Saturday I went hiking all day. When I got home my hay was all baled. I seen Dan had picked up a number of bales already as the bales around several sides of the hayfield were gone. I was starving so I made and ate supper first before getting my hay bales. I kept 70 bales, or a touch over 2 ton of hay, for using in feeding cattle I plan to buy next Spring. My hay is very good this year.
After supper I got my two-wheeled hand cart out out to bring my hay bales to the barn. Here is a view of the loaded cart. I could carry two bales at a time.
I had one broken bale which I gathered up in my wheelbarrow and put into a water trough. In the second photo the bales that are stacked high are the new 70 bales, and the bales on the right that are not so high are the old bales. In front is the hand cart without any bales on it.
I had asked Dan to leave the bales on the north end of the pasture for me as those bales were closest to the barn. Two by two I gathered bales. It took me a few hours and it was dusk by the time I finished. Naturally the mosquitoes were out and attacking.
Dan came the next morning to get the rest of the bales. By the time I woke up he had almost all the bales loaded as he bucked the bales while his wife drove the pickup.
Just before I came outside the house a pickup drove up my driveway and stopped near the house. A couple walked out to the field where Dan was loading the last of the bales. I didn't recognize the couple but I found out they were the eldest son and his wife of one of my neighbors immediately north.
She was watching five horses for a friend who had to go to another city because their parent got ill. They were gone longer than expected and the horses ran out of hay and needed a bale or two. The couple offered to buy a couple bales and Dan gave them two bales free.
He tossed two bales from his trailer to the ground. She went and got their pickup and then loaded the bales in the pickup. Since her husband wasn't going for the hay bales Dan offered to put the bales in their pickup. Instead her husband said that she likes to buck bales as she is a horsewoman. I know, women are equal and can do anything a man can do, but still... it didn't seem right for her husband - and us - to stand around while she tossed the bales into their pickup. Call me sexist.
I also found why the couple were now living with his parents. They lost their house in the contractor scam last winter. A contractor wasn't bonded and quite a number of people in the Valley had liens placed on their house by subcontractors and suppliers because the contractor did not pay them. Many people has tens of thousands of extra dollars they had to pay, and those who couldn't lost their house. Apparently the contractor now lives in Mexico.
To lose one's house like that... man, that's rough.
Any way, I am happy my hay is cut and baled and done as that is one less thing I have to do this Summer. And the cut field makes it easier for the owls to find the rodents. At night I hear the owls are back. The cut field also makes it easier for me to find the pocket gopher mounds. I had to start my line of traps back at the northern fence as I found quite a number of dirt mounds I had missed in the tall grass.
I also found new regular gopher holes near where I had finally trapped the gophers from the NW hayfield. *sigh* The new gophers didn't re-open the closed holes and instead dug new ones. Well, after a day the gopher was dead. The moral: don't mess with me.
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