ESL Blogs

What an amazing day when the hay is pressed in bales and wrapped in silage foilsyes, It provides one with an ease. The fodder for 2 Horses for half a year is safe. On the picture you see our meadow that a bit about 2 acres and after all we harvested around 14 bales of around 200KG each.

But before we have achieved that, it provides me with belly aches for some time. There are so many insecurities. First you have to fertilize the green with either chemical fertilizer or bullocks. I prefer bullocks which definitely is the more natural way. Since the hay is meant to feed horses with the bullocks must be from cows. Swine for horses do not fit. Horses wouldn´t eat it. Thanks god we have a befriended cow keeper near who always brings cow bullocks out on the meadow. This is no problem hence.

Lol you needen´t pull the grass long as it grows on its own. Alhamdullilah. As it is for horses it needs a huge length as it contains many stipes and seedcorns then rather than leaves. Horses need stipes, cows much more leaves. Well the stipes grow to a height up to 1,5 meters. That makes them sensibel against storm and hard rain, which can lay the stipes down on the ground and hard to harvest. Thanks god no hard weather came up this year and all went well till harvest.

For the harvest you need a stable weather with warmth and a mild wind for some time. And that´s the problem here. you have to watch weather forcasts intensively to find out the best time for the drying period. There are really a lot of inscurirties with the weather. If you are unlucky you might almost have the hay dry and hard rain falls into. It is not a huge problem if it happens just once, just you need a new period. But if there will come up an instant rain for some days the hay is irretrievably lost. You have 2 problems at the same time then. 1. you need to buy hay somewhere which is costly and 2ndly you need to remove the hay from the acre and store it somewhere else. It are around approximately 2,8to in our case. Which means 14 bales of 1,4x1,2x0,8 meter. That also costs you an arm and a leg.

Luckily we were able this time to get the hay dry, pressed 14 bales and wrapped them before the big rain came. :-) Now we just have to remove them bales from the meadows and pile them. and we have food for half a year. There will be another harvest in some weeks by now and if we again are lucky we don´t need to buy hay for a whole year :-)

Thanks for reading, in case you didn´t fall asleep. LOL