Re-bale

Last night rain came up in the weather forecast for today.  A 20% chance.  Well... with hay on the ground, 20% is like 100%.   The rain chance wasn't to come until the afternoon.  In the morning I debated on either going for short morning wake-up bicycle ride or re-bale my bad hay bale.  It didn't look like it would rain anytime soon, but the dew was dry.  So I decided to re-bale the bad bale.

The old full bad bale and the about a third of a net wrapped bad bale ended up making four inches short of a full bale.  Funny how re-baling keeps breaking the hay down with a result of a denser bale.

I set the wrapping to be 2.5 times in case I had another net wrap failure.  It wrapped perfectly this time.  And the bale was even from side to side.  Probably my best bale yet.

I parked the tractor and baler with plans to clean it later this afternoon.  Less than 15 minutes later it began to rain lightly.  Wow.  Once again I made it by the skin of my teeth.  If I hadn't re-baled when I did I would not have been able to re-bale today.  It rained off-and-on most of the afternoon.  The hay would have not dried out.  We had .14 of an inch of rain overall today.  I had to delay putting the large hay bales into the hayshed as this evening they were still wet on the surface.  It may take a day or two before they are dry.  I never did clean the baler.  Tomorrow.

Late this afternoon I took a bicycle ride.  The field with hay down that I had seen Friday was still down.  That meant it suffered Thursday's rain and now today's rain.  The hay is pretty brown.  This same field got wet and brown during the first cutting back in June.  I saw another field that had about eight rows of hay down and the tractor and haybine sitting out in the field mid-row.  It looked like he started cutting this morning.  Another local farmer who doesn't pay attention to the weather forecast; doesn't think 20% means it will rain; or doesn't care.


The rain clouds made an extremely gorgeous orange sunset tonight.  I wish I had my camera with me as the sky was a fantastic color.