Piles of hay, Hadley and more baling...

Now we have the hay it needs stacking up. It’s in the shed and its lying about in order to sweat out the bit of rain water that has ended up in the bales. To keep it under control over the winter it needs stacking properly. It’s a bit like building a dry stone wall and twice as hard. But if you get it right there is a beautiful wall of hay. Because of the damp in the bales we are adding some salt to soak up some of the moisture; this also means that as each bale is passed to me I get a liberal salting. I’m positioned at the top of the stack and the boys form a chain passing the bales up to be arranged. I can’t quite see how well we are progressing until I realise my head is almost touching the roof. What a pile of hay!
We have brought Hadley back to the ranch as she is due to calve sometime this week, but knowing our predictions it could be anytime in the next month. She joins Wasi, who is stubbornly refusing to have her calf, in the front field. She is actually due on the 7th and shock, horror on Tuesday morning she promptly has her calf. It’s a little heifer calf and Hadley shows no signs of ‘silly heifer syndrome’. Sometimes when a heifer has her first calf she is so besotted with it that she won’t let it out of her sight, consequently she spins in circles keeping an eye on it whenever it tries to suckle, makes life difficult. It looks like a good calf though.
We are having a hot week, why couldn’t it have been last week? So we cut the last field, big dipper, to make hay at the weekend. In the meantime the hay at Houghton has been sweating in the field and now needs to come in and be stacked in the barn. It’s a long job; we throw them on the big trailer and run them to the shed before hay-wall construction begins. By the evening we have a team of six at the job and the banter, and bales, fly. By midnight there is a fair stack, the shed is almost full and to say we are tired would be an understatement. If anyone wants a good workout, try stacking bales.
On Sunday its time to bale big dipper and I get the treat of doing it. This time around it seems much easier; the hay is much drier and has had no rain. The terrain in big dipper (name a big give away) means the little Massey has a bit of trouble with the baler and sledge on the back so we swap to the Case, nice tractor bouncy as all hell on the roads but does a grand job of the baling. I seem to fly through it and within a couple of hours we are leading 200 bales to the shed, if only the other fields had been this easy!