Hay baled

I got all my hay baled today.  Just in time as it was 9:20 pm when I was done.  It would have been nice if the hay rake didn't break yesterday.  I would have gotten all the hay raked yesterday, the tractor re-fueled, and the tractor hooked up to the bale yesterday.  Since I didn't get that done yesterday, I had to do it today.  I didn't start baling the hay until 3 pm.

A little over six hours to bale the hay.  Not bad.  None of my usual baler mishaps happened so that helped.  I had only one instance where the bale wouldn't stop wrapping a bale.  That was when the netwrap roll finished.  Whether that was the problem that netwrap wouldn't stop, or the not-stopping is what caused the netwrap roll to finish is unknown.  That bale did have more than the usual amount of netwrap.   I got the new roll of netwrap loaded and the baler's actuator adjusted, and everything was fine after that.

My only other annoyance is that occasionally one side of the netwrap would get caught in the baler and not around the bale. This happened four or five times but the bales are good and don't have to be re-done.

Examples of this:

I made 59 bales. Which is decent.  I fertilized the hayfield this year so I expected more bales.  On the other hand I cut the field almost three weeks earlier than usual.  The longer time in the past would have meant more hay in the first cutting.

Tomorrow I will clean the baler and park it.  The hay dried quicker than expected so I won't have to wait as long before I stack the bales in the hayshed.  A few days from now.

Once the bales are stacked I will lay out the irrigation lines and start irrigating.  A few rain drops when I turned the tractor off, but no real rain yet.  A half hour before I finished baling I saw dark rain clouds and a lightning bolt in the north end of the valley.  But it didn't come my way.   Rain is forecast for after midnight, but now that my hay is baled the rain probably won't come.