Hay Season

Here are Smokey and Serena lounging in the house. Serena is doing a good job of running off all of the moose within a half mile radius of the house. She diligently patrolls her area and protects us from invaders. Hopefully, the garden will be spared this year. Darren is tired of having to continuously fix the fence around the garden every time a moose crashes through it.

None of the dogs noticed when a fox was skirting the edge of the hay field on its way to the turkey pen though. Darren spotted it and chased it off. The fox will probably be back. A while back we had two of our rabbit does die during birth, the litters were lost as well. We decided the problem must be the new buck producing babies that were too large for the does. The does are just as big as he is so we didn't forsee a problem. He sired a litter last year with no problems but he wasn't full grown then. Our old buck died so the new guy is the only non related buck we have to breed to the does. He is a Californian which is a large meat rabbit. We had one more pregnant doe and we were concerned about her fate. She appeared to have a difficult delivery and several of the kits died but she ended up with about 4 babies that survived. Here is Darren holding one that is a week or so old. It looks very big and lean and muscley for a bunny, they are usually round and soft. I told Darren that this one is built like a pit bull. So we will probably still have to find another buck or some bigger does. Maybe around Fair time, we'll start looking.

Elijah is ready to help Dad cut hay!

Things are generally busy around hay cutting time. I took 3 days off work so Darren could cut, rake, and bale hay. We got about half of the fields done and are just waiting for another sunny window to cut the rest. Here is Darren cutting the hay by the house on Wednesday, June 23rd. He raked and baled the lower field on Thursday. After he finished baling he hooked the trailer up to the truck and I drove while he loaded the bales. It was kind of tricky since I am not used to driving a stick shift and Elijah didn't have a car seat in the truck, so he and Isabella were just climbing all over the inside of the truck while I tried to navigate between bales and watch Darren in the mirrors.

There were some pretty soft spots in the road back to the house, so some of the bales got rather shook up. None of them fell off though. Darren was having trouble with the way the baler was tying the bales, about a quarter of them came apart.

On Friday, as the thunder clouds built up in the distance, Darren disassembled the baler and sharpened the string cutting blades and figured out what the problem was and got it running right again. Then he could finish the last of the baling, but with the rain clouds fast approaching I had to help. My first task was to take all the loose hay that was piled in the big sled and distribute it amongst the hay rows to be re-baled, it was about 4 bales worth or hay or 200 lbs. I pulled the sled with the 4-wheeler and spread the hay out. Elijah was napping and Isabella rode on the 4-wheeler with me. Here she is exhausted after several loads of hay.

Then I got to pick up the new bales Darren was making, load them in the sled, and then stack them on pallats before getting another load. Yesterday's hay was stilled stacked on the trailer, so the sled was the only option for picking up the new bales. Here is one load on the sled.

My hay stack doesn't look very nice. These are 50# bales, some heavier, so at least I got them stacked up as much as I did. I ended up picking up and stacking almost twice the amount of hay shown in the picture below. After Darren finished baling, Isabella and I went back to the house to check on Elijah, who was still sleeping. Darren finished picking up the hay which was about as much hay as I picked up, but he did it in a quarter of the time. And incredibly, the big thunder storm went around us, the hay was saved!

Hopefully we'll get a break in the rain soon so we can get the rest of the hay up.

Isabella has made it her job to rescue trapped or drowning bugs from the greenhouses and water buckets and nurse them back to health. Her favorite bugs to rescue are butterflies, lady bugs, lacewings, and flower flies (flies that are striped like a bee). But basically any bug that will sit on her finger is a good candidate. Bugs that do not cooperate with the rescue efforts usually get squished in the process.