Picking up Hay - Summer 2016

This post contains a lot of pictures and may be a little longer than my normal posts, but I wanted to capture the day's events.  Hay day is a hot, hard day, but it is only one day of the year and when the job is done, it is done for the entire year.  And, I must say, you sure sleep soundly that night!  Here goes...

When I was a young boy, I remember my Mom always telling us to make a wish when we'd see a truck with a load of hay on it.  This past Saturday we had the load of hay and if I had made a wish, it would have been that all 75 hay bales would make their way into the hayloft in the barn without us having to work so hard.  That wish did NOT come true!

Our neighbor down the road bales fantastic, top-quality, bermuda grass hay. People who own horses come from miles around to purchase hay from him.  He always calls us when he bales the first cutting.  He gives us a great price per bale if he doesn't have to touch it.  We simply drive in the field and pick up the bales as they come out of the baler.  Tricia drove the truck, I picked up the bales...

1 down, 74 to go...

We met Russ in Breaux Bridge which is halfway between Baton Rouge and Jennings and I traded my little car for his truck.  We also borrowed my Dad's cattle trailer.  As Tricia drove slowly, I would pick up the bales and toss them in the back of the trailer.

Benjamin would pick up the bales and stack them,  I would count the bales and Benjamin would repeat the count so we wouldn't lose track of how many we picked up.

Stacking and Counting

Now on Saturday there was rain falling all around us.  One thing you don't want to happen is for rain to fall on your hay.  Our neighbor has his whole family out baling.  In the photo below, his grandson is running the "fluffer" to fluff up the hay after it has been raked and ready for baling.  You can see the thundercloud in the distance.  They are trying to race the storm to get the hay baled and in the barn.

Hurrying, fluffing, trying to beat the rain

Here is the view in front of the truck.  Tricia drives between the bales and I picked up the hay on either side.

Here is my neighbor on his baler.  We normally 'shoot the breeze' for a bit, but he was in overdrive as he was trying to get everything done before it rained.  A smile and a wave would have to suffice for today.  He is an amazing fellow.  He is 85 years old and keeps going.  He beat cancer after some tough chemo and radiation and nothing stops him.  He just keeps on rolling - literally and figuratively.

You can see the hay bales dropping out of the back of his baler as he heads southward in his field.

Now this next picture shows perhaps the best invention a hay-man has ever seen. This contraption picks up the bales and stacks in on a trailer with no manual effort at all.  All it requires is a tractor driver.  We sure could have used one of these!

The Amazing Hay-Picker-Upper

The machine picks it up...

lines it up, and then stacks it.  He'll take this load to the barn and the entire wagon lifts/dumps and stacks the hay in a neat stack in the barn.  No sweat.  Seriously.

Our job wasn't quite as easy.  We filled the trailer with exactly 50 bales.  I wanted to see if we could creatively stack 25 bales (to give us the 75 we had ordered) without making a second trip.  It is only a mile down the road, so it wouldn't be a big deal if we couldn't fit them, but we certainly wanted to try.

I tossed the bales up to Benjamin and he continued stacking and counting.  At last he put the 75th bale on the very top, tying them all together nicely.  The truck and trailer were loaded down.  I don't think we could have fit another bale.

Whew!  We got it done!

C'est tout!

The prettiest little truck driver in all the land posed with her (tired) boy.

On our way out of the field we met our neighbor's daughter and paid her.  All honor system.  We chatted for a while and we thanked her and told her to tell her Dad we appreciate him and then we took off.  The work was only halfway done.  We had to drive the truck and trailer back down the road very, very slowly, back it to the barn and get it all up in the loft.

Easier said than done.  I bogged the truck down backing it in.  Tricia and Benjamin had to unload the truck and trailer one by one into a wagon and then pull the wagon to the barn.  There is a pulley on a 4x4 outside the loft door where I pull the bales up after Tricia and Benjamin hook the hay up to the rope with a bungee cord.  After I pulled the first one up, Benjamin alerted me to the fact that there was a big wasp nest right over my head under the eave of the barn.  I asked him to go get a cup of gas.  He returned and I threw the gas on the wasp nest, killing all the wasps but filling my ear with gas in the process.  It burned, but I guess it was better than being stung by a bunch of wasps.

Hay Woman

Finally the last 3 bales were waiting for me to pull them up.

I would pull the rope while walking backward and then pull the bale into the loft and slide the bale along the floor and stack it tightly and neatly.  Over the years of doing this, the floor of the loft is worn smooth, like a dance floor in an old dance hall.  It is getting kind of slippery.  I had to be careful.

The View from the hayloft doors

We were finished!  Finally.  Except first we had to go get the truck out of the mud. Using a come-along, we got the truck and trailer out of the mud in no time.  We cooled off, showered, changed clothes, and rewarded ourselves by driving into town to the Rocket Drive Inn and treating ourselves to root beer floats and Oreo milk shakes.  That work we did today will benefit our Jersey cows throughout the winter. On a day approaching 100 degrees, it was hard to even imagine the concept of what winter is!

Hay Day 2016 can be summed up like this:

Proverbs 6:7-8 Though they have no prince or governor or ruler to make them work, they labor hard all summer, gathering food for the winter.