A generous neigbour offered his field of about a six acre size. The field is unused for the most part, though he said he ran a brush hog through it about 4 years ago. Quite a few ant hills, lots of little alders or willows and the East end of the field is very wet, though not muddy. The grass content is low and the weed content high since it is not managed.
I started out cutting the West end and ran into all kinds of issues with the thick undergrowth and some poor mower maintenance on my part. After taking the contaminated oil out of the slip clutch on the mower and realizing the need to run the mower at a higher RPM, things worked a bit better until the wooden pitman arm broke. Thankfully, I was able to make a new one quickly in the shop, replace the broken one and carry on. After that, it was all about learning the grasses, watching the changes in it and listening to the mower labour.
Raking was easy, but needed to be done over 2 days since mowing was done in 2 batches.
We loaded all this raked hay into the wagon by hand as we do not yet own a baler. This will probably be OK in the long run as a baler would have been hard to run in this field where it was wet.
We have a line on a baler but the current owner is on vacation and we have not been able to make the purchase. In the meantime, we did buy an old hay elevator (designed for bales) and have it good running order, ready for use. With loose hay, the elevator is not the right piece of equipment except that I have made a special bucket which loose hay can be put in and sent up the elevator. We will be trying this in the next day or two, hopefully it will do what we want.
The hay that we have brought home already we just dumped in the main level of the barn. We will handle it again to get it upstairs but this will ensure it is turned and dried as we don't want it to go mouldy.
In the end, we brought home 11 loads of loose hay, somewhere around 3 tons!
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