Making Hay While the Sun Shines

We have had a spectacular growing season here in central Minnesota. Just the right amount of rain and an ideal heat index means the corn is coming in ahead of schedule, the hay volume is peak and no one is hauling hoses to their vegetable beds or watching the grass go brown.

It is also spectacular to be at this phase of family growth. Healthy teenage farmers are the best hands. They are strong, good looking and already have a wisdom about how to get hard work like bringing in hay, done. I am happy knowing they will carry this knowledge forward with them no matter where life leads.

Get 'er done

My husband was out in the field gathering bales and my son would greet him coming up the drive and help him to switch wagons, lining up a full one with the barn conveyer and easing the empty wagon onto the hitch.

My daughter and the neighbor girls would discuss how to divide the tasks of unloading bales off the wagon, onto the conveyer, off the conveyer and up into the barn. To the uninitiated, this may sound simple, but there are critical decisions at each step. What body strength and type is required for each job? What risks are associated? (read:don't fall

of the wagon, destroy the conveyer or break an ankle up in the loft) Has everyone hydrated, taken allergy medication or protected their arms from bugs, prickly hay and sunburn? Where should the hay be stacked for easiest on-going feeding to the horses and sheep? And finally, what's the plan to go the distance? With 35,000 pounds, 90 degree heat and rising in the loft, a burning sun on the wagon and only 4 of us for the full day, that becomes the critical question. With rain imminent, this job gets done, period.

Here my pride in my children is as rich as the aroma of fresh cut alfalfa. Knowing we had the neighbor girls for the first load when we were still fresh, we piled those bales highest in the loft. As the day wore on, the girls left

and the loads kept coming, we worked in a quiet, methodical, meditative rhythm. I felt like I was in a hot yoga class separating physical pain from those nasty "when will this be over" thoughts that are more burdensome than the task at hand.

We took advantage of the breaks to breathe and laugh. When I got tired, my son and husband pushed even harder. At the end of 8 hours my 14 year old daughter and I still had to grab the damp and heaviest bales and pull them inside the barn to cool out and stay dry. My son had to navigate a wagon of broken bales around a tricky corner, through a narrow gate, across the sand to perfect alignment with the feeder. Waste not want not. It was an Olympic countdown to our lemonade and shower.

Stamina, responsibility, tolerance, planning, precaution, strength, pride and rising to the task makes bales alfalfa grass mix even sweeter.

Tuesday, March 15th - Shearing Day
Aside from hosting a wedding or some other once-in-a-lifetime event, this really is the biggest, single day of the year on the farm.

I spent weeks cleaning the barn so it would be ready to receive these beautiful fleeces! I scrubbed out horse stalls, power vacuumed the floors, set-up my fancy new skirting table, lay down tarps on the already clean floors, organized wood blocks with fleece numbers to mark the fleeces, gathered the notebook that keeps annual evaluations of each fleece, the genealogy records, etc, drew a How-to-skirt-Fleece poster for my helpers and then waited for the starting bell.

My husband Andrew put many long hard hours into cleaning the feedlot. Taking advantage of good weather days, he removed all the winter bedding, realigned gates and put temporary plywood flooring down for the shearer. We were nothing if not prepared.

Tim Kroll, our shearer is a real expert. I wish I had a picture of his hands. He removes a fleece in a single cut, and the sheep grunt as if they were having a massage at the spa. How he maintains his back after wrestling with these 300 pound ballerinas is more than I can figure out!

Monday, Minnesota was hit with a lot of snow. We were still able to drive but the roof on the barn was covered in white. That was merely beautiful until the snow started to melt with the high-noon sun on Tuesday. Madly, we rearranged gates to keep all the sheep out of the dripping snow, ready for shearing and able to be released into their proper group. We have three separate pens right now- one for the pregnant ewes, one for lambs and one for the ewes who are not pregnant. They all have different nutritional requirements and so must be housed separately. Therefore, managing their exit chute out of the shearing area became the challenge of the day. Having a move-as-you-g0 chute system to avoid snow melting off the roof and onto their coats made it nearly an Olympic sport!

My mother, step-dad and daughter-in-law came up to help as did our friend Kayla. All of us in winter snow suits, moving fleeces, measuring and rating them, skirting them, moving gates and generally responding to whatever the day brought. My mother and daughter-in-law loved the smell of lanolin. Every time we brought a fleece inside we were inhaling like mad.

Kudos go to my step-dad for bringing the coffee pot into the barn and running into town to get sandwiches for lunch. I dare say we would have collapsed into the wool out of exhaustion had he not kept us in coffee and food.

10 hours and 35 fleeces later we had successfully made it through the day. Most of the fleeces have been skirted and the rest will be done in a day or two but we succeeded in this the biggest, single day of the year. Now on to lambing.....

March 6, 2006
As you other shepherds know, this is the hardest time of the year with the labors of shearing and lambing. We are in the final stages of preparation for both. We have our birthing jugs all set up in the barn which is not too hard, just time-consuming and hauling the fencing around does wear down the back muscles a bit. One of my favorite moments was using an old Porsche car cover to haul straw from one end of the barn to the other to add bedding to the jugs! Zoom, zoom!

Yesterday my husband spent most of the afternoon arguing with fencing that wanted to stay frozen to the ground, herding the ewes together in one side of the feedlot and then going in with the skidsteerer to remove this winter's worth of straw and droppings - most of which were donated by our lovely Llama, HotRod. What a mountain of fertilizer it created! HotRod gave us plenty of stern looks of disapproval at being removed from his winter boudoir, but the shearer will be pleased and the fleeces will stay clean throughout the process.

This morning I did another round of cleaning in the barn getting it as spotless as possible before Tuesday's shearing. I love my Power-Vac! Although I am glad no one saw me. I look like a storm-trooper vacuuming the barn. We have 40 in our flock and I need a large and very clean space to lay down all those fleeces - even with tarps. We have some lovely horse stalls with rubber matting and fairly new pine walls, so this is my annual excuse to clean the stalls to within an inch of their life. Spiders beware, your webs are gone! On shearing day, I lay down tarps, then bring in fleeces as they come off the sheep and they are safe and sound in these immaculate stalls while we get through all the skirting. Even with help we can't skirt as fast as Tim can shear. Just writing about it gets my blood up. I better go check on tarps.