Rain and straw baling and a fire

We had a rain shower Sunday. It was not enough to do anything but put me behind in baling straw. Just enough also to lower the quality. I am now probably a week behind what I promised the farmers.

The weather has been super dry and we have had lots of 80 and 90 degree F days.

Thursday should have been our last day of combining annual ryegrass but we caught the field on fire. The combine was unharmed. Of course it was insured. 

The fire was not serious but putting it out caused problems. The field was planted to Orchardgrass last fall. It came up to oats and annual ryegrass. The plan was to either do hay or silage early to pay for planting the orchardgrass as it wouldn't grow enough for a crop this year.

However, no one wanted silage and we had too much hay, so we decided to just combine the annual ryegrass. This was a little hard on the Orchard Grass. 

So was putting out the annual ryegrass fire with a disk...

My nephew was first on the scene. He saw it from the house. He got on the disk before the combine operator knew there was a fire at the other end of the field. Several neighbors showed up with water trucks also. I had my gator sprayer converted to a fire truck. However, as soon as I opened the fire nozzle it broke in half. Cheap Chinese Shite. 60 gallons goes pretty fast out of a 2" hose, but does a lot with fan nozzle.

Fortunately I have friends with access to a whole box of surplus fire nozzles and I was set up in time for putting out hot spots from the second fire.

We got the fire out and soaked down the field. Or so we thought. I went back to recharge my phone and the wind came up. Suddenly the fire was back and twice the size. I got the 2-155 and Steiger covercrop disk going and disked around the fire. It was pretty exciting with the wind. It was a little hard on the field. 

Today I am drying out the annual ryegrass windrows for baling. I got ahead of myself last week. I got my daughter to start raking so I had double windrows everywhere.

I am using the White 2-60 and a pull type fluffer to let air into the windrows. This is going into big bales and the baler guy says he can take 8ft windrows. The fluffer doesn't really move the straw around much so I am hoping I won't have to redo the raking. Plus, I am supposed to be working on another field.