Pumpkins and Hay Bales

It's here!  My favorite time of the year.  I adore autumn.

This past week we've seen a major shift in leaf color. The maples are stunning!  It was time to load up the truck with pumpkins.

Another favorite thing is putting up our hay for the year.  It's a lot of work, but I always feel very satisfied at the end of the day to have a barn full of hay neatly stacked and ready to get our animals through the winter. It's like having a fully loaded pantry.  

We buy our hay from Roger, a fellow who lives two miles from our farm.  Like most things in Vermont, there's a back story....   Roger grew up in our house.  

Our farm is about 215 years old, and there have only been a handful of families that have lived here in all of that time.  The original owners kept the property in their family for over 100 years. Anyway, Roger grew up here, and his family raised dairy cows.  

When we were renovating the kitchen and stripping wallpaper, I found a message written on the bare wall that his mother had penned when Roger was a small child wishing future owners happy days in this home.  I couldn't cover up such a heartfelt wish, so we decided to "frame" the message by hanging an empty picture frame over it.  

When Roger was ready to leave home and get married, he bought the farm he lives on today, just down the road.  He owns and hays fields that are in between our two farms.

So our hay is really local.  :)   

Wagon number one.  Our place is all connected:  house to breezeway to hay barn to pottery studio to animal barn.  It's very convenient when the weather is poor, but it also means we load hay from the front lawn.

Here's Roger.  He unloads from the wagon and places the bales on the elevator.

Then it takes two men upstairs to catch, toss, and stack the hay into orderly piles.  Thanks, Grey and Jim!

And, at the end of the day, three wagons and 550 bales later, a full barn.   This is enough hay to feed 12 goats and 2 sheep for six months, and provide for an emergency stash.

Happy Autumn to you!