Saturday Fun: A Roll In the Hay

When we left our heroes (that would be A. and me), they had finished shearing Coco the Sheep and were ready to move on to the next Saturday chore: the hay.

Sheep are really low maintenance in the summer. You stick 'em out in a pasture full of grass, make sure they have water, and wait for the lambs to grow big enough to eat. In the winter, though, they require a bit more effort. Procuring hay, for instance.

A. buys his hay from a farmer a few miles away. He's a commercial farmer with a big operation, which means that he makes very large bales of hay. Not many farmers nowadays make the small, 75-pound square bales (except it just occurred to me that they're actually rectangular, so why are they called square bales?) so familiar to all of us from Halloween decorations. Modern hay bales tend to be huge, either rectangular or round, and they weigh hundreds of pounds. They are always handled with machines. They can't be lifted by a person. But the round bales can be rolled.

So on Saturday, A. drove Big Red up to Farmer John's (yes, that is his real, honest-to-God name) to get hay to replenish the sheep's store. Farmer John has a machine he uses to lift the hay bales and put them in the back of A.'s truck. Then, when A. gets home, he positions the truck so that we can roll the hay bale off the back of the truck and to the barn. Then he unwraps the plastic that keeps the bale together and starts pitching the hay into the barn. The bale is rolled up kind of like a cinnamon roll (mmm, cinnamon rolls . . .), so he basically unwinds the hay in strips and then uses a pitchfork to move it into the back part of the sheep barn.

Pitching hay is just an impossibly bucolic activity.

The hay is kind of fluffy when it's pitched in, and it fills the hay mow quickly. The first time we did this, the hay mow was full and we still had more hay that we needed to put in there. That's when I remembered that Laura Ingalls Wilder used to go out with Pa and trample down the hay in the wagon when he was pitching the hay stacks in at haying time. So I climbed up into the hay mow and trampled the hay, just like Half-Pint. I knew my obsessive reading of the Little House books would come in handy one day . . .

I basically fling myself into the hay mow and then stand up and stomp around on the hay to press it down. It's kind of fun, although climbing into the hay mow is a little bit awkward.

After the flinging and before I got to my feet. See? Awkward.

I'm sure you noticed Mia's head peering up at me from the bottom of that photo. I think she wanted to play in the hay mow, too. Or maybe she was just bemused by what the crazy human was doing now. She likes to hang around when we're working. She's not very helpful, but she is good company. And she doesn't mind getting covered with hay.

What a good farm dog.

This should be the last hay bale the sheep will need this winter. The grass will start growing soon and then they can be let loose on the pastures, where they can graze with no assistance from us.

And that's the end of our Saturday fun. But who knows what next Saturday will bring? It's always a party at Blackrock!