Slow Feeder, My Ass!

If you haven't been following the hay net exploits on our Facebook page, let me enlighten you here.

Mom has had great success with her hay net.  Us?  Not so much.

We started on Sunday and all looked good.  We started with a full bale, which should have lasted them 24 hours according to our regular feed schedule.  We were feeding 1/2 a bale in the morning, and 1/2 a bale in the evening.



 Since they were supposed to be eating from a "slow" feeder, I was confident that there would be a bit left over on Monday morning.

Ha!

Ten hours after we put out the first bagged bale it was empty.  And I do mean empty!

It was so empty that I had to walk the pen to look for it.

I made Skeeter carry it to hay storage for me.

I filled it up for a second time that day, all the while cussing at them.  Certainly they couldn't kill TWO bales in 24 hours, right?

I was wrong.  At feeding time on Monday, we had to again walk the pen to find the empty net.  We filled it for the THIRD time and anchored it to a cinder block so we could easily find it when the pigs emptied it.  By this time, I was also cussing my mom for talking me into this cockamamie idea.

Bale #3 - we're going to go broke at this rate.

Not only was I cussing about it's lack of powers as a slow feeder, I was cussing at the increase in hay waste.  I mean, our horses are Hoovers - they clean up after themselves, there is very rarely a single snuffle of hay left ever.

After work on Monday, the hay bag wasn't empty-empty, but it was close.  Almost three bales in 36 hours.  We put out another bale and thought, surely they have to be slowing down.

Wait Dad!  Don't take it, there's still some in there!

Bale #4 went out and we were optimistic.  They had to be getting full, right?  Right?   Jay and I went into town for the late showing of Furious 7 and when we got home after midnight those fools were still standing there eating.  Jay may or may not have told them that they were going to pop like zits if they kept it up.

Tuesday morning there was still most of the bale left.  Success!

64 hours and almost four bales to get to their "full" point.  In fact, when I looked out the window on Tuesday morning Copper was sprawled out on the ground looking like me after Thanksgiving dinner.  If he had pants on, he would have unzipped them to find more room.

They grudgingly ate breakfast when we took it out to them, but their hearts weren't really in it.

Finally!  We were getting somewhere.

Tuesday night (last night), we got home and the horses were starving.  Like, pacing and pawing the fence (Skeeter!) starving.  In went bale #5 (heavy sigh).

This morning, there was about half of bale #5 left.  Instead of letting it run out, I just added another bale to it and sent up a quick prayer that they wouldn't kill it in one day.

I swore I'd give this hay bag thing a solid week, and I will, but damn it's getting expensive pretty quickly.  If I get home from work tonight and that damn bag is empty I might lose it.  (Which Mom would like, because I told her if this bag didn't work out, she could have it.)

Adventures in Horse Ownership

Hay.

The horses need it and we were getting low, so we did a quick CraigsList search and found some small bales reasonably priced at $6.00/bale.  We figured that 100 bales would get us through to the first cutting this year, plus that's all we could afford.

Jay had to work the only day that the sellers were available, so I had to call in reinforcements.  Well, reinforcement.  Okay, I called Beel.  Jay's truck's transmission isn't so hot and I didn't want to risk taking it, so I asked Beel to bring his truck down and I borrowed a flatbed trailer from a friend of mine.

I maybe should have known that all was not going to go smoothly when Bill called from the interstate and told me he was still a half hour out.  No big deal, I texted the sellers and told them that we were running a bit late.

When Bill got to the house and we tried to hook up the trailer, it didn't like Jay's ball hitch, so we switched to Bill's and finally got it to work with some cussing and persuader tools.  An hour later than we anticipated, we were off!

Now, both Bill and I have a nasty cold, so we're not working to our fullest potential and we hoped that the sellers would be able to help us load.  Turns out, it was mostly just Beel and me to load.  The seller was kind enough to back the truck and trailer down his driveway, around the house, and into the barn where the hay was (Thank God, or we'd still be there trying to negotiate his driveway).

The trailer is a big, good sized one, so we thought we could get all 100 bales onto it.  About three-quarters of the way through loading the trailer, we realized there was no way we could do it.  Stacking the bales four high was as high as we were willing to go.  We decided to move twenty bales off the trailer and onto the truck.  At this point, the seller's wife came to help us, so we could form a hay brigade.  (The seller has a wrist injury and can't lift bales).  I stood on the tongue of the trailer and took the bales Bill handed down to me, then handed them off to the seller's wife, who was kind enough to stack them on the truck.

An hour after we started loading the first bale, we put the last bale on the trailer and started to strap them down.  Only, we could only find three of the five straps that Bill usually keeps in the truck.  We needed all three straps for the trailer and didn't have any for the truck, so Bill figured a way to tie down the bales on the truck with baling twine (amazing stuff, isn't it?) and off we went.

I started firing off texts to my sibs and kids letting them know that we were running late and if they still were going to come help us unload and stack, it would be closer to six.  We were now two hours behind schedule.

A few miles down the highway, Bill decided he didn't like the feel of the trailer and pulled over to check it.  We used a step-down hitch to hook up the bumper-pull trailer.  Mom and Bill have a goose-neck trailer, so the step-down hitch doesn't often get used.  When we pulled over to look at the trailer, we noticed that the weight of the trailer had torqued the step-down.  Not a little bit, either.  A lot a bit.

I started calling my sibs and kids again, trying to find out who was already at my house and who could bring Jay's truck to me, bad transmission be damned.  Just as I was talking Digger into bringing me the truck, Bill said he thought we could make it if we moved more hay off of the trailer and onto the truck, so I told Digger to standby and we started handling they hay for the third time, this time on the side of the road.  Since we didn't have an extra set of hands, I pulled the bales from the trailer and lowered them to the ground, where Bill picked them up and stacked them on the truck.  Thankfully, he's tall.

Remember, I said earlier that we didn't have straps for the bales on the truck?  I wasn't entirely sure how on earth we were going to secure the bales we moved from the trailer to the truck, but Bill dug around in the truck and found three little straps - not the heavy-duty ones, but straps nonetheless.  Hallelujah!

He was reasonably sure that we could make it back to my house as long as we took it slow and easy, so I called Digger back and told him not to come get us yet.  We'd see how far we could make it.

We limped on back home, about two and a half hours behind schedule, but we made it.  My kids were already there (and had been for a couple of hours).  I was exhausted and over the whole thing, but the bales still needed to be moved from the truck and trailer to the hay shed.

I'd decided to put the horses in Estes' old pen so we could just open the fence and drive the trailer in.  Bless our horses, they were amazing.  Copper hasn't wanted to be caught and haltered for the past couple of weeks, so Jay's been working on it.  I think that over the winter, Copper just decided life was pretty good without being caught.  I was ready to have to move him and really work to get him haltered.  Bill got Skeeter caught in under a minute while I headed for Copper.  Copper backed away for about twenty steps before deciding that if his sister was caught, he might as well be too.  Took less than two minutes to catch and halter Copper.  Whew.  Finally, something about the day went right!

They walked nicely over to Estes' pen, where we turned them loose to graze.  There were no complaints from them about that!

I don't usually like leaving halters on them when they are unattended, but I thought that if they got the notion to jump the four-foot fence at least we had a chance of catching them if they were haltered.

I took the horses' behavior as a sign that things were finally going right with this damn hay moving day.  Digger and Ashinator's boyfriend started helping unload and stack and I was so happy.  Not five minutes after we started, my youngest brother showed up with his family to help and I was overjoyed!  It took no time at all to get it all done. 

Before we knew it, it was time to move the horses back from Estes' pen, and not a moment too soon, because the sun was setting fast!

Digger and Copper

Ashinator had manned the grill and had dinner ready for us by the time we were finished.  She might not have done any of the heavy lifting, but she definitely played an important role in hay moving day.  I was famished.

The hay adventure started on a bad foot, but ended with food, drinks, and laughter with some of my favorite people.

Not a bad day at all.

Keystone Wrangler

It rained for six weeks straight one summer; the pen was a swamp and I began to fear that my toes would begin to form webs. I spent more time in muck boots than cowboy boots. It sucked. But I gotta tell you, I was ripped. When the pen’s a quagmire, you can’t cheat and load hay bales into the wheel barrow to take to the feeder. No, you have to carry all of the hay, bale by bale, out to the feeders in ankle-deep mud that threatens to pull the muck boots right off your feet.


Sucked.


I’m five foot nothing (well, on a good day, five feet one-half inch) and in order to get the bales into the feeder I had to essentially execute a clean-and-jerk up over my head. The tops of the round feeders are eye level for me, so imagine trying to lift a light fifty pound bale from knee level up over your head and then push it forward over the feeder and wiggle your gloved hands out of the twine before your fingers get popped off. Now imagine doing it with sixteen hungry horses trying to help and standing in mud that completely covers your feet and ankles.


Sucked.


Only once did I make the mistake of trying to set the bale down to get a better grip for my clean-and-jerk. Dumb move. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I gently set the bale down on the mud, hoping that the large surface area would keep it from sinking into the mud too far. You know, like laying supine when caught in quicksand.  Increasing the surface area decreases the sinking speed.


I repositioned my hands, got a better grip, bent my knees so that I could lift with my legs and not my back. One, two, three, lift. Nothing. I tried again. One, two, three, lift. Nothing. The stupid bale wouldn’t budge. Then I realized my mistake – I hadn’t taken into account the suction-cup factor involved in pulling a fifty pound bale of hay up out of the mud before I sat it down. I should have nominated myself for a Darwin award for that move.


In the end, I had to forgo proper lifting technique in favor of using the toes of one foot to prop the hay bale up out of the mud. I planted my heel in the mud, pulled my toes up to the sky and attempted to balance the bale on my toes up out of the mud. It was beautiful. Kind of like the Keystone Kops, but not. I was the Keystone Wrangler.


Sucked.


But…I learned my lesson and earned some pretty sculpted arms during that summer of rain. And I never again sat a bale of hay down in the mud.

*********Don't forget to vote to help me choose which story to submit to the writing contest***********