Hay Y'all

Sitting atop one of the bales.

Let's talk hay bales. Yeah, I know. Ex-cit-ing. OK, not really. But, now that I've hauled off to the country I have to admit they're a little fascinating. Still not convinced? Yeah, me neither. But now that I have first-hand knowledge as to how they're created, I'll never look at another hay bale the same. You see along with a house and all of that, we also acquired four acres of alfalfa. Which, at first, I thought was kind of useless (especially after we found out we couldn't sell off the extra land and make a big fat profit). But then we started brainstorming all of the wonderful ways we could develop the land. Unfortunately we don't have the patience for pumpkins or even close to what it takes to establish a winery, so those dreams died pretty quickly.

The dreams may have died, but alfalfa remained - and we knew it would take an eternity for my husband to get through it with his 22-inch Tecumseh push mower.

Lucky for us, a local farmer showed up one day with his tractor and cut it. Then, said farmer arrived a few days later with another piece of farm machinery (a baler perhaps?) that raked it all up, wound it into a huge gigantic ball, and shot it out the back end. That's the cleaned up, PG version of what happened. Apparently the farmer will send us a check at the end of the year for all that hay. Cool. We'll probably get just as rich off that as we would the winery.

And if not, the bales make perfect targets for a little game of pasture golf. We could totally charge admission for that.