Hay! It's That Time of Year

Right before I went to Virginia, we finally got our hay delivered.  We ordered 20 round bales to start with this winter, which would have meant five trips for Herb on five different evenings since he can only take four at a time pulling our trailer.  So we just decided to save him some time and get it delivered.

Scott, our hay guy, can get the whole load on his trailer in one trip.  He doesn't live far away, so he brings it over with his tractor, uses the tractor to unload the hay, and takes off.

It's up to Herb from there.

It's a job Herb enjoys, but it's always a bit of a rush to get the hay into the barn before dark since Scott can't deliver until supper-time.

Herb has mastered the skill of stacking bales on top of each other to save room in the barn.  He puts the bottom bales up on pallets to keep them away from any moisture that gets in the barn.  Since we had the front and back of the barn replaced a few weeks ago, the transparent panels are new--no more rain coming in on our hay!

About the first thing we had to do when I got home from Virginia was to put some hay out for the animals.  Although we were 20 inches ahead of normal annual rainfall up through the end of September, the spigot dried up in October.  We were lucky if we had half an inch for the whole month, and the grass is just not growing.  Here Herb is loading the hay ring into the pickup.

It's heartening to see a supply of hay in the barn, but we know 20 bales won't be enough for the winter when we have to start feeding it before the end of October.  However, we'd rather feed hay to supplement the grass that's left instead of letting the animals overgraze the pastures.

It goes a lot quicker with two of us.  I drove the truck down to the pasture while Herb followed with the hay on the tractor's hay spear.

He took the hay over to the run-in shed.

Watching Herb plop the hay down where we want it reminded me of our first year here when we had to manually roll round bales off our trailer and into the barn because we didn't have a tractor.  The only way to get hay to the animals was to tear it off in chunks, stuff it in a hay net, and carry that to the barnyard.

With the hay ring around the bale, there's room for multiple animals to get access to the hay from all around it without them being able to stand in it.   The hay stays dry from the weather and clean from the animals. Everyone gets plenty to eat without us having to stuff and haul hay nets.  I call that a win-win situation!  

A Crappy Day--The Good Kind!

An exciting event we've been eagerly awaiting happened this morning while I was at physical therapy (of course).  Fortunately, Kara grabbed my iPad and recorded it for me.   Brandy asks, "Is THIS the new pony?"

Sorry, Brandy, no, but it IS something we got because of you (and Angel and Sara and Siobhan and T-Bone).  Hint:  Poop!

Our instructions from ABI said to have a tractor with a loader ready to help unload our new toy because it was too big for the lift gate alone to handle.  So Herb fastened a strap to it and helped the driver let it down.

Oops!  Suddenly it slipped!  But the tractor and the strap held it up.

Oof!  Safe on the ground!  You can actually see the relief on Herb's face!  (Our new toy weighs over 1,000 lbs, by the way.  You don't grab it when it slips!)

The mighty little Kubota dragged the whole thing out of the road so the driver could turn around at Kara's house.

This is the delightful sight that met my eyes when I got home:  Our new ABI Classic Manure Spreader!  Ours is the 50G, meaning it is ground-driven (the blades turn as it drives over the ground without having to be hooked up to a tractor's PTO drive) and it holds 50 cu.ft. of manure.  This is not a lot as full-size manure spreaders go, but it is perfect for us.  It would take us all winter to fill a gigantic manure spreader, and then our tractor wouldn't be able to pull it!  This one will be light enough to be pulled by our riding mower, will cause less damage to wet ground, and will be more maneuverable.

Take a peek inside at the chains that move the manure back . . .

... and the chopping blades and spreader bars that, well, chop and spread the manure!  :)  We can't wait to try it out, but we need a large cotter pin, so we'll just have to hold our horses . . . before the spreader can hold our horses' manure!

Stay tuned for a photographic demonstration . . .

You can see why this was a "crappy" day and why it was good, too.  One more thing happened that might qualify for a "crappy" day for lots of people, but made it extra specially good for us:  A cloudburst that dumped rain on us shortly after I took this picture.

What a lovely, doubly crappy day!

Looking Back: Things We've Done Right

Things we’ve done right in our three years here:

1)  Getting chickens.  That includes having our own layers and learning to butcher our own meat chickens.

2)  Getting Dexters.  While Sara is not the best representative of the breed, she has given us a marvelous heifer, and Siobhan has convinced us that we love cows, particularly Dexters.  The very helpful and friendly Dexter breeders we’ve met have also contributed to our enthusiasm.

3)  Getting pigs.  Herb getting to meet the Large Blacks at Nature’s Harmony Farm changed his perspective on pigs, and he caved in to my pleading for a pig when I found some on craigslist.  Now we’re both pig fans!

4)  Getting Muscovy ducks to eat flies in the barnyard.  Besides doing exactly what we raised them to do, they are beautiful and fun to watch.

5)  Finding Jeff McBryar, our butcher, and Jim Gifford, the breeder of our Berkshire crosses.  It’s so helpful to have local contacts that we can trust for their expertise in their particular area.

6)  Getting a smoker and vacuum sealer.  We are hooked after smoking our own bacon and ham, and Herb will probably smoke anything that lies still, including fresh salmon at Christmas.  The vacuum sealer will prevent freezer burn in our meat and produce.   It has even been useful in packaging bubble-wrapped bottles of homemade liqueur for air travel.

7)  Reading blogs.  I have learned so much from reading blogs, particularly Farming in France, Hope Refuge Farm, Sugar Mountain Farm, and Throwback at Trapper Creek.  I used to follow Nature Harmony’s Farm blog when they still had one, and this led us to their summer Farm School which was a tremendous help in giving us insight and direction—and leading us to pigs!

8)  Getting a generator.  It could have been a serious mistake not to get one sooner, but Herb managed to find one in time to save our meat last time the power went out.

9)  Making improvements over the past three years.  These include:

• Getting our Kubota L-series tractor, one of the best decisions we've ever made.
• Fencing our 20 x 30’ garden.
• Fencing the barnyard.
• Fencing the Home Pasture with no-climb horse fence so our tiny Dexter calves can be safe.
• Hiring a crew to link all our fences and give us the large new pasture we call Kara’s Pasture.  They came with ideas that saved hundreds of feet of fencing, made our pastures more functional, and got the job done in a fraction of the time that Herb could have done it alone.
• Converting half of a surplus shed into a brooder house.
• Building a large chicken coop and moving it to the safety of the barnyard with water and electricity handy.
• Piping water to the barnyard—it has saved us carrying countless buckets in freezing weather.
• Running electricity to the barn—enabling us to have motion-detector security lights, unfrozen water in the winter, and a barn ceiling fan for hot weather.  A future project is to connect it up to the brooder house so we won’t need to run multiple extension cords.
• Getting a head gate set up with a chute, small round pen and simple sweep gate.

10)  Doing this!  We love what we are doing for ourselves, for our children and grandchildren, for our animals, for this bit of creation God has given us to steward, and for friends and acquaintances we can share these blessings with.

2011 in Review: Mistakes We've Made

Mistakes we’ve made during our three years here and what we’ve learned from them:

1)  Leaving a gate open. The result: Sara got loose. We herded her into a pasture, but we weren’t able to get close to her again until time for her calf to be born. We had to trick her into the trailer and haul her up to the round pen before she calved. Now we double-check gates!

2)  Waiting so long to build the barnyard. We didn’t actually realize we needed one until the rodeo with Sara and the impending birth of her calf, which we knew we needed to separate from Sara to be able to touch it. It is one of the best improvements we’ve made! What we did right was: make it as big as possible, leave a wide right of way for the drive in front, plan it so it links with the pasture gates across the drive to channel animals through, fence it in the best no-climb horse fence, and connect a round pen to it by a small gate.

3)  Not getting a posthole digger when we bought the tractor. When we were ready to build the barnyard, we tried renting a one-man gas-driven one, but it hardly dented our hard, clay soil. So Herb hand-dug every single one of the 21 postholes, 3 feet deep, no less! We learned we needed a PTO-driven one for our tractor. By the time we finally got one, it was summer and the ground was so hard we were advised to wait because even a PTO-driven posthole digger can’t dig through soil that’s like concrete. Winter was too wet, and the tractor would have slipped on our hilly terrain. Herb had to wait till spring rains, followed by enough sun to dry the ground surface before he could fence the home pasture. It was a herculean task, even with the digger, but he did an amazing job. A professional fencer who came to do some work for us admired Herb’s fence!

4)  Thinking our barnyard was secure just because we had a coyote-proof fence. We under-estimated the cunning of a fox to either climb the fence or creep through a tiny space between barn boards. This cost us nine of our birds in a few days. What we learned is that we need a livestock guardian, and that is how Misty joined us.

5)  Driving the tractor into the barn without fully raising the sliding door. Oops! The roll bar on the tractor sticks up WAY above your head—unfortunately, behind you, so you forget about it! At least the door was easily repaired, and now we haul it all the way up. Okay, now that I told one on Herb, I’ll tell one on me . . . Insisting on putting the tomato plants as close together as the “square foot garden” enthusiasts say you can. You can’t! Not in our area! Herb told me they’d get blight, and they did. Next time I’ll listen to him.

6)  Paying the man who dug our new pond before he finished the work. (You’d think at our age, we’d know better.) He laid it on thick about how he’d already done even more than we had asked him to do, which had kept him there longer than he planned, and some rain had made it impossible for him to get his equipment into the old section to dig it out and compact it per agreement, but he would be back to finish it as soon as he did this job that was waiting . . . yadda, yadda, yadda. You can guess how that story ends: We still don’t have a pond that holds water, and Mr. T doesn’t answer my calls any more.

7)  Letting the ducks go a week or so longer before we butchered them. They had already shed were re-growing down—leaving lots of teeny-tiny bits of down that were impossible to pluck out. It took us as long to butcher three ducks as it did to do 10 chickens. But we learned—we stopped at three instead of the five we’d planned to do!

8)  Not realizing that old houses can harbor dangerous stashes of rat poison that can kill an animal many years later. Poor Zephyr nearly died after she ate some rat poison that she found in an access hole in Kara’s house. By God’s grace, she was spared, and we plan to keep Zephyr Hill rat poison free!

9)  Not realizing there are still horse thieves around. After Angel and Brandy were stolen and recovered by God’s grace, we instituted several defense measures: Gates on all entrance drives and a security camera aimed at the barn. After Brandy was stolen a second time (from the barnyard on a moonless night) and recovered by God’s grace, we installed motion-detector lights in the barnyard and got BIG DOGS. They have probably been the best deterrent from future thefts.

10)  Waiting so long to do this! Why did we wait until we were in our 50’s to discover how much we love farm life? I think it was just not where God was leading us earlier in our lives (rather harder to do in Africa or in France), but we are so thankful that He has brought us down this rural road in the autumn of our lives!

Farmer Girl Rises to the Occasion

While Herb was in Dallas with his siblings and his sister in the hospital, we had the horses and calves in the barnyard.  The hay was going down fast, and I realized it wasn't going to last till Herb got home.  Seeing the tricky location he had chosen to put the feeder, I was pretty sure I'd never be able to get a bale in there.  So the solution was to put some hay in the Home Pasture for the calves  who wouldn't mind eating hay that had gotten rained on.

Usually Herb plays with the tractor, but this time I was going to have to rise to the occasion.

First step, remove the loader with the quick release--a piece of cake!

Second step, get the hay spear onto the tractor.  That was a little trickier, but thanks to Kara's help guiding me and a few times hopping down to look, I finally remembered how to put it on.

Third step, also pretty easy, pick up a hay bale from the barn . . .

and take it out to the pallet I had set up in the field.  With some more guidance from Kara, I plopped the hay bale down on the target.

Kara went in to do some homework, but I wasn't quite finished.  I retrieved a cattle panel from the side of the barn and dragged it over to the hay bale.  Using rubber bungie cords to pull the ends together, I added a couple small pieces left over from a panel we cut up, and tied everything off tightly with more rubber bungies.  I shoved a couple of concrete blocks in under the low side of the hay bale to keep it from tipping, and voila!  I had a custom hay bale feeder!

The final step was (after shutting the horses in their stalls) to open the double gates to the barnyard and the Home Pasture and chain them together, making a wide passage for the calves to go through into the Home Pasture.  We purposely designed the gates to work this way, and I'm so glad we did!  While I could have led Siobhan, I could never have gotten T-Bone through single-handedly without our nice chute arrangement.

All that was left to do was to sit back and enjoy watching the calves enjoy their personal bale of hay while I enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction that comes from rising to a challenge!

Hey, Hey, Hay!

After more than average rainfall for the year, August has been completely dry.  Strangely, the temperature has been in the low 90°s, even down to a high of 89° compared to the high 90°s of July--but no rain.  It's dry, dry, dry!

Yesterday while we were working nearby, the pigs started galloping along the fence, raising a cloud of dust.  Their dust is what is highlighting the sun's rays!

Since they chewed through the bungee cords holding up their shade-tarp for the second time, their "spa corner" has been a bit hot.  Besides, they are so big now that one pig flopping in the wading pool pushes out most of the water.  Archimedes should have met our pigs!

So I turned on the hose and let the pigs play in the spray.

Here is one happy, wet pig!

Misty likes the pigs and made herself very small to touch noses through the fence.

This weather is not good for much except making hay, so we decided to start laying in our winter's supply.   The guy we bought from last year was all out because many farmers are already having to feed hay with the grass drying up.  So Herb found Scott Teems just a couple miles from us and arranged to buy 12 round bales.  That meant four trips, three bales each time.  We went over to get the first three, and Scott told us that he had to deliver a load of hay near us and would bring the rest of our bales after dinner.

So while Scott ate dinner, Herb unloaded the first three bales . . .

. . . and the pigs had a ball playing through the fence with the dogs.  They (the pigs) were excited by the tractor driving by, and they went galloping and cavorting along the fence.

I wish I had a movie camera so you could enjoy the sight of pigs spinning in circles!

This, of course, meant lots of barking from Hero as well as Zephyr racing pigs along the fence.

Too bad I didn't have the camera handy later when Scott drove up with his big rig.  The pigs went absolutely crazy, like whirling dervishes!

We were pretty happy, too, to have our nine other bales of hay roll in without having to make any more trips.  They are the light green ones on top, fresh out of the field and ready to put in the barn.

A bit of the hay fell off, green and dry and sweetly fragrant.  Scott just found some permanent customers!

 By the time we ate our dinner and got back out to put the hay in the barn, it was dark.  Herb did the fun part, spearing the bales and carrying them into the barn, while I did the no-brainer part, moving a new row of pallets into place as he finished placing a row of hay bales.

By the time we went in to bed, we had a dozen lovely bales of hay stored in the barn.  I'm sure the pigs were already passed out in their favorite spot downhill, worn out from all the excitement.