Boot City has a LOT of cars. Our property strongly resembles a parking lot. In the interest of cleaning up and also getting some $$$$ we had a little car washing and photography session recently. Boot City is motivated to sell his 1972 Datsun Z car so I was happy to help get ready to get RID of the thing!
DIRTY Datsun
The car has been parked by our house for a few months and is COVERED in tree gunk. Sticky and gross!
Dirty dirty Datsun
We had to move it from the house to wash it, which gave Boot City an opportunity to put his big tractor to work. He LOVES his John Deere!
Cars that don’t run get towed
Boot City put me in charge with the outside cleaning and he would clean the motor. Probably a good idea since I’m pretty sure I would mess something up on the car if I were to be put in charge of spraying a jet of water at the motor. I was moving the hose around and getting my bucket of soapy water ready when I heard lots of screaming and shouting behind me. Sadly I wasn’t quick enough to get my camera out in time to capture Boot City running and screaming away from the car as a hive of wasps came furiously out from under the hood where they had evidently been happily living until their untimely disturbance.
The not so friendly hive of wasps living in the Datsun
I happily got my jet sprayer and removed the nest from the car. We had been seeing the red wasps around for a while, but had never really taken the time to find their nest. Hopefully now they will be gone for good. But in reality they will probably move into the car parked next to where the Datsun had been living. Sundae the kitten participated in the wasp removal by eating the remains of their nest. Gross, but good kitty!
Evidently wasp nests are a tasty treat for kittens
After the wasp incident we got to work with the washing. Thankfully the guck came off quite easily and didn’t require a tremendous amount of elbow grease. It actually looks pretty good when clean, if I do say so myself!
Almost completely clean
Once the outside was cleaned and ready Boot City got some rags to clean the inside for photos. He’s posted LOTS of cars on Ebay so is really good at prepping and photographing the cars. Guzzi enjoys helping and advising car cleaning.
Guzzi the automotive advisor
Now Boot City is working hard on his Ebay post. Keep your fingers crossed that some Datsun aficionado falls madly in love with our 1972 Z car and that it finds a new home quickly.
First off, I’m sorry for the inadvertent blogging hiatus! For a girl with 10 planners, my time management isn’t the best. Hopefully I’m back on track to post here regularly.
Summertime for horse owners (and keeping them at home) means hauling hay. It is one of the least glamorous aspects of horse ownership. There is nothing quite like being hot and sweaty with hay in your socks, in your shoes, in your mouth, in your shirt, well, you get the point.
When planning how much hay to buy every year, I usually get one bale for every day, so around 365 bales. They are about 50lb bales and most every year I run out of hay at least 3 months before the next harvest. Cold winters put a bigger dent in the hay supply, too. Horses stay warm by eating hay, it gets their internal furnace burning. My hope is that with one less horse and improved math skills I will get enough hay this year! It costs twice as much to buy hay from the feed store than to buy it directly from the supplier so is MUCH nicer on the feed budget!
All ready to unload. Who needs boot camp with this workout!
The supplier I buy from is gracious enough to let us drop off our trailer and load it for us. This way all we have to do is take it home and stack it in our barn. When we built the new horse barn we started using the old barn exclusively for feed storage and as the chicken coop. This lowers the fire danger in the new barn and reduces the amount of dust.
This first load of the summer was few bales short of 150. We will get another similarly sized load later this summer and then hopefully one final small load before the hay is gone.
We have lots of helpers to inspect the hay as we unload and load.
We clean out the hay room before refilling it with hay. This requires taking out all the pallets and lots of sweeping. We probably should wear breathing masks because of the dust, but we didn’t plan for that this year. It gets REALLY dusty! You’ll see the dust in quite a few of the pictures. It makes me feel like sneezing just looking at the photos!
All cleaned out and ready for pallets and HAY!
I learned at a very young age how to properly stack hay. You want to create a stable base for the stack and fit as many bales in a small space as possible.
The base layer, again with helpful inspectors
After the base layer is down, you stack the next layer flat on and perpendicular the base bales. Each additional layer goes on the same way. Only the base bales are laid on the narrow side. The rest of the layers are laid on their widest side.
Two more layers in.
It usually takes a couple hours to stack 150 bales. I do most of the stacking and get Boot City to help with the top two layers. He’s taller and has more arm strength than I have to get the bales up that high. It feels SO good to be done stacking the hay and be prepared for the upcoming fall and winter with lots of hay for hungry horses (and sometimes goats).
All in!
