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RE: Last hay post of the season, I swear!
Your photos bring back memories - I grew up on a farm but didn't have the physical strength to sling hay bales. My dad and his peers could hold a bale in each hand and hurl it up into the haymow. Dad's hands are the size of hams; his fingers like Cuban cigars. But even the whip-thin farm boys had grips that could bring a man to his knees. (My husband, his brothers: lean and tough.) My dad never made sileage, but my father-in-law did, and my husband ranks that among his favorite smells. The smell of fresh cut hay is #1.
But that was before the Mountain-Sized haybales you have today!
What a hot, dusty job, and I hope you didn't need mounds of allergy pills to counteract the work.
Fresh hay is 100 percent better smelling than any sileage I've ever smelled! I have seen the kids sling the bales that easily. I have to use two hands and I complain about it for days afterwards. Not all of us were built for farm work but some of us are doing it against all odds. I will take all the moral support you can throw my way!
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You've got my moral support!! And my poor mother--'Not all of us were built for farm work but some of us are doing it against all odds"--and suffering arthritis for it. Her work-worn hands, knobby with swollen joints, are heartbreaking to behold. The work of our hands! She'd rather be sewing or painting, but she married a farmer who doesn't hire help (can't find good help), and says we all must accept "our lot in life." I was never one to accept "That's just the way it is." Champion of Lost Causes, shaking my puny fist at the universe...
Take care of those hands!! @crescendoofpeace and @owasco seem to know lots of good herbal remedies for inflammation. Stinging nettle or catnip tea...?
Yeah, still have no stinging nettle on my place that I can find, but I did finally get some seed, so next season watch out! ;-)
And truthfully, my "farm work" is mostly hobby farm work, as I'm mostly feeding animals and propagating plants. No ploughing with oxen - or even a tractor- involved.
Of course, it usually also involves lots of mowing, but both of our mowers crapped out, so at the moment I'm wading to and from the car to the front porch through knee-high grass that's a magnet for ticks and chiggers. Ugh.
And our poultry enclosure is completely overgrown to the point of weeds literally growing through the top in some places, and it's over four feet tall. Yikes!
Ah well, I'm planning to go out later and at least pick up a little push mower, which won't cut it for our acreage, but will at least allow me to mow around the house and the trees in our orchard.
Such fun when it's in the mid-90s. Ugh again.
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I kill stinging nettle, and you plant it - LOL! - I need to figure out how to use the stuff. Sooo many of our natives are good for the wild things but not for me: poison ivy, bedstraw, and more sticky-seed or itchy things than I can list off-hand.
The ticks! The chiggers! Even in short grass, they're everywhere. If those chiggers weren't invisible to me, I might despise them less because I could kill them more.
The work of maintaining an acreage in 90+ temps with humidity... there have to be more perks than we can remember while we're sweating it out amongst the chiggers. Focus on the prize. The scenery, the solitude, the bug-free winters?
Last winter we never got cold enough to be bug free, and never even had a proper snow.
So this year the biting little creeps have been even more miserable than ever.
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So I should be grateful for our prolonged, sub-zero winters.... the bugs ALWAYS survive them. But they have to, if the lightning bugs and butterflies are, too....