Last of the hay

With Donna's and Wyatt's hay in the hayshed I turned my attention to cutting John's and Calvin's fields.  This year I cut both Calvin's upper and lower parts of the field.  Some years the upper field doesn't have enough grass to make it worthwhile to cut; other years I have to wait a few more weeks for the lower part to dry.

It took me 11 hours to cut everything.  While the acreage is not large, it is all grass.  The upper parts are fine grass and the lower parts are thick tall grass.  For each I have to cut a little slower than usual.  Some haybines (mine included) struggle with fine grass and can "miss" some of it, especially when going too fast.

Otherwise no problems cutting the grass.

The weather has been in the 80s and dry with a breeze.  The grass dried quickly.  Two days after cutting the fields I raked the upper parts to make fewer and larger rows to bale.  Then immediately I began to bale the grass.   Once I finished John's field I began to bale Calvin's.  I got one bale made before dark.  Which was fine as I found part of the lower corner still had some green grass at the bottom of the thick windrow.

The next day I waited till the afternoon to begin baling again.  By then all the grass was dry.

The only hiccup in baling was that one bale ended up only being wrapped with twine for half the width.  Don't know why as everything seemed to work when I wrapped the bale.  I took care in hauling the bale to my hayshed.  That went better than I expected as barely any hay flaked off the bale as I moved it.

Before I moved the rest of the bales into the hayshed I first had to haul off to the barn all the loose hay that came off the bales when I had problems stacking Donna's and Wyatt's hay.  I ended up with four pickup loads of loose hay.

The final result.  (I kept the sad, misshapen and twineless hay in front to be used first.)

I am finally done with the hay this year. I even slept in (until Daisy woke me up.)    Things appeared to finally be going well.  Well.... that was before today.  Today (July 23) was a challenging day with many things not going well.  A story for another day.