Started baling my hay

Late this afternoon I started baling my hay.  I have a small window to get all my hay baled as the weather forecast has rain coming tomorrow afternoon sometime.

Wednesday I did a little more grass cutting in the middle pasture.  Then I spent time cleaning the MoCo.  Because the hayfield was not super dry when I cut it, the MoCo had more 'crud' to clean.  Kind of like a lawnmower when the grass is not dry.  I got a lot of the MoCo clean but I have more cleaning to do.  But I don't have the time right now so I unhooked the MoCo from the tractor and left it to finish cleaning another day.  I then drove the tractor to the gas station since rush hour was over and my fuel tank was low.  I filled the tractor with 40 gallons of diesel then got to work raking the hayfield windrows - two windrows into one windrow.  I got 3/4's of the hayfield raked by dark.  Early this afternoon I got the rest of the hayfield's windrows raked 2 into 1.   Then I raked those windrows - again.   That is because 2 into 1 means raking one windrow on top of the next windrow.  Because the top of the windrows were dry and the bottom of the windrows were damp/wet and with some green, I needed to rake/flip all the windrows.

Usually the windrows would dry by now.  After all I cut the grass back on Sunday and Monday.  But several nights of rain.  And the ground was still damp from back when I irrigated the hayfield.  Here you can see the grass is really growing after being cut only a few days ago.

Then I waited the rest of the afternoon for the windrows to dry.  

After I gave the cattle a couple sacks of apples I then started baling the hay.  It was now 7 pm.   This is the first time I baled hay since I fixed my baler's broken roller back in June.  Would my fix work?  Yes, it works.  Yay!

Then on my third hay bale the console ended up flashing with the same warning as when the roller broke in June.  Oh no!  I tried the manual override.  Nope. Still a warming of a failure. I checked the baler and found netwrap really rolled around a roller that feeds the netwrap into the baler. I never had this happen to me before.   Because this roller is covered in rubber, I had to use a scissors to cut the netwrap rather than using a knife.  Slow going to cut thick netwrap.

This is how the roller should look.  This is how the roller looked after I repositioned the netwrap and then successfully netwrapped the bale.

The rest of the bales were successfully netwrapped.   I did have two bales where part of the netwrap got stuck on the baler's belts.  This has occasionally happened to me in the past.  Not sure why.  But with a little effort I got it removed from the baler.

I baled until dark at 9 pm.   In two hours I got 13 bales made and four windrows baled.   Now tomorrow I hope the dew is gone early and the rain starts late.  Then I may get all my hay baled before the rain comes.  I hope so.