Posted By FarmerJ on August 10, 2009

Keep those hay bales rollin’!  It seems like forever ago since the first cut of alfalfa ~ so I thought I’d better give you an update…and let you know where I came in with my prediction on the number of rolls that massive cut produced.  [I guess there's a reason why I never win those games where you guess the number of goodies in the jar.]

You can see the net result lined up along the edge of the field, and Peanut, the Beagle muttly, doing patrol and ‘hunting.’  The bales are two deep, except for the one on the left end, so there’s a total of 33 massive, beautiful bales.  I know, I know.  Thirty-three is a far cry from my original prediction.  I think I’d forgotten just how incredibly compact Mr. J’s baler makes these bales.  Or, I’m just a terrible guesser.

Actually, these bales consist of the first and second cut.  As our luck would have it, it started raining the day after the first cut and it didn’t stop raining for a month.  Over 8″ of rain in that month, to boot.  The alfalfa has to dry out before you can bale it.  We’d get a couple of days without rain and the top layer of the windrows would dry, so Mr. J would turn the rows over with his rake so the underneath would be exposed.  Again, as our luck would have it, undoubtedly every time the rows got turned it would rain…again…a lot.  This went on for the entire month of June.

So, in the meantime, the alfalfa grew and began to bloom again.  It was time for the second cut and the first one still laid on the field.  Not a good start to the 2009 season.  Mr. J cleverly came up with a plan to incorporate the first cut rows with the second cut rows so that the bales would have a combination of both.  The second cut was made on July 5, and praise God, we actually had enough rainless days for all of the alfalfa to dry out and it could finally be baled.

Here’s Abigail, the Toy Fox Terrorist, playing Queen of the Bale.

Now, here we are entering the second week in August and we’re ready for the third cut ~ except it’s been raining again.  Not as much as during the month of June, but enough that you don’t want your windrows lying on the field.  But, wait!  The forecast is calling for clear skies beginning tomorrow through Saturday.  That should be plenty-o-time for the cut, rake, bale process to take place.  We’ll be keeping our fingers crossed!

Hay, there’s more!  Heehee!  Darling Husbie made the second cut of the alfalfa/grass mixture on the pasture in the back forty last weekend.  He also decided to cut the deer food plot this time, too.  Yesterday evening we went out to bale it into small square bales.  The yield was 18 alfalfa/grass bales and 27 deer food plot bales.  There were some obstacles to be overcome with the baling wire, but Husbie remains my Mr. Fix It Man of Everything and we had success…

…and some fun.  Fun for me, because I got to drive Husbie’s new tractor and operate the loader while he threw bales and stacked them in the barn.  Squeeee!  Sometimes being a girl has its benefits.  Heehee!

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