It is time to start harvesting the orchard grass, rye, clover and oat grass from the field. We will mow, rake, bale and accumulate square bales from all of this. Being our first harvest with our new seed we are not sure how it will come out. But looking forward to having some bales very soon. Hopefully we can do this three times a year with good weather. This is the first of the year so there should be more harvests in 2024 as well.
Mowing is done using a tractor attachment that cuts the grass, it lays flat and I will need to come back later with another tractor attachment called a rake. All I have to do is drive the tractor and make sure I get it all mowed. I can listen to a podcast or an audio book while mowing. Its slow going around 4 MPH so its a pretty relaxing job.
My foreman mowed the immediate area so we can hook up everything without climbing through ankle high grass.
He hooks up the mower for me, I watch and eventually I should be able to do this myself.
Before I start mowing, we collect tree branches from the fields so the mower does not hit them. This takes about half a day to clear the fields.
I put down stakes for the 1 acre area where we plan on growing garlic. There were small stakes in the ground but the mower would have hit them, so I can to put some t-posts in the ground so I can see them and avoid when mowing.
Lots to mow, will take me about 1.5 days to get it all done.
There still is milkweed in the fields, we were hoping tilling would deal with it. Seems there is less, so we need to see if this will be acceptable for animals to eat. If not we will use the hay for the garlic fields and till it into the ground to raise the nutrient levels.
Its really cool seeing these tall grasses sway in the wind. I will try to capture it on a windy day.
Looks like what we planted last year is now flowering, perfect time to gather it.
1.5 days later:
With everything mowed, I go inspect my work. Seeing if I need to go over any areas again.
Looks good, soon I will rake it all up into windrows.
Driving the UTV around I look for rocks, I hit a few while mowing and want to avoid them next time if possible.
Some of them may be laying under the grass, so once I rake I will look again for more.
But once in awhile I find one, and chuck it in the back of my UTVs bed.
This thing can break my mower blades, or worse if it gets jammed it can break the gears inside the mower.
Building quite the nice rock collection...lol
With all the mowing done I am going to take a break and then get back to raking soon. Then my foreman will bale and accumulate them. Then it will be time to see if they are a quality product or not. If so great... if not we will probably need to do some improving in the fields. I will still use the hay for tilling into the ground, but hopefully long term it will be good animal feed.
Besides riding around on my tractor I also got to see a rat snake hanging around my garden.
You can see its head poking out from the garden bed.
More updates coming soon once the fields are raked.
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@solominer/the-fields-are-waking-up