Hay Staging

 All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

              -William Shakespeare As You Like it

When words act as multiple parts of speech, I get excited. This week we staged some round bales. "Staged," as in placed them in position to be fed later. But to keep them off the ground and make unwrapping the net easier, we placed them on a "stage," in this case, a pallet.

A lucky guess on where the flat spot would land.

It's a fun task to "stage" round bales- with all that hooking and unhooking.  The basic set of steps is this:

1. Pull the stone boat up next to the bale (in this case, the bales had a flat spot, so we judged where the boat needed to be to have the bale land correctly.

2. Hook a hay hook into the netting and run a chain over the bale.

3. Move the team so they are oriented perpendicularly to the stone boat.

4. Link an additional chain onto the "hook chain" and hitch it to the yoke.

5. Take just enough steps to roll the bale on to the boat. (Normally, I like to leave the bale with the axis pointing skyward right on the stone boat and feed it like that, but it does tie up the stone boat for the next few days and it means you can only move one bale at a time.)

5. Pull the bale to the staging area. (In our case, next to the pasture fence. We peel and feed hay 2x a day.)

6. Throw a pallet down behind the stoneboat.

7. Repeat steps 1-5 to roll the bale up onto the pallet. (In this case, the axis is skyward, making unwrapping easier)

8. Hook to the stone boat and go back for another.

Like I said, lots of hooking and unhooking.  Half the time the team hooks they have a heavy pull, as they are pulling the bale and the boat. The other half, they are flopping a bale, which I could realistically do myself.  That's nice. It makes the team pull "gently," no matter what.

. . . And if the senior Senator from Vermont offers to help, let him.