Friday Farm Photo: Have a Colorful Weekend.

Any plans this weekend? I'm hoping to spend some time in the kitchen garden sowing a bed of Swiss chard and cucumber seeds (did I really order five different varieties this year?), finally getting the rest of my poor tomato and pepper seedlings in the ground (can you tell I'm a little behind?), pulling approximately 3,000 more weeds, and mulching everything I can with grass clippings—now that it's finally dry enough out there to cut the grass—and that wonderful, nutrient-rich manure/bedding hay from the sheep barn.

I'll also be savoring the fact that our hayfield no longer looks like it does in the photo above because there are 225 square bales of hay now stacked in the barn (we didn't cut the entire field, just what you see here). We'd hoped to get a lot more bales, and it's not the best hay we've ever put up, but it's nowhere near the worst.

Fortunately we still have a lot of big round bales left over from last year (because for the first time we cut Donkeyland as well as the hayfield) so no matter what Mother Nature throws at us this fall and winter, we should hopefully have enough hay to keep the sheep and donkeys fed well into next spring.

Even so, depending on the weather, the rain fall, and what grows up in the hayfield over the next month or two, we may try to go ahead and put up some more round bales just in case. Because if you have a farm full of grass eaters, an always unpredictable climate, friends and neighbors with herds of cows but no hayfields of their own, and some room still left in the haybarn, there's really no such thing as having too much hay.

Wondering how you put up hay? Have a look here and here and here.

© FarmgirlFare.com, hanging out on the bright side of life.