Hay Hay Hay

I have been way too busy to blog!

We had some more guests on Saturday for the day - they brought their dogs so we went on a nice hike along the river and then had a farm tour and bbq. They are already planning their next trip back.

On Sunday we did a bunch of work on the farm and then took one of the fish to a pond store for a scraping to try and figure out what's wrong. For almost 3 weeks we've been losing a fish a day. The scraping didn't reveal any parasites - the problem seems to be some kind of bacteria. There are different treatments for bacteria in fish but none of them are to be used in fish intended for human consumption. Since the water is also circulating through the plants that we eat, treating the fish with a non-food treatment isn't really an option. This weekend, though, Nathan switched to using pond water for the fish instead of regular (degassed) tap water. So far no more fish have died....it's still a mystery, but hopefully the pond water has fixed the problem.

Yesterday I started my great hand haying adventure. You know that expression about reinventing the wheel? Well, I feel like I've gone back about 70 years and am figuring out for myself why people worked so hard to invent mechanized hay equipment. It seems ridiculous, though, to let a field's worth of hay go to waste and then go out and buy bales of hay from someone else's field to feed our animals. So out I went on Monday morning with my (stupid, heavy, splintery, not-intended-for-hay) rake and my trusty companions.

This is what the field looked like after the landlord mowed it. The cut grass was lying in rows and was pretty much fully dry already. 

I raked down each row, gathering the hay into piles. I lined up the piles to make collecting it easier. There was barely any damp hay left, but I tried to leave the damper stuff on top of the piles.

After hours of raking, I left the piles to dry in the sun in the afternoon. That's when Nathan called to say he had hurt his back at work (picking up bales of hay, of all things). We were going to meet for a swim in the lake after work but when I got there, he was sitting on a bench and he could barely walk (I'm not sure how he thought he would enter and exit the water). We drove to the one walk in clinic in town, which turned out to be full for the evening...so we had to go to the emergency room. After 2.5 hours there, he finally got a prescription for some muscle relaxants. 

The next morning he woke up and couldn't stand up. After crawling to the bathroom, he realized that he couldn't go to work. He took his pain killer cocktail and once it had taken effect he was slightly more mobile - mobile enough to drive his truck back and forth along the field while I gathered up the hay. It was pretty bouncy, though, and I felt bad that he was out there with his bad back. When he passed out in the afternoon from more pain killers I took the truck out myself and finished the second truck load. 

I tried baling some of it by stuffing it into a tupperware that I'd lined with twine, then tying it up when it was compacted. It worked well but it was way too time consuming.

I think I raked and collected about a third to a half of the field and ended up with two compacted truck loads. I unloaded all of the hay into the garage in a chicken wire frame/fence thing that I put together. By the end of it I was sweaty, itchy and exhausted but seeing those two big piles of hay that I'd collected for the sheep for the winter was incredibly satisfying. 

What was incredibly dissatisfying was going out to lock the chickens up in the evening and finding the newly stacked hay pulled apart and eaten by the horses. I had put a tarp on top and weighted it down but they still got into it. I don't think they ate very much of it; they have *so much* fresh grass to eat. Stay away from my hay!  If anybody had told me a year ago that I'd be angrily grumbling, as I fell asleep, about stupid horses eating my hay, I'd definitely have laughed at them. 

They look so creepy in their fly masks.

I'm tempted to go out and rake some more hay today, but I've been busy this morning. 

A few hours of picking these:

The stand sold out yesterday! Three pounds of tomatoes, 5 cucumbers, 2 bags of peas, 2 zucchini, a bag of basil, a bunch of kale...all sold. It was our best day yet!

Then I bought some more grain for these guys: 

Yes, Speckles has her head up Zebra Head's butt. I have no idea why.

And then, I picked up my reward for haying the field. 

Six Ameraucana chicks. My excuse is that they'll lay blue eggs, which is really cool. The truth is that I'm on the fast track towards becoming a crazy chicken lady...