Jenna Woginrich came by today to buy 15 bales of hay, we had some extra and Jenna doesn’t have a big barn for storage so she gets hay one truckload at a time, everybody is scrambling to get set for the winter. We have changed our water system, when we dug out the culvert for Lulu’s Crossing, we opened up a fresh water pond near the rear pasture, and we stopped filling the plastic tubs with water. The sheep and donkeys get their water from the pond now, they go into Lulu’s Crossing several times a day.

I imagine in the heavy winter we will have to put some heated water tubs out – the animals may not be able to get to the water easily, and they may need the warmed water to help keep warm in sub-zero weather. Otherwise we are ready for winter, we have started using the wood stoves and rarely need to turn the oil heater on.

Jenna has a venerable farm truck with lots of miles on it and Maria went up into the hayloft to toss the hay bales down, and Jenna stacked them in the truck. Neat to see two strong women tossing hay around. Maria was yelling at me that we didn’t need to make a bigger path to the animals for the water, but I asked Jack Macmillian to bring his tractor over and do the work, and he said he would.

Get back into your hay loft woman, I said, don’t second guess the farmer. That didn’t work out well.