What did I do to prepare today? Began getting in hay for winter. I always try to buy enough hay to last from Sept/Oct until April. We don't have enough land to grow our own but do supplement with goat garden stuff as much as we can. But good milk demands alfalfa and my friends it ain't plentiful nor cheap anymore!
130 # bale went for $5 in 1987 it now goes for , ouch,ouch, $15.50 to $19.99 and more often than not they aren't even close to 130# a piece . So today as luck would have it the fellow I often get hay from brought in 178 bales of pretty darn nice goat alfalfa. Fine stemmed and leafy. Not super green but then green doesn't always mean good. Price was right, so I came home with 10 bales. If they test out well by the "alfalfa test goat team'' I will get another 64 and hope that the weather cooperates and it is a wet winter, early dry spring and baling begins on time. Which would be early to mid April.
I have a nagging feeling that with lousy economics in play, weird weather for two years running. Very late season for beginning to bale here this year. That hay will be very hard to find and very expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if it hit $25 a bale in my area. Since there are very few if any who farm it over here and most all of what is available here is trucked in from either S. Oregon/extreme N. Cal or the Sacramento valley. So that increases the cost.
The thing I miss most about moving out of the San Joaquin Valley? Besides my grandbebes and kids. My hay man. Brett who grew high octane alfalfa, cut and baled to perfection, delivered it and stacked it with a retriever. Bless him he would also scale the retriever arms and knock the first two courses down as we didn't have a ladder that would work.
Other than that today not much in the way of being prepared. But I just got a heads up the tomato's are beginning to ripen. Good thing I ordered extra jars from Azure this month! Have a wonderful rest of weekend.
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