Wednesday, June 29, 2016

June 29, 2016

Busy summer.  Our latest adventure is having our pasture hayed.  We needed to have three days in a row without rain, so it was tricky.  We decided we wanted the small square bales of hay (why don't they call them rectangles?) because we don't have a lot of extra equipment to handle the heavy round bales of hay.  Haying the field accomplished three things:  mowing, hay for the cows for winter that we knew didn't have harmful chemicals, and it allowed for the new tender growth of grass that the cows prefer.  As we do not have the equipment to hay our own fields, we hired someone to do this for us.  First, he came with an attachment to cut down the hay.  He waited at least a day and came back to check it.  When it was dry enough, he came back with a different attachment that fluffed the hay and moved it into rows.  Then he waited a day and came back with a different attachment that was the hay baler to make it into the small rectangular bales of hay that we asked him to do.  Out of the 6 - 7 acre pasture we got a total of 232 bales of hay.  Once that happened, we then had to pick up the hay and move it to shelter.  My husband did most of that work with the help of my son.   I got the easy job of pulling the trailer with the truck so they could throw on the bales of hay.


My next adventure was providing flowers for church.  I had not done it before and have very little experience of making flower arrangements.  However, if you have been reading my blog long, you know I stretch money tightly and take on as much of the labor as I can myself so I won't have to spend much money.  Youtube came to the rescue again.  As a numbers person, finding a video that showed me how to make a floral arrangement with numbers was ideal!  I used this video to make it happen.  I then came up with this flower arrangement:

I had borrowed a flower urn from the church, and they even gave me a leftover block of oasis that someone else had used.  I used flowers and greenery growing in my yard.  I didn't think the flowers would show up enough for the people sitting in the back of the church, and I sent the picture to a good friend who gave me the helpful hint of trying not to have the flowers in a row, so I moved the middle flower.  On Sunday, I replaced a couple of flowers that looked a little wilty and added some red daylillies.  It turned out looking like this: