Cleanup Begins

Thankfully the day of cleaning the hay equipment only lasts for part of one day.

More often than not, my job is to get into the guts of the equipment and scrape between gaps in teeth, along rolling wheels and around the blades to loosen all the build up from processing the fields. Crawling around, under and through the equipment can be a pokey experience.

All the gunk that gets scrubbed, scraped, high powered blown off with a compressor coats the ground where we have the equipment parked in the now stubble of the hay field. Or I should say most of it ends on the ground after wafting through the air at terminal velocity, what doesn’t end on the ground attaches to our sweaty bodies as we try to restore the metal surfaces to clean enough to be stowed away for another year.

Getting the hayseed, pollen, chaff and detritus of the harvest off the equipment robs the mice of eating and nesting materials and helps keep the storage area of the barn litter free. Especially noticing it is a heavy mice year as we worked the fields, I would much rather that the vermin stay in the fields than find comfortable lodging in the barn.

As fast as each piece of equipment gets cleaned it is stored away until next hay season.