck spaghetti up his nose.

Uncooked.

Wade (16) told me on a particularly "sneezy" day that if I said "squirrel" before I sneezed, I wouldn't sneeze.

I always thought this was a bad thing. I mean, anything coming out of your face with a force like a sneeze, you really don't want to hold it back, right?

I sneezed all day.

Finally, at night I tried it. guess what? It worked.

That one little word warded off my sneeze.

Kinda wierd.

I wouldn't do it often, but if you were, say, in front of a large group of people and you felt a nasty, messy sneeze coming on you might want to say "squirrel". At least you don't have to explain the snot hanging out of your nose.

You might want to take it to the next level to try it.

Just take an uncooked spaghetti noodle out of the box, and poke around inside your nose with it.

It might make you sneeze, then you can test the theory.

Just like Cole (14) did.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

He sat next to me at the kitchen table doing this for about 15 minutes before I even noticed what he was doing.

For the record, I don't recommend trying this, and all the spaghetti noodle manufactuers out there have never heard of me, and don't know me from a lasagna noodle.

Amen.

One other thing, is "farmwife's" a word??

Love, Me