+4 Farming XP1 today:
I learned how to flip hay. Flipping is necessary if you raked the day before but didn’t get around to baling it, in order to let the ground moisture dry off. Our hay rake has two sides which make a shallow V behind the tractor and they rake the hay in towards the bottom of the V to form a neat column. To flip the hay, you close one side of the rake and use the open side to re-rake the hay, which if you hit it right flips it completely over.
I wore sunscreen on the backs of my hands, although I’m not sure if it did much after I got hydraulic fluid on my hands and wiped it off. I haven’t had a watch tan quite this rad since high school cross country. The real +XP will be when I admit I need to put thicker sunscreen on my face before I get in the tractor for the day. I was a little pink today.
I opened the hay rakes back up (almost) by myself! I don’t know if I can adequately explain how accomplished this made me feel and at the same time quite silly because as far as farm tasks go, this is a pretty basic one. But it is a large piece of equipment set with a mixture of hydraulic adjustment and manually moving parts. The first time I “helped” open them I tried to help push down on the rake arm and I wasn’t heavy enough — I floated a foot off the ground. Today the rake cooperated. The help I needed was I didn’t know how narrow the opening at the back of the rakes should have been.
Hay rakes in action. I learned how (although I think I need an additional lesson) to recover when the hay rakes get clogged up. Sometimes if the hay is too thick, the rakes can’t handle it all and you just start dragging a ton of hay. As I understand it, the professional can reverse, pivot, and recover, which I did a couple times while flipping, but I also definitely just reversed and went around the hay stack once or twice.
Oh +5: It may have rained after I raked but before everything got baled. I haven’t checked in yet. I count this as experience because while it was sunny I thought nothing could top having to ted and then rake as normal, then flip because it didn’t get baled — but if this hay gets rained on I am pretty sure it has to be re-tedded, possibly more than once, and re-raked before it can be baled. Dealing with ornery weather is just part of farming, but that doesn’t make it much less discouraging to have so much work undone.
For those keeping score at home, from just what I’ve seen this week, this particular hay field has been covered six times — mowing, tedding, tedding again, raking, flipping, baling. And that’s all done at about six miles an hour or slower. This field took me three and a half hours to ted all the way across. So in case you were wondering what a hay bale costs — it probably isn’t enough.
Today I:
Went grocery shopping
Tried to go to a yoga class but it was cancelled at class time
So I went for a long walk instead
Flipped and raked hay
Took the bean to a park for a walk. I love summer.
eXperience Points, for the uninitiated