Harvesting

Silence yesterday meant I was putting the pedal to the metal and pushing. I've one more load of hay to haul which is a six hour trip. Yes, we are picky about our hay and none of this baling it all day garbage will do for us. I want my hay from the second or third cutting and baled when a little dew is on it. Not many farmers really know how to bale GOOD hay and I found a gentlemen who knows what he's doing so we travel six hours for a load. It is worth it for the nutrition value is much higher. In fact, this gentlemen gets paid by the nutrition value, the higher it is the more he gets paid by a dairy and his less desirable hay goes to a beef feed lot.

Better hay means you don't have to feed as much and you get a much better result without feeding grain supplements which is more expensive to feed than hay.

Kirk and I went for the first two trips but he had to go to work and the second load was still on the trailer when Monday morning arrived along with the grand kids.

The oldest two munchkins went to school but the youngest is home all day with me and I wasn't about to start throwing sixty pound bales of hay around. Okay, I don't throw them at my age, actually I just do more of a drop kick. My husband laughs but hey, it does the trick.

So instead of stacking hay, I canned tomato sauce from some of the ripened tomatoes that were laying on newspaper in our basement. Then I sliced a bunch more tomatoes to dry in the dehydrator for tomato powder for noodles. I then made soup with some of the sauce and photographed it to take to the rec-center to put in fliers to advertise the soup cooking class I'm giving in a couple weeks.

And to prove this grandma is not all work and no play I took our youngest grand daughter to the park to help wear her out for a long nap. Yes, I might be conscrewed as devious at times but I needed some time without her help.

Afterwords she ate lunch and I read the same Scooby Doo book I always am forced to read before her nap time. After she was asleep, I went out to the garden and dug potatoes. I also found a few little beets I can chop up and dry for beet powder. The potato crop was horrible in the area that had buckwheat growing but the patch by the sunflowers did very well. That's is one of the reasons you grow a crop in more than one place. If I had all my plants in with the buckwheat I would have very few potatoes for the winter. I won't mix the two again - lesson learned. It wasn't too bad a crop with the big ones filling a fruit box.

And the little ones I put in a couple fruit box lids. We don't need very many potatoes as I've nowhere cold enough to store them for a long period of time. About the end of February they begin to sprout and at that point I cook and freeze them. I'm not too fond of canned potatoes so I've long ago quit doing it. 

For a break, I sat and shelled some of the sweet corn I'd picked last week. A little that was left in the garden and had dried on the stalks.

It will be fed to the chickens as I've still some from last year to make into corn bread. There are a few more cobs of sweet corn in a small pile in the basement drying for another day and another break.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to shell the Painted Mountain corn.


At three I picked up the older grand kids from school, fed a snack and... and... and... you know how it is with kids. 

After they left I was notty and rested for thirty minutes past the time I had taken out the tomato sauce from the hot water bath. The sun was setting by then and I had a trailer of hay waiting to be stacked in the shed.

It gets a bit exciting peering into the shadow to find your footing and I'm not real sure where I put my hay hooks. I know they are embedded in a hay bale but I'm hoping it was in one high enough that I didn't burry it when it became really too dark to see.

Oh well, I'm not babysitting this morning except to take the girls to school and I'll get the rest of the four ton stacked in the shed so I can call about getting another load hopefully tomorrow. So if you don't hear much from me this week know I'm swamped and somewhere in between all the work I've got to find time to help my husband get ready to go elk hunting this weekend. For us, fall is the busiest time of the year.