Oh what fun it is to ride

Oh what fun it is to ride my favorite tractor, pulling the fiesta-colored hay rake! Ya, I don't care if the tractor is overpowered for pulling the little rake. I like driving it more than the M and will use it for everything except sickle-ing.
I'm doing a small field of overgrown waist high Timothy grass and knee high alfalfa, for a test of the hay making machines. Boy, that sickle cuts nice. Too bad I broke it. Right before I started. Still worked without the spring. There is a large spring that assists to manual lift lever and also stabilizes the big base part of the cutter bar, and I was lifting the lever and the spring broke. I got off and looked at it and it had already been broken before and had broken now where someone put little spots of weld on it. Then I got back on the M and couldn't get it started. So I just got on my favorite IH666 tractor and brush hogged the rest of the field. You might think that it would pulverize the grass and be non-existent then to use for baling, but the grass was SO LONG, that it came out nice. I waited until noon today to rake it and so far, raking is my favorite machine and job. Great little unit. In case anyone doesn't know why I call it the Fiesta Rake, it's because it's orange and blue and yellow and black. Found another piece of that truck top that tore through that field a week or two ago during one of the big storms.
So, I noticed that when I had a bigger swath of grass to rake, it rolled up on itself as it went to the left, and when it was thinner grass being raked it didn't roll but just kind of fluffed itself forward and sideways. Is that how it's supposed to work? I sure like raking, did I say that already? Tomorrow or Friday is try-out-the-old-baler day. Pretty skeptical and nervous about how that's going to go... Really hope it makes bales because this grass is excellent. Overgrown, but no weeds and less sugar for my fat ponies.
The one 10 acre field on the other side of the property is newly seeded for horse hay with a cover crop of oats. Those oats have already been mowed down once because of thistle control maybe 3 weeks ago. They have re-grown and are thicker than ever. They are at milk stage, so next week, if the baler turns out to work okay, I will cut and bale the oats and hope what springs up over there next will be Timothy and other grasses I seeded. I have one other field that was planted the same as this one with the nice oat cover crop, but it has weeds on it too for some reason, so yesterday/last night I brush hogged it down in hoped of killing or stunting the weeds and giving the seeded grasses more space and sun and a better chance to grow and mature. The alfalfa there is looking good though. There was no sign of Timothy seed heads yet. Lost the oats that were growing there but had to cut because of weeds. Most were harmless weeds like foxtail and what was the other I'm not sure what it is. Reddish stem base, very tall, fine branched, fluffy seedy tops.
This is all so fun.

If you aren?t so familiar, oats takes very very long to dry down.

It sounds like you don?t have a crimper.

Very, very long. It is not like grass hay, it takes a long, long time to dry for dry hay bales.

Plan on a long drying period for it.

I hate being subtle like this.....

Paul

[quote="paul, okay, good to know. Like just how long are we talking? A week or? I figured longer than grass but didn't know it'd be excessively long. More than a week? And that's why I'm waiting until it's past milk stage. I read milk stage it is nearly impossible to dry down, just will get moldy.

When I've seeded down a field and have always used oats as a cover, when the oats are in the milk stage sickle mowed them, and handled them just as I do my hay, its been a few years but it was not much longer dry time than my regular hay. . I know that cattle sheep and horses eat oat hay like candy, consuming a lot of the straw with the oat heads. I just baled the weeds with the oats. Bush hogging your cover leaves a lot of crop residue laying on top of your new seeding, seems detrimental to me. Just my experience. gobble

No conditioner or crimper? Uh-oh! My first season of farming, I had to tackle a field of cut & unconditioned oats. Though it was an unusually cool &
wet summer, it was still sopping wet, after being turned three times, better than two weeks later. I ended up selling them to the local horse
boarding outfit as I got them off of the field. Half a wagon a day for four days..... & them bales weighed a ton! They were also so wet, they didn't
heat. I will admit, the oats were fairly tall, taller than I've seen Esker get. They were put in thick, too, to keep the weeds down. So.... yep.
It's going to take a minute, but now you will have this under your belt for future knowledge. Bonus!

Good luck & have fun with it.

Mike

P.S. Find a hay conditioner. If you're sticking with grass, you might want something with steel on rubber. Should still be a bunch floating around
up by you & NO! They are not million dollar collectibles! They usually average about $200 on down to "no interest" at auctions around here..... when
we had auctions around here. *sigh*

[quote="tomturkey. Was seeded two months ago. Will be cutting the oats to bale next week or whenever with the sickle, and yesterday cut the weeds higher (with sacrificed oats not baling) with the hog.

Two weeks and still wet??? Ugh.

Yup, totally. That's the whole reason I cut this small pasture area, is to try out the three machines. Mostly the baler. Second most, the sickle. I was confident in the rake working. This is my test run for the real deal, the oats next week. And I'd also like to cut and bale the rest of this pasture soon that I'm testing now. Horses haven't been in this one all summer. I was supposed to be finishing up the baler today but I was doing other things, so HAVE TO do it tomorrow morning. I have home made metal channels that need to be filed to fit perfectly with the bolt holes on the baler chute floor and making a new covering for the floor, too. It is rusted there. Otherwise, it is pretty much ready to try. Oh wait, there's another thing or two to do on it. I might try it tomorrow late afternoon if it's ready, or else Friday. Rain is coming Friday night.
Got to show you a pic of the new cat. Chuck still hates him.

New cat. I see pic is upsidedown again. Mustvetilted the cam the wrong way to the left oops.

This one is upsideup! Im a bad sickle driver. These were supposed to be two rows rigjt next to each other! Crazy.

(quoted from post at 17:00:20 07/31/19) This one is upsideup! Im a bad sickle driver. These were supposed to be two rows rigjt next to each other! Crazy.

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What a beautiful cat! Great shot, too. BTW it showed up just fine on my phone, but on my laptop the cat pic was upside-down. Technology. Gotta love it. Sickled rows look great, you must be happy with the mower. Those pics look normal on my laptop. Looking forward to an update including status of bales when you get to it. I know the world doesn't stop just because you have a baler to get ready, life goes on--but you'll get it all going and it will start spitting out bales and they will look like something the horses might be interested in eating. It'll all work out!

A mower conditioner would prove it's worth, on the oats. Or maybe have a neighbor with one cut them for you. All hay will dry down much faster, when it is run through a set of rollers. The mower conditioner will do both jibs on the same fuel with one trip versus your mower then crimper/conditioner second trip.