Hay – Not, truck shopping, missing Mama

On two fields that should have produced between 800 and 1000 bales of hay, Grandpa was able to put up twenty seven bales. I am going to see what relief there may be at the county level to re-coop some of the loss due to the drought. There may not be any, but it would not hurt to ask. It makes our grand plan to haul hay from West Virginia to Texas seem like a very practical enterprise.

We are expecting rain today but that has been the case for weeks now. There seems to be about a fifty mile wide bowl we are sitting in that is being denied the showers the surrounding areas are getting with some regularity. But even those areas are suffering from the overall lack of rain. Grandma and Grandpa passed miles of flooded lands along the swollen Mississippi as they traveled south. Norman and Seth are heading back to West Virginia in a week hoping things have dried out enough to allow them to get back to work; not so much here.

Today Norman and Grandpa are going to Dallas to look at several trucks they have found online. They have already walked away from about half a dozen that did not quite meet their expectations. I am glad they are being so particular because they can only spend the money in Norman’s pocket once. They are looking for a truck that would allow them to hitch up a large trailer and haul several hundred bales of hay back to Bowie for sale, not your everyday, run of the mill puck up.

Hopefully, once the truck is bought Grandpa, Norman and Seth will get to the wiring, insulation and sheetrock in the apartment. It is nice having help.  Even last night as I was putting a tarp over the south garage door opening I had Seth helping with the tarp and Grandpa holding the ladder I was on. It made the work a lot easier and the results of that work a lot nicer; especially since there was a twenty mile an hour wind blowing against us.

Mamas’ chickens are really missing her. I do not know how they can tell but they are not laying as well the last several days – since she has been laid up. All of the baby chicks are growing at an unbelievable pace even without her careful attention, but the older ones know she is not the one coming to check on their needs. I think there are ten baby chickens and four guineas in the lot of little ones. I am hoping the guineas are females and the large one we now have is a male so we can hatch and sell our own at some point but that may be wishful thinking.

Grandpa is back in full farming mode and he is very pleased with the calves Mama has tended in his absence. We are going to wait until September to butcher the large steer and we will keep one of the little bulls until he is over a year old – just for grins. So we still have four little steers to sell late this summer.

If the dairy we have been working with gets back into the breeding program they followed last year we should be getting some bottle babies in the very early fall; probably around the end of September. Then we get to start all over again. Maybe when the grandkids come up in the Fall we can go get some baby pigs to complete our livestock program.

Time will tell.