Author: Garry

My neighbor brought the hay rake and bailer up this morning and together we gathered 34 bales of hay. A bail is about 5 feet in diameter and 6 feet long. I’d ran the rake pulled on the back of my New Holland while he pulled the bailer behind his John Deere.

I’ll get the hay spear put on tomorrow or the next day and move the hay out of the field and into a holding area, but there is no hurry as I choose not to go fishing with the weather in the high 90’s (as it is until next Saturday).

This hay is not as ‘clean’ as the bales we put up earlier in the year, it has a lot of mature sage grass in it….cows don’t like mature sage grass, but they are ok with it when is is younger. Lynn advised that we should feed this cutting to them first, in the early part of the hay cycle, when they are not relying on high nutritional content. As the winter progresses we give them the better content hay, big buckets of molasses (100+ pounds), sweet mix, and corn. This keeps them happy and healthy as they nurse whatever calves they are soon to drop.

I did go fishing the other day and tried out the new lures I purchased: caught two bass. Nothing worth keeping, and certainly nothing to brag about, but I went bass fishing and caught bass. Life is full of small pleasures!

It’s hot. Damn hot. I was able to work around my garden plot yesterday and managed weed-eat around the fencing. No small feat when you consider that it had to be trimmed on both sides of 360 feet of fence (720 feet inside and out). It’s a metal mesh fence, so I burned through a massive amount of trimmer line.

I mowed down two of the three 30 X 40 foot planting areas using the zero turn and used the weed eater on the third….it still has about a dozen huge watermelon in it and I didn’t want to destroy those until I gave the kids and grand-kids a final chance at them.

My absentee neighbor (Lynn) drove his tractor and hay cutter over to our place yesterday evening and made a couple of laps in our back field. Before leaving he showed me how to operate the John Deere 6400 and position the cutter. As I was giving him a ride back to one of his properties (as far as I can figure he has three farm/ranch operations going in addition to his full time job with the Tennessee Valley Authority), he says: “that tractor won’t go all the way over on that steep hill, it just rises up some”. I had no idea what he was talking about, but given that it was a much smaller tractor than I was accustomed to, I figured I’d be able to figure it out on the fly.

This morning I set out to mow the rest of the field. Now a cutter is not the same as a brush-hog. The cutter operates from the back of the tractor and cuts from the right hand side. You cut whatever field you’re cutting in a clockwise direction that way you don’t mash down the hay with the tractor wheels. A brush hog operates from the back and is towed along behind the tractor (you can go any direction you choose).

So I get to this fairly steep hill that I had always cut (with a brush hog) by going down nose first…..this time I’m going up nose first and all of the sudden the front wheels were no longer on the ground! They finally get back down after about 20 yards after they cleared ground and about 10 feet before I had to take a right turn. Now I know what Lynn was talking about. I got the field cut, but for a while my butt hole was puckered so tight that had I stood up, the seat would have came with me.

This afternoon I broke out my tractor and brush hog and straightened up a little around the cabins, to the west of my garden plot, and down by the creek bottom. I need to get the weed-eater working, but again, it’s damn hot. Everything in it’s own time.