Taking care of the fields like a boss in typical Martin Family Style, follow these steps:
1 – decide you should cut & bale hay this year, let it GROW, GROW, GROW!
2 – search for equipment to purchase or rent, can’t find reasonable priced cutting & baling equipment
3 – wait to make sure you weren’t wrong and talk to various people (aka friends and helpful, nice, Southern folk) about it, in this step receive 3 contacts/recommendations of someone to hire
4 – confirm all contacts/recommendations are too busy to work us in.
5 – decide its time to brush-hog, hook up mower deck to tractor and start (after work/cool of evening is best time here)
6 – in cool of evening Friday night about sunset, lose one of the pins from the mower deck. Traipse around the freshly cut areas with flashlights in search of said pin…give up and go to bed.
7 – Saturday morning trip Tractor & Supply to purchase a replacement pin. Since they sell these, apparently we aren’t the first to lose one.
8 – Return home and install pin, discover the end isn’t large enough so the entire pin pushed all the way thru the hole. That won’t work!
9 – Visit to Hay’s Tractor to get the ‘right’ pin.
10 – Return home and install pin, it fits! Yeay!
11 – Before resuming the mowing, notice one of the tractor tires is flat – take off tire. (luckily this step is easier on tractor than the truck, push the loader down to raise up the front end – piece of cake)
12 – Visit Sexion Tire on 36, these awesome people repaired the tire and they were FAST!
13 – Back home, replace the tire and start mowing/brush-hogging. AND just in case you think THIS is the end of the story…its not!
– to be continued –