That haying... It can be stressful

So goes one of Davids mentors sayings. And it is all so true. The biggest point of stress?? Time. Or more specifically time. "While the growing season will allow for four crops the haying season only allows for three". The main reason is simple. Rain. Being from California this is a bit of a shocker. Its hard if not nearly impossible to think of a time when it rained in the summer. But Oregon is a different place with many nuanced local climates and here in the Pine Valley seeing some rain and thunderstorms is not at all uncommon. 

The crop in question is Alfalfa. Must of the fields that we have here can be cut in one long day or two long ones so long as we can keep at least mowers running. The same field that took one day to mow however might take two or three days to rake into windrows that the baler can pick up and this is only after the hay has had time to dry on the ground for 3 to 4 days before raking and one to none after. Raking takes long for several straight forward reasons. 

One... There is only one rake

Two... There is highly limited time window from raking begin between when the dew is off the leaf to when there is too much leaf shatter from the heat. Typically this is about 5 am to 10 or 11 am on days when there is cloud cover at night and 6 am to 10 or so am on days without such cover.

Three... Making a windrow requires two passes through the field to make one row.

Four... It is hard work and exhausts the horses. 

All that said raking is a fair amount of fun and working in the early morning cool sure beats the heat of the day.

Baling too takes time. The first 20 acres that we mowed yielded 770 bales and took two days of baling to do. The majority of those bales are still in the field and needed to be moved today. We moved some of these bales yesterday so that we could water our garlic crop which shares the low laying area of the same field. Using the horses we moved 70 or bales in two wagon runs. We did about 30 in one run and 40 in the next. Because the bales are very fresh they still have a slight amount of water weigh and the wagon loads come to 1 ton and 1 and 1/2 tons respectively in hay along. in simple terms this is hard work for man and horse. Likely be have a bale stacker that can grab bales from where they lay in the field and make nice neat 70 bale stacks with the tractor. Sadly the thing doesn't fit in the hay shed so it has to be unload next to it and restacked inside. As many of those bales as possible need to come in off the field today.

Why all that rush? Well its that rain. Two to Three days from now we can expect some thunderstorms with rain. Last time we had such storms it was a down pour. At the moment in addition to the 650 some bales left in the field there is about 10 acres of windrowed hay ready for baling with a a small amount of raking to be done in the same field and the associated moving of the bales. There is a 10 to 15 acres field of cut hay that needs to be raked, baled and moved also all in the period of the next two days.

Solution... lots of hard work and long hours and working into the night to get it done.