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