12 December 2023
I have this impulse that when I sit down to write I need to capture every single thing that has happened since the last time I wrote. It's been a while, so there's a lot and I am resisting this impulse.
Feeling like I have to document everything makes the writing boring and I assume it makes the reading boring. I’ve been thinking about writing shorter entries more frequently. I never meant for this blog to be like a DIY show where months of planning and work are summarized in one post that takes an hour to read. Some of that couldn’t be helped because I didn’t start writing until about 6 months after we moved and there were some projects to catch up on, but hopefully I can do better doing forward!
This morning is a beautiful one! One of those clear, blue and silver mornings after a storm leaves. This is the first day I’ve worn insulated bibs for chores, but by the time I was done I was sweating up a storm so that may have been premature.
Today I unwrapped the first bale of haylage to feed out! I do really wish that word processing softwares knew more ag terminology. Back to the haulage er.. haylage: This is exciting and scary and intimidating. It's a big change in our winter feed operation and I’m excited to potentially see improvements in the health of our sheep, and the number and health of the lambs we get in the spring… But this feed can spoil, and spoiled feed can be very dangerous including fatal to livestock. Also - we bought new equipment for handling these bales - the tele handler which I haven’t talked about yet, but also a bale squeeze attachment that hasn’t arrived yet. Now they are saying end of next week? Anyway, I bring it up because it's something I’m going to have to learn to use. It shouldn’t be a big deal - I am pretty confident in tractor work, but I recently had a humbling situation that is still stinging.
Our neighbor / farmer / hay maker came down with a wagon load of hay and straw. We wanted some dry hay to feed our cull ewes. For clarification, the term 'cull' means that they are being removed from the breeding program. Usually these animals are sent for processing for meat and I reserve the right to do that in the future, but for right now our cull animals get retired from breeding and get to stay here until the end of their days. There are only 4 animals in this group: Baby Jessica, Bolt, our Ram’s mother, and another 7 year old ewe who is over conditioned (read fat) and slow. I just think she’s feeling her age in a way that the other ewes from that year aren’t.
Back to the humbling story! We needed a few dry hay bales to feed this ragtag group during breeding and to feed the dudes over the winter, so neighbor / farmer / haymaker came up (down?) with a load. He pulled it with the tractor so he could unload, but I thought that I would unload the wagon because I want him to think I’m good at farm work and also I don’t want him to avoid my calls because he has to do all of the work for me. The bales were going into the manure spreader shed which is 8 feet wide and roughly 32 feet long. With a bale on the front and an intimidating spectator, the tractor is 6 feet wide and approximately 117 feet long and I immediately found myself in a situation like that scene in Austin Powers.
I wasn't trying to turn around, I was just trying to put two bales next to each other when there is really only enough room for the tractor to go straight into the shed.
Then neighbor/farmer/haymaker came down to help me which was embarrassing. But I persevered because tractor work IS something I’m good at and I needed to prove it to him! I mean literally one day before this incident I cleaned the manure out of this very shed like some kind of gleaming golden farm goddess on her chariot of flame (in reality a ginger haired, sun burnt woman on an orange tractor, but potato potahto). However! Things continued to spin out of control and neighbor/farmer/haymaker had cows to milk, so I asked him to please unload the bales and said I would put them away after. Very demoralizing.
At some point during this process Chris came home and saw that I was having a mild meltdown so he decided to fire up the skidsteer to move the bales since that is a lot smaller and more maneuverable. The skidsteer has state of the art material handling technology from 1984, so it needs to be coaxed to life if it hasn’t been used every day, and Chris got started with this process. When the thing finally fired up, I was just picking up the last bale to put away with the tractor.
It turns out that all of that gleaming golden farm goddess stuff is totally accurate - unless someone is watching me. I mean, neighbor/farmer/haymaker shouldn’t have been chanting, “CHOKE, CHOKE, CHOKE” while I was working, but I still should have been able to do it. Just kidding, he was super, super nice repeatedly telling me that he isn’t that good at tractor work either, which is a bald faced lie often used by farmers when they are being nice.
Just as a post script here, further evidence that I am a farm goddess with a chariot of flame, Kubota made this ad using a poor man's Chris and Tricia. I imagine that they had heard about us but were too intimidated to approach us. Or maybe they thought that we would be too good looking and the ad wouldn't be believable. yeah, that's what we're going with...