Howabout some pics Hoss.........
Not much to look at, a big ol' pile of hay, all tarnished and dark on the outside.
Since we've only got a few acres for haying right now, I just used an old dump rake, like this one...
...to drag the cut & dried hay into loose windrow piles over by the storage area to cure some more in the Summer, before stacking the stuff up into a silo-shaped pile 12-14 feet high.
Funny how much it shrinks as it compresses under its own weight. I periodically moved what shed/slid down the sides back to the top. After Summer rains, when we had long dry spells in-between, I tore the stack down to let it air and re-dry before rebuilding it a couple times.
Now the pile has lost half its height, and is as tightly packed as a round-bale.
Did it shed the rain..??
Seems to have done pretty well... A husk of ugly stuff an a few patches of black on the outside, but the inside looks as good as it did when the stack was built... Once you pry some of it out.
Between the rain and snow up here in "Yankee Land" I'm afraid an outdoor stack wouldn't fair well...........
Oh, it rains here plenty. Worse, it rains warm.
Before it became commonplace to compress and bind hay into bales for hauling on trucks, everyone either had to have a barn with a huge, vaulted-roof loft and a crane system to store hay loose indoors, or hay stacks outside.
I had to learn about outdoor hay storage when we started using round bales. (Just for storage. I pitchfork off them to feed the horses.) I figured we'd need to cover them, and tried to do so with tarps for the first few years here. (Wind is tough up here on the hilltop, shredded the tarps before halfway through a season.)
I finally to an old timer's (an even older-timer than myself!) advice and left the tarps off. Had dramatically less rot-loss than with the tarps, which actually prevented the hay from re-drying and promoted mold.
Sunday we were takin a ride past my great Grandfathers farm, when I remembered that there had been a hay loader parked in the weed's there, a few years ago........ I've been looking for a good repairable loader for a while now, so's I went down and asked if I could look at it. Turns out there was alot more than just the loader there...... Got ahold of the owner of the property (he lives in another state) he gave me everything that was there, tho some of it is "worse for ware". A full line of horse drawn equipment including a threshing machine (won't know if its saveable till its out of the weeds) All belonging to my Great Grandfather who died in 1957, two yrs before I was born.............. Whats the chances of this happening to someone, let alone me .......??
Pretty cool...
We've got the draft sale coming up this month... Will be lusting after all manner of horse-drawn equipment there no-doubt.
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