Round

School is back in session and I have the house to myself once again. It's nice to slow down after a pretty hectic summer wrap up. I'm ready to gradually get back into sculpting full time as I took the summer off for a change. It was nice to focus on the kids and making fun memories....and we made many this summer.

Ever year around this time we fill up our shop with hay. Enough hay to keep all the critters fed for a year. We always get small square bales because they are easy to handle, stack and store. No big machinery needed, which is a plus since we don't have any. My regular supplier of hay is my friends aunt. This year she decided to do her whole field in big round bales instead of the small square ones. No big deal, I'm up for a change. So Saturday morning I took Sean's Jeep and rented a heavy duty trailer from the local rental place and headed out to the field. The Jeep has a tow package on it allowing it to haul 6500 pounds. Each bale was around 1000 pounds so we loaded up three per trip, making 5 round trips. It was an hour round trip to the field and back. Needless to say it was a long day.

We'd unload the three bales and I'd take off for the next trip leaving Sean here to man handle the bales into a row. Round bales should be stored in rows going North and South and they should be placed as tightly together as possible to keep rain and snow from entering the sides (we did our research). Sean did a great job getting them moved but was pretty sore after manually moving 15 of them. We decided a tractor or a skid steer might be in our future and have started shopping for one...especially if round bales are happening every year from now on.