Hey (Hay), Move!

Moving hay is a learned task, which so far…we haven’t ‘learned’.  We are still at remedial hay moving.  Most of what we’ve learned, we learned the hard way.

1.  Wear gloves (still have blisters)

2. Wear long sleeve shirts (arms still scabbed and scratched from the sharp ends of hay…looks like I got pushed into a dozen rose bushes).

3. Barn cats are no help at moving hay.

This was actually alfalfa, not hay, but all moving issues are the same when it comes to 150 (or so) pound bales.  We had 3 tons of alfalfa delivered for our herd for the winter.  One big stacked pile of hay behind the barn about 12 feet high and each one heavy.  I needed the help of Number Two Son to get the whole hay-ball rolling.  I convinced him to climb up on top of the stack and push some bales off, so then we could drag them into the barn and begin a new stacking pile.  He did not really think this was such a great I idea, as

1. he was wearing shorts

2. he didn’t have gloves

3. the wind was blowing…. I mean it was really blowing

After he’d knocked some bales down, he became concerned that he might be the next to hit the ground and asked if we could stop.  Being a ‘good’ mother, I agreed and we proceeded to just clean up the 18 bales we’d managed to get inside.  I kept telling him how ‘glad’ he was going to be this winter when we needed to feed the herd and only had to do it from the barn, but with hay scratches on his arms, legs and hay in his eyes…he didn’t seem to care about winter or hay, all that much.

Day two I tackled on my own, mostly because I was in a bit of a bad mood and using the opportunity to be stubborn on a job that needed to be done often seems to help.  I was just getting the hang of it, with plenty of huffing and puffing going on, as I reduced the pile to a dozen bales or so.

I was actually feeling fairly proud of myself as I’d figured out how to use the previously stacked bales to bring the new bales in and stack them even higher.  Stacking the hay/alfalfa up 4 bales high….(note to reader…these bales are heavy)

I moved about 30 bales of hay before the reinforcements arrived with only 6 bales left to go where they shook their heads at my stubbornness and went to find some gloves.

For a 54-year-old ‘city’ girl…all I can say is…not too shabby.