Now we’re a month into winter we’ve moved the little darlings onto hay again. Although there’s still grass on the hills and the flock trundle round grazing, the grass lacks nutritional content and isn’t sweet and tasty like it is in the summer.
For the last few winters we’ve been really lucky getting in small square bales of hay which are perfect for smallholdings. They’re easy to store and carry around, much more so than the huge round bales that large farms use. The huge round bales are only moveable by tractor and we don’t have a tractor. (Well, we used to have one and it was useful when we had cows, but since we sold the cows we stopped using the tractor so we sold it).
This year however we hit a problem. At the beginning of October, feeling very organised I pinged an email to our suppliers to arrange our first load of bales for November. Only to be told that they’re no longer doing small bales, yikes!
I clicked into action. There aren’t many smallholdings around here and not much call for small bales, but there are plenty of horses and horse owners like small bales too. I phoned my friend who keeps a horse in the next village. She gave me a number for her hay chap, but sadly his hay was all tied up and he didn’t have enough for us. Next, I jumped in the car and whizzed over to our local agricultural store. They’re a great mine of information and I was sure they’d know someone who did small bales. Sure enough I came away with a phone number of a chap who was setting up a hay operation and potentially did small bales. Unfortunately, it turned out he wasn’t going to be ready until next winter, darn! I made several more phone calls – but no joy. Finally, scraping the barrel I did some facebook searches and found a supplier in Cumbria who looked hopeful, they had a barn-full of soft meadow hay, perfect for sheep – until I calculated how much in fuel it would cost for me to go and collect, eek! Time was running out and I needed to get something fixed up soon.
In moments like this a cup of tea is always helpful. Sure enough, halfway through my cuppa an idea started to form. As things were looking, it was either big round bales or no bales at all. Handling big bales is pretty much impossible without a tractor, however, I wondered if there was a way we could roll them into our shed if we got them delivered right next to the shed entrance. It would only be a few feet and the shed was slightly downhill. The only fly in the ointment was that the bales would need to be stored on pallets to keep them off the ground. I wondered if we would manage to get them onto the pallets or whether that would be a step too far. I ran my idea by Adrian and he said we should go for it, basically, we had little choice.
So I ordered three big bales and they arrived on a drizzly day. What with Adrian stuck at his desk doing his day job we wouldn’t be able to move them until later in the evening, so I rummaged about in the shed to find a tarp big enough to cover them and somehow managed to drape it over the bales to keep the rain off.
Later that evening we rolled up our sleeves and with a bit of pushing, shoving and the odd naughty word, by a minor miracle, we got our three bales into the shed, yay!
Now the only thing left to do would be to decant the hay from the big bales into user-friendly portions to allow me to transport them to the paddock where the feeders are set up.
Back in September, Adrian built a nifty little shed in the paddock, just big enough to store a week’s worth of hay. Having a few bales stored near the feeders makes life so much easier when it comes to topping up the feeders (which I do daily).
I was so excited to use the new hay store this winter, and Adrian had even sized it up to accommodate exactly one week’s worth of small square bales.
Needless to say I was slightly concerned the new shed would take a week’s worth of hay in dumpy bags.
But I didn’t have to worry about that until a few days ago because during November I was still using the remainder of last winter’s small square bales and life was easy. Then the time came to move over to the big bales. To be honest despite my trepidation about storage, I couldn’t wait to rip open the netting on the first bale, last winter’s hay being a year old was a bit average, some of the bales were stale and I had to discard a couple which had got wet. I couldn’t wait to get stuck into the new hay, there’s nothing like opening a fresh bale of hay, it smells amazing!
After a shaky start at the beginning of the winter wondering how we were going to manage, it seems things are working out fine with the big bales. And the sheep are pretty happy with the situation too.
