Late last week we figured out that we'd yet again missed the ball on the hay. Remember we had a few bales of great hay? The horses love it, and it didn't mold. We'd told the guy we'd call to come and get more in a week or so. Welp, he had someone show up wanting to buy his whole supply... so then we were back to the classified ads. We called quite a few numbers before we found anyone that still had hay. Looks like out towards Greely there are sellers still with a supply.
Meanwhile, all of the hay we got from our neighbor, plus those bales we got that were baled too soon - were declared total losses. We added so much hay to the manure pile for composting that we started to see the farce in calling it the manure pile.
~*~
Hooray! We managed to pick up a load of 80 bales this weekend. Not without having to abandon our first choice and switching to a second, but we're quite happy with what we got. David and I did the majority of the hay tossing - Ginger having her hand in a cast since she had surgery last week. Actually that worked fine, since keeping count of the bales as we load them has always proven to be an amazingly difficult task. So Ginger took over that duty. Roger was a big help in organizing the bales as they were loaded. We had both pickup trucks and a small trailer - and 80 bales was as much as we could get. By the time we got home we'd had quite enough of moving hay so we decided to leave unloading until the morning. Not wanting to take any chances with rain, we pulled the trucks into the barn. It is just way cool to be able to drive into the barn.
Sunday we got it all stacked next to the barn, under the overhang. The stacking went fairly smoothly, minus us having to yank the first layer and a half off so that we could trim the hay rack to a better size. But better then than wait for us to have 6 layers deep. Then we noticed that where we were stacking was going to block the main exterior light. Fortunately Dave saw that we could swivel the light bulb around, and by leaving off the last two bales they are still functional.
We have calculated we'll need 200-300 bales to feed just our own horses over the winter, so we still have quite the job left. Next weekend, however, we'll have a much larger trailer at our disposal and, if we are smart about it, more people to help as well.
Labels: Ranch
