Haying and Playing

                                                          The Princess and the Pig

                                     The Good Dog (Doesn't Eat Chickens)

The small field is about a quarter acre, I'd guess. And the grass had not been cut once this year until the neighbor did it for us the other day with his big tractor mower. The hay looked beautiful after drying for a couple of days in this lovely eighty-plus degree heat, but how to store it? The equipment needed to actually bale the hay is very expensive (and I'm not even sure what it's called. A Baler, I'd guess, but before you bale it, there's some other machine that goes over the cut grass and leaves it in long lines. It spins. A thresher? No. I dunno.)

Finally I decided to just rake it with a leaf rake. The field is small, after all.

It took me four hours and my arms feel like hamburger. There's a trick to it, though, that makes it easier. Don't try to rake long rows:  You can just keep raking in a long "vertical" row and the grass will sort of snowball all by itself, rolling itself into a nice tight cigar that is easy to later pick up with a pitchfork.

And throw in the back of the pickup truck and take to the barn, but there it stops. It isn't easy to get the hay up into the loft of the barn, no way, no how.

We raked all the hay, but only got a little less than half of it stored. We were just plumb tuckered by then. Homero fixed the pig pen today too, and raised the rails so the goats can't jump in. They tried, but they can't. They just crash and look hilarious.

Ha Ha!