Well, Saturday dawned a cool pleasant day. I’d gotten some sleep after the long trip to Connecticut. My intern’s sister arrived about 8:30 and we went up to get started.
Last year when I got the mulch hay from this farmer, it was lovely stuff, but I had to store it outside as my husband couldn’t deal with putting it in the barn as he was building the house.
So when the farmer called to say he had more hay, I decided to make a place in the barn for it. We went up to open the doors for more light. But first we had to move the mower out of the windbreak. We quickly discovered the drive train had seized up and it wasn’t going to go into neutral so we could roll it away. I got the truck and dragged it down by the hay bales where I hoped it would be out of the way. (It wasn’t.) This was a harbinger of things to come…
We went back inside and started clearing out the area that had had the doors and windows in it last year. We got all the stuff we could out of there and reorganized what was left. Then we headed out to the old pile to get pallets.
All the plastic had been left where it was when we moved the last of the hay out. We cleaned off 4 of them and put them in the barn with plastic on top to keep the moisture from the hay.
Then we went back out and I started cutting up the old black plastic cover as it was full of holes. My helper was stuffing the pieces in trash bags. We discovered the carpenter’s trailer had been put on some of the plastic and we couldn’t get it up. So I called him and asked if he could move the trailer as the hitch was too low to reach my truck’s bumper.
We kept working on the plastic and he arrived just before 11AM, when the neighbor had arrived with her truck and trailer to go get the mulch hay. He said she couldn’t get the trailer up the driveway. It turns out, after several trips up and down the driveway, she had brought a horse trailer and just didn’t want to come up the driveway and have to turn around.
We finally got the carpenter’s trailer out of there and my helper and I set off with the neighbor for the farm with hay. We get up there only to discover the original hay he said he had was left outside and was soaked and moldy. It could not go into the barn. The second lot of hay he had, the roof had blown off his barn in the windstorm last Tuesday night and a wagon load of hay got wet. That couldn’t go in the barn either.
Good thing we’d not been able to finish cleaning up the outside area as all this was going to have to be there. As we moved the outside bales, my helper found a mouse family that had babies without eyes open. She insisted on bringing them home to try to raise. We both knew her father would not be pleased…
So we set about loading the mostly wet and some VERY heavy bales into the trailer and back of the truck. It all just fit. We got back home and started stacking it on the remaining pallets and it just fit.
After lunch, we went out and started trying to fit some plastic I had onto the stack. It was only 10’ wide and we had to do a bit of creative work to make it stay on the stack.
In the end, it was well roped down and the best we could do. We cleaned up the messes we’d made and her father came and got her and her baby mice around 3PM.
This was to be a simple, move stuff in the barn, set-up, bring in hay and unload on pallets job. It turned into a 6 hour marathon. Why can’t things just be simple? But it’s done for now and if I get dry mulch hay, I now have a place to store it. And a small portion of the barn has been cleaned up. So I guess I won, but what an ordeal…
Sunday is to be a cool cloudy day with rain late afternoon. I hope to get back out to the Small garden perimeter job and finish it. Then I hope to mow the lawn before it rains. I can’t believe it’s the 1st of August and I’m still doing vegetable gardens instead of just flower beds.