Oh, look! It's been four days since I have posted. Again. Honestly though, I have the best of all excuses for being absent again, it's hay season!
I mean, how is it a bad thing that I have been putting in the entire next year's feed for my critters? The feeling of preparedness that permeates my being as I stack feed for the winter in my barn is just the greatest thing ever. I loved the book The Little Red Hen as a kid, and read the story to my kids, for hard work and preparing for winter are never a bad thing. Well, my teenagers kind of grumped a bit, but that's normal, and one thing I have learned is teenagers just need the addition of other teenagers to the mix and grumping evaporates. It's an amazing phenomenon!
But I just digressed a bit. Really, I could write posts for days about teens and their awesomeness. Today though, today I am talking about hay. For the last nineteen years I have been procuring my hay from a family that who I just absolutely adore. Their farm straddles the Idaho and Washington border, 900 plus acres of some to the best hay producing land ever! When I started getting hay from them their son was still in high school and I had just left those halls. Now the son runs the entire operation and I am more than a respectable amount of time from school aged.
We only have to put in twelve to fifteen tons of hay each year, so we can take care of that amount of feed in a couple of days. Having the added bonus of knowing so many bored teenagers comes in really handy during haying season. Of course, that means I have to stack hay and cook mountains of food, but as anybody who reads this blog knows, I don't mind making a mountain of food.
My grandfather ran a hundred head of cattle and a custom cut and bale haying operation, so before I was grown I knew more about hay than I ever wanted to. I love the smell of freshly cut and baled hay! If anyone figured out how to capture that scent in an air freshening product I would so buy it.
Properly mowed, tedded, raked, and baled hay is a piece of agricultural art. Me though, my big hay thing is properly stacking the stuff. With the influx of people from urban areas, I have seen some stacking that has caused me to develop some involuntary twitches. Things like stacking the bales all one direction, or strapping a load of small square bales. Why? Just why?
Instead of being like many Americans these days and griping about something that annoys me, I have done my part over the years and taught an entire new generation how to stack hay. Every teen who helps me put in hay leaves the farm knowing how to tie in bales and can stack like a boss! It makes me feel good to contribute that tiny little bit to the human labor lexicon.
Well, gotta run, now that the hay is done for the year, I have a huge patch of strawberry and blueberry plants to weed!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's hay scratched and accessorized all agricultural style iPhone.
