Hay stacked. Harrowing done.

Today I finished stacking my hay bales.  I had to move last year's hay bales out of the hayshed, then gather and stack this year's hay bales, then re-stack last year's hay bales back into the hayshed.   As I never use all the hay bales in a year, this way last year's hay bales are first to get eaten this Winter.

Last year's hay bales at the end.  It would appear my second hay cutting this year may have the hayshed filled and a few hay bales just out the hayshed.  We'll see.

Once the hay was stacked, I got the harrow out, raked the extended corral, and re-raked the corral.  Then parked the harrow.  Another day I will take the harrow sections apart and lean them against the hayshed until next Spring.

Around and around I went in the extended corral to smooth it out.  When the ground was wet and muddy this Spring the cattle's weight moved some of the ground into "hills" which then stayed when the ground dried.  The "hills" were kind of a moat-area around where the cattle stood around the feeder.

The extended corral area is now level.

The main corral on the left.  On the ride side is the corral where the bull and his feeder were located.  Not as much to rake in there, just the location where the feeder had been.

Move, burning, hayfield harrowed

This afternoon I used my pickup to haul furniture for Edward.   He got approval to move into an assisted living apartment.  He has Gaucher disease even though he is in his mid-40s.  Donna and Mabel have been looking out for him and taking him to see a doctor or to a hospital at times.  They gave him a sofa and a recliner and desk stand for his new apartment.  I had a pickup full of furniture to move.

The wind was still blowing in the 'wrong' direction today.  Not as strong.  But off-and-on wind speed.  I decided to burn a small section of the ditch across the road. The northern end of what I plan to burn.  It was against an area of rocks with little to no vegetation.  When I had mowed my 'strip' I had to go from the road to where I wanted to make the 'strip' in the field. I also wanted to mow around this telephone pole. Years ago when I last burned this ditch the telephone pole had caught on fire.  I don't want that to happen again.  So I had a path out to my 'strip' as I couldn't mow close to the rocks.

In the photo you can see the area is not big.

I didn't burn the rest of the ditch today as I wanted to finish harrowing the hayfield today.  Tomorrow the wind is predicted to be light and from a 'good' direction.

My harrowed hayfield

The harrow is holding up so far.

With the hayfield now harrowed, that opens up the window for me to fertilize the hayfield this year.

Start of harrowing and extended corral build

Spring is coming off and on.  Earlier this week our temperatures were high for three days.  One day even set a record high temperature at 71 degrees. The last few days our temperatures are now back to normal.

The grass was starting to green. I had planned on putting out one more large hay bale in the pasture before setting up the extended corral.  But the recent warm temperatures sped up the grass growing. Every day was much greener.  Now the cows were spending some time nibbling at the fresh grass and not always eating the hay.  Not good to wait three more days to set up the extended corral.  The gras needs to get a start growing.

But before I can set up the extended corral I first need to put the harrow together and then harrow the NE pasture.  I need to get the harrow into the north pasture before the extended corral is set up.  Assembling the harrows went slower than expected.  I thought I would be done yesterday but it then rained much of the afternoon.  I finished assembling the harrow this afternoon.   In the past some harrow sections would come apart by the time I was done so I spent more time and effort chaining sections together.

Harrowing the NE pasture went well.  Partway through I had a short time of rain and graupel.  In the photo below you can see the harrowing areas before and after the rain and graupel.  There wasn't much of the moisture but the little that fell made a difference.  I also harrowed the fruit tree area.

Once the NE pasture was done I went out to the north pasture and harrowed where the extended corral would be, and a little bit of the north pasture.  The photo below shows the manure and snow I had pushed out of the corral earlier this Winter.  Almost all of our snow is gone.  But this was a huge pile of snow, and the manure slowed the melting down.

Then off to make the extended corral.  The past few years I made the extended corral a little smaller each year.  The reason is that the cattle obsess with eating all the grass until there is nothing left.  And that is even with all the hay for them to eat.  Making the extended corral smaller allows the grass to slowly come back in the previous year's extended corral.  I don't need a large extended corral.  The only reason for the extended corral is a place to put the large hay bale.  When I put out a new hay bale the cattle are kept in the corral so they won't get in the way or get hurt when I put out a new bale.

The extended corral is done and now time to let the cattle out to the hay.  And time for them to stop mooing at me to hurry up with my work.

While the other calves run around to check out the extended corral this calf is already starting to eat a little hay with the big cows.

Some of the rest of the calves.  The newest three calves still spent time laying and sleeping and they were still laying in the corral.

I'll see if tomorrow I will continue to harrow the hayfield and other pastures. The ground is still moist and often I could see a little indentation from the tractor tires.  I may wait a few more days.

Harrowing the pastures is done

Monday I finished my harrowing for the year.   Well, all but where the extended corral is located.  When that is taken down in June that spot will be harrowed then.

Harrowing took some time this year.   First it was slow to start because I decided to fix one of the damaged harrow sections.  On the section shown below, one of the side (up and down) pieces was broken off.   I have lots of broken harrow section pieces from years past.  I got one of those side pieces for this harrow.   To put this piece on I had to straighten the top side-to-side piece.  When doing so half of the piece broke off.  Argh!!  So I had to replace the entire piece.  Also, the middle side-to-side piece was half broken.  So I replaced that piece also.

Making this repair work slow going was that I had to remove the teeth of the pieces to remove or add the side-to-side pieces from the up-and-down pieces holding them in place.  These harrow sections are old and the bolts holding things together were stuck and hard to remove.  I still must have some strength as some of the bolts twisted into two pieces when I tried to unscrew the bolt's nuts.  So I had to find replacement bolts and nuts.

But as you can see the 'rebuilt' harrow section looks good.  Now that harrowing is pretty much done, this piece held together.   But as usual the tree roots that sometimes run along the top of the ground did a number on a different harrow section.  

The middle section on the right side got damaged / partially broken up from the harrowing this year.  The following photo is before I started to do the harrowing.

At one point I had to move the large metal hay feeder sitting in the middle pasture.  After I did so, I completed the harrowing of the middle pasture.  Then at the end of the day I saw that I was missing a piece from my tractor's 3-point hitch.   The next day I looked and looked where I harrowed the field after moving the metal feeder.  (Moving the metal feeder had nothing to do with the loss of the piece.)  After a few go-rounds I finally found the piece. Here is where I found it.  I screwed it back onto the 3-point hitch.

Also slowing things down is that before harrowing the middle and north pastures I hand raked the manure next to and under the trees in the pastures away from the trees and the roots at ground level.  Lots of trees.

The pastures all now look good and the manure is all broken up.

Now on to other projects.

Harrowing, done

Last Sunday I finished my harrowing for the year as I got the south pastured harrowed.   First I had to remove the downed branches from last November's snow storm.

Here is another tree where I had to clean branches from.  The photo was taken after I removed the branches.   Not all the branches fell from the tree.  I had a few branches that remained attached to the tree.  Barely.  I had to climb up the tree to use a handsaw to cut the branches.  The arrow shows how high I had to go.

An example.  The branch is 99% broken, but it is still holding on.

Here is the last tree I had to remove the branches from.  This is a "before I removed the branches" photo.   It is hard to see in the photos, but I had to climb this tree also and cut on five branches to completely remove the branches hanging from the tree.  In the photo on the right, the light colored branch over halfway up the tree, I left that branch there as I didn't want to climb that high.

The top of this photo was highest I climbed in this tree.

An example where the branch broke off the tree on its own.

Raking to clean the area of the branches was a pain.  Lots and lots and lots of small pine cones were there.   The pine cones would get stuck in the rake and I would have to stop and pull them off the rake.  Many, many, ... many! times.  Often, every three or four times of raking.   It was annoying and slowed me down.   The geese liked me cleaning up the pines cones.  I tossed the cones in a low area near the river.  A goose then built a nest on the pile of pine cones and hatched her eggs there.  She liked it as the area was close to the river but not that close, and was dry.

All my raking was hard on my rake.  I had to fix the handle as the rake broke off the handle.  Not pretty, but it works.

It took a few days to harrow the south pasture.   This is the latest I have harrowed the pasture.  The grass was growing tall.

Partially harrowed.  Can you see the difference?

I am done harrowing.

Once again I was hard on the harrows.   There are six harrow pieces chained to each other.  The middle two pieces are now broken up.

To get from the south pasture back to the middle pasture I had to go through the hayfield.  Not ideal, but I had no choice.

So glad to be done with the harrowing.  I ended up hauling eight high pickup loads of smaller branches and pine cones away.  My chain saw still worked and I ended up cutting the larger branches for firewood.  I got one heaping pickup load of cut branches hauled away. 

I wanted to get the harrowing done.  I still have a pickup load of branches to haul, but those branches were right next to a few trees and I could easily harrow around those branches.

Harrowing, part 1

A month ago I started harrowing my hayfield and pastures.  I had to harrow the NE pasture before I put up the temporary corral panels to make the extended corral as the panels would then block my harrow from reaching the north pasture and beyond.

I then harrowed the hayfield.

After I harrowed the hayfield April 19.

The hayfield on May 12.  The grass is growing.  It is even taller today.

Last November, the first week, we had that wet snow which broke many evergreen tree branches, mostly on the north side of a number of trees.  I had cleaned most the north pasture branches last November before more snow came and put a stop to the cleaning.  This Spring I finished the cleaning in the north pasture.  Then I was able to harrow the north pasture.

Then on to the middle pasture.  I had a lot of branches to clean up.  I ended up with eight pickup loads of branches to dump in lows areas where I don't harrow.

Then I ended up with two pickup loads of branches I will cut up for firewood.   I hadn't gotten my new chainsaw chain yet, so you can see how I had to haul these branches off to pile them in the NE pasture for later cutting.

A number of branches were long.  I measured one branch at being 20 feet long.

You can see where some branches came from.  These branches remained on this tree.  Branches above these branches had broken off.

Once the branches were cleaned up in the middle pasture, I had to move the metal cattle feeder in the middle pasture to a spot among the trees I don't harrow.  I had the bucket on the tractor and not the bale spear, so it was harder to tip the feeder up so I could roll it to a spot in the trees.  The rain didn't help.

I had the bucket on the tractor because I wanted to move some dirt to fill in some low spots in the pasture.  Eight or so.  These low spots were spots where I had removed tree stumps the past years.  Between the soil settling when I re-filled the dirt back in the hole after removing the stumps, and the cattle using the loose dirt to rub in and throw on their backs, the spots were now an annoying drop - like a bad pothole - when driving the tractor in the field.

These dirt circles were where I had the metal feeder to feed the cattle last Fall/Winter when the ground was wet and not frozen.  The cattle's hooves disturb the wet ground around the feeder as they eat.  That is why you don't see disturbed ground every location I had a feeder.

When I harrowed the north pasture two geese would walk around and away as I harrowed before getting tired of doing so and flying off.   In the middle pasture only the male goose waked around and around before flying off.  The female goose was sitting on the nest next to the river.

Between cleaning up the branches, and then a few days of harrowing, it took a while before I was done with the middle pasture.

More harrows

Earlier I had mentioned that when I got the gates from a neighbor near Donna's place, I also bought some harrows he had.  I picked them up the other day.  It is always nice to have extra harrow pieces as due to the number of tree roots along the top of the ground in the pastures, they are tough on my harrows and break them. 

$200 worth of harrows.

Raking and harrowing the pasture

A few days ago I finally finished harrowing all of the pastures.  I did the middle pasture last as it was the hardest to harrow.  Since I kept and fed the cattle in that pasture over Winter there was lots of manure all around the pasture.  Plus hay remnants from the feedings.  And since the cows like to lay under the trees there was lots of manure under those trees. While manure is good and fertilizes the ground, too much manure under trees and close to the tree trunks can be bad for the trees. Since I can't drive under or close to lots of those trees I ended up hand raking the manure away from the trees. Under some trees the manure was so thick from cows laying on and flattening the manure over and over, I had to chop the manure with the rake to break it up so I could then rake it away from the trees.  That manure was so thick it was killing the grass under it.  The hand raking took a lot of time to do over a number of days.

Here are a few photos from a couple of the trees.

And another tree.

A number of the trees have roots poking out of the ground that go a distance away from the tree trunk.  Those roots were hard on the harrow sections breaking or bending parts of the sections.  I have six harrow sections that I chained together.  I had to re-adjust the sections.  One harrow section by the time I was done was in pieces.

Before and after.