Making hay time!

These last few days of sunny skies and very little dew, have been just great for those hard working folks putting up hay. Today dawns warm and sunny, with no dew in my neighborhood. This is particularly good news for a neigbor who has hay down, which got a soaking two days ago. Won't be the end of the world for them, they have a variety of livestock to feed, and wrapped round bales are always welcome.

The typical pattern is warm sunny days which lead to clouds forming on the mountains. The heat rising drives the formation of thunderclouds, sometimes big boomers which rocket for miles. With them, come downpours as they trend southwest, to stall against the Sleeping Lady on the far side of the Susitna River. It's rather a crapshoot, whether an individual field will get soaked or not. I recall one year being out at Pt MacKenzie (large agricultural area about 25 miles to the southwest from home) and watching these small storm cells form, drop a hard downpour, and scoot off at a rather high rate of speed. From one high spot on the road, I could easily see six or seven of these "isolated thunderstorms" over the area.....very common summer weather pattern here.

I mention all this because I have been blessed with a wonderful husband.


For the third year in a row, he has dropped whatever he was doing, put the aluminum flatbed on his truck, and hightailed it up north to get hay for me. All by himself, he loaded way more than I expected, an even hundred bales! Its very very dry (yay!!) and very leafy (yay!!) and I am more than thrilled to have it :)

Now, what you have to know, is that my husband is not a horse person. Oh he has picked up stuff over the years, just from hearing me talk about this, or pointing out things-but in no way does he "love" horses, you see. I think he tends to think of them as overgrown dogs, who are stupidly expensive to keep and mean a huge amount of work. Well, I can't say I don't agree with some of that-they are a lot of work, lol! But, despite this: I have a nice pole barn. Paddocks which are sufficient, with better footing than most, including mats in the stalls. I have an area cleared and leveled which is my panel arena-over 90 foot across-and it now has absolutely beautiful sand footing too. We have a couple different drags for working the surface and he willingly scrubs and bleaches icky stock tanks when needed, lets me know when he notices something amiss, and while he may roll his eyeballs at the "looney tunes" carp that passes for the horse community here.....he will help with anything if asked.

So, when I made the call to let him know the farmer was planning on being on the baler by 2pm, he literally dropped what he was doing and hit the road-he knows dry hay won't wait. And in fact, quite a number of vehicles were there loading up also, including a couple of my own hay customers, lol

Like I said, he's a wonderful husband and I am more than blessed :)