Moving hay

Late last June, if you remember, we purchased fifteen 600-lb. round bales of hay (4.5 tons) delivered for our upcoming winter cattle feed. (Ironically the farmer delivered them during one of the fiercest thunderstorms we've had in a long time.) After the weather calmed down, Don neatly stacked the bales in the front driveway and we tarped them against any subsequent rainstorms.

Now it was time to move those bales from the front of the house to the back, where we wanted to stack as many inside the barn as would fit.

One thing became apparent at the time the bales were delivered: These bales weighed way, way more than 600 lbs. each. Don estimates they exceed 800 lbs. The farmer was apologetic; apparently he had never used a round baler before, and it took some adjustment, so the bales turned out a lot bigger than he anticipated. Still, he gave us 15 bales at the original price he quoted, so we weren't arguing that we got closer to six tons for the price of four and a half.

These bales were almost comically misshapen. Most were wound tighter on one end than the other, leading to a humorous mushroom shape. But hey, we weren't arguing about their appearance. We appreciated the extra tonnage.

But the extra-heavy bales did present one quandary: Our tractor couldn't lift them using the front-loader spikes, which cantilever weight away from the main body of the tractor. How were we going to move 15 bales from the front driveway to the barn in back?

So, after doing some research, Don made one of the few new purchases we've made since I lost my job last February: A hay bale spike that goes on the back of the tractor. Attached to the three-point hitch, this spike is able to lift a couple thousand pounds, so it easily handled the round bales.

More and more farmers are transitioning to round bales, so this purchase was way overdue.

Anyway, with the change in weather, Don was anxious to get as much hay under cover as possible. The cattle were almost finished with the last of the old hay, so Don took the opportunity to clean out the center part of the barn. This was highly educational, as he kept uncovering tools or items that had been missing for nearly five years, since we moved in ("So that's where my spare Sawzall went!").

Finally, after about a week of sorting and tidying, the center part of the barn was fairly open. (If you peer closely, you can see what's left of the last remaining old hay bale in the center back.)

Don untarped the new hay bales. Some of the bales had a few rotty spots, but for the most part they were in very good condition. Additionally, these bales are much higher quality hay than the stuff we'd bought last spring to tide us over.

One by one, Don positioned the tractor by a bale, backed the spike into it, and lifted the bale into the air. 

Then he drove around to the lower driveway and brought the bale to the barn.

Once at the opening of the barn, he dropped the bale just outside.

Then he turned the tractor around and, using the bucket, tipped it on its end. Alley-oop!

Once it was tipped up, he used the bucket to slide the bale over the concrete floor of the barn. His goal was to cram as many bales in the barn as possible. There is very little maneuvering room in this space, so it's not like we could stack them or anything. Besides, we needed the bales to be positioned so that we could cut the twine that binds them and unpeel the hay when it's time to feed the animals.

You can see the size difference between these newer bales (left) and the last remnant of the old 500-lb bales we bought last March (right). For one thing, the newer bales are over five feet high (they're taller than me), and wider in diameter. (This photo is an unfair comparison since the old bale is mostly used up.)

In the end, Don managed to squeeze 10 of the 15 bales into the barn, nine of which are shown below.

For the remaining five bales, he laid down pallets just off the main driveway and stacked the bales in a pyramid, then we tarped the bloody heck out of them and tied the tarps tight.

We broke into one of the new bales a couple days ago, and the cows are crazy for it. In fact, just tonight Maggie didn't even want her usual evening grain. She wanted hay.

This is yet another example of what we're doing to batten down the hatches for winter. Now we have plenty of feed inside the barn to last all during the cold and snowy months, and enough tarped in the driveway to get us through the muddy spring months.

Product Review Monday

This week's product review features two books.

This first book is a cookbook I've had since, I think, my college days (early 1980s) entitled "More-with-Less Cookbook." Published by a Mennonite publishing house, it features recipes that are simple, basic, easy to follow, and emphasize food as a resource that is to be treasured, not squandered.

This cookbook has been reprinted over and over since its initial publishing date in 1976, and in fact has sold more than a million copies ... with good reason. The late author, Doris Longacre, was a passionate advocate for reducing world hunger, and this cookbook is a reflection of that passion. It's an excellent resource for those who want easy recipes with wholesome, basic ingredients. The book contains hundreds of economical recipes that makes meat optional. "More-with-Less Cookbook" should be a staple in every frugal person's kitchen.

_____________________

Don's book recommendation this week is a little unorthodox, but in a great way: The "Boy Scouts Handbook," a reprint of the first edition in 1911.

Don writes:

I've had a copy of this book for years. Not an original, but a reprint like the one offered by Amazon.

If you want to see what boys were learning to do back in the early 1900s, this is for you. I don't mean to put down the young men of today's scouting, but we seem to have lost something truly important.

Anyway, this is a great book just for casual perusal. Enjoy!

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, we earn a small commission.)

(Don't forget: A complete list of all our book and product recommendations are linked here and at the upper-right column of the blog.)

Scary videos

Recently I saw a compendium of short (perhaps ten seconds apiece) videos showing Ring camera footage of house cats chasing away bears that got too close to babies on porches. That may seem like a very specific category, but there you go. I couldn't locate the original collection I watched, but you can see a few of them in these YouTube shorts:

• Here

• Here

• Here

• Here

There were more, but you get the idea.

It wasn't until I started wondering just how many stupid parents were leaving their babies unattended on porches that I noticed the fleeting logo floating around the screen:

I wouldn't have paid attention to this logo except by chance, just the day before, Older Daughter had shown me a video with the same jumping logo and explained how "Sora" is the automatic logo placed on AI videos created by Open AI. Specifically, "Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions," according to the website. Older Daughter also mentioned how some people are trying to scrub the logo by glossing over it, so if you see a video with random blurry blotches jumping around, it's the logo that's been removed.

Keep in mind that Open AI is free. There are other AI video programs that cost money, but put out a superior product (and presumably don't have a telltale logo jumping around on the screen). But even with the free program, you must admit these videos are awesomely realistic – and in that realism, they're terrifying. What happens when the video doesn't depict a heroic cat saving a baby? What happens, instead, when kindly Mr. Smith down the road is shown shoplifting from the nearby corner store? Or worse?

"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" was a chilling statement variously attributed to Stalin or other Soviet-era miscreants. Artificial intelligence offers tools to achieve this in a way the Stalinists could only dream of.

Those cute cat videos aren't so cute after all.

Vultures as archeologists

I saw two back-to-back articles (here and here, with the original paper published here) on the subject of bearded vulture nests being used as a source of archeological treasures. Fascinating.

It seems bearded vultures, an Old World species, have nests that go back generations. Some of these nests, in fact, go back centuries. Biologists are learning that sometimes, over the course of time, the vultures have incorporated things in the construction or reinforcement of their nests that are of archeological interest. As a result, scientists have started examining these nests with a closer eye.

In northern Spain, archeologists found over 200 human artifacts, including a  650-year-old sandal made from woven twigs and grasses. Other finds include bits of rope, a crossbow bolt with a wooden lance, a slingshot, and bits of leather. How cool is that?

For obvious reasons, the scientists are only examining nests that are no longer in use, since they must tease them apart layer by layer. Since the vultures often nest in cliff caves, the cool, dry microclimates have proven to be perfect for preserving artifacts for centuries.

Nature is amazing.

The firewood is finished

This time of year, a critical fall chore in rural areas is to get firewood put up for the winter. In the Lewis household, this chore often falls on me since I don't mind splitting and stacking, and it frees Don up to do more complicated projects.

I started by assessing our woodshed in mid-August. This space was mostly empty and had accumulated a variety of things we tucked in to keep them out of the rain over the spring and summer, including the oversized canvas umbrella I used while picking blueberries.

Also – and crucially – in the woodshed was located the manual hydraulic log splitter. Our gas-powered log splitter had been stranded on the other side of the property with a flat (actually, destroyed) tire, so through late spring we had been using the manual splitter to split firewood.

Late last fall, we had ordered a few extra cords of firewood to supplement what we already had on hand, just in case it was needed to get us over the winter. As it turned out, the firewood was fairly green (not dry) and the splits were huge, far too large to fit into our stove. In short, the entire delivery would have to be resplit, and even then the wood was too green for effective use unless the stove was already very hot.

We tried to make the best of it by stacking some of the smaller pieces in the woodshed, but soon gave up. The wood pieces were simply too large and too green  to use. So the majority of the pile sat there, tarped but unstacked, all winter long. Over the summer we untarped the pile to let the wood dry out, which it did very nicely.

Now that I was tasked with firewood, the first thing I did was examine the wood that was already in the woodshed, much of which was too large to burn (but at least it was dried out).

I used the manual log splitter to split it down to size...

...then restacked everything. I concentrated on stacking everything as tightly as possible, and up to the absolute rafters.

Meanwhile we finally got a replacement tire on the (gas-powered) log splitter, so we towed it around to the front of the house, and I settled in to resplit the cords of firewood that had been drying out for the last year.

I kept the canvas umbrella in the woodshed, since at this point (late August) I was still harvesting blueberries and needed it for shade.

The blueberries finally petered out, so I moved the umbrella back into the barn and started stacking firewood in earnest.

Once the pile of wood was resplit and all stacked up, we started moving miscellaneous wood from the barn side of the house to the front where the log splitter was. These were rounds that had been harvested from dead trees we'd taken down.

We loaded these into a box Don built to go on the back of the tractor, and pulled them around to the log splitter.

This left me with plenty more wood to split.

Some of the rounds were enormous. These were the monsters we tried to tackle with the manual log splitter without success. The gas-powered splitter conquered them with very little effort.

As the weeks went by, I split and stacked everything I could lay my hands on. It was my goal to get that woodshed stuffed to the brim.

Row by row, I built up our supply.

However when everything we had on hand was split, we were well short of that goal of having a stuffed woodshed. So ... we ordered one more cord of rounds, just to fill in the gaps.

Splitting that last cord only took two or three days of working a couple hours at a time.

Second-to-last row...

As I wound down on the splitting, I was also playing a game with how much gas was left in the log splitter. I wanted to use it all up so we wouldn't have to drain the splitter before putting it away for the winter. But it was a fine balance, because I wanted to use that gas power to split the bigger rounds. So I pulled every remaining large round out of the pile...

...and carted them over to the splitter.

As it turned out, the gas in the splitter ran out just as I finished splitting the largest rounds. So I turned to the manual splitter to finish the batch.

And that was it for splitting.

I had an enormous pile of split wood needing to be stacked. The question was how much of it would fit into the shed. All? Most? Would there still be room in the shed?

I stacked and stacked. When each row reached the top of the shed, I played Tetris to see how many wood pieces I could shove into any available opening.

Almost finished...

Success! The woodshed is filled side to side, back to front, top to bottom. Based on the dimensions, Don calculates that we have almost five cords of wood, plenty to get us through even the harshest of winters. To me, a full woodshed is a thing of beauty.

There was a fair bit of leftover firewood. It took three loads in the Gorilla cart...

...and I stacked it on the back porch. This will be the first firewood we use this winter.

Now it was time for the cleanup. I had been tossing kindling-sized pieces into a pile...

...so I gathered them up and put them in a bin on the back porch for easy access.

I raked up the bark and other debris...

...and loaded it into the Gorilla cart. I pulled the cart into the pasture to dump it in a pile to be composted down. The cows instantly came to investigate. "Is it edible?"

This left the area in front of the woodshed nice and tidy. We'll tuck the log splitter away shortly.

The very last thing we'll do is hang a tarp loosely over the front of the woodshed to discourage rain and snow from blowing onto the wood. But for now – the firewood is finished!