Dam Hay

Yes, I spelled dam correctly. However, after we moved, unrolled and laid out 3 rolls of hay on the dam, I felt like calling it the other word. We all had hay where hay wasn't supposed to be by the time we finished.

Here is the story:

We have had trouble with erosion on the dam. I was driving down the road 2 days ago and was trying to figure out how to get wildflower seeds to grow on our dam. I had tossed seeds out there last year, but the rains came and washed the seeds into the pond and made them catfish feed. Well, since they were seeds, maybe they made birdfish feed. 

Anyhoo, they didn't grow and I wasted a ton of money. So I am driving down the highway with nothing better to do than try to figure out something to do to waste my time.

*idea!* I can take the bailed hay we have set aside and put it out on the dam!

Now, people... this dam is not small. By lake standards it is not big. By pond standards it is TALL and steep. I tell Steve that I am going to take hay and put on the dam and explain to him that the rain is coming in a bit over a day, so tomorrow I am going to spread that hay out so the rain will lay it down and then I can toss seed into it. The seed will stay because the hay is there and the rain will germinate the seed and I will have a flower dam and all those flowers' roots will stop the erosion. I am sure he thought yeah, right.

So I take my trusty little 4-wheeler, and I attach my trusty little trailer and grab my trusty pitch fork and go to the pasture.

And soon after that I remembered just how dense hay bales are. They are denser than the rain forest in Singapore. 

But I took my pitchfork and decided the hay bale would not going to get the best of me. I started tossing hay onto my trailer to haul up the dam and toss down the dam. It took a long to break that bale.

My sweet little grand daughter thought her granny needed help. Thank goodness for grand daughters.  After one trailer full of hay it did get the best of me - and our grand daughter - whom I am sure was looking at those other 3 bails of hay and thinking she would be there until she graduated trying to help her granny get it up on the dam.

In comes a handsome man with a tractor, with forks on it, who stabs a bale of hay and effortlessly hauls it up the dam and proceeds to toss it around the dam for us.

Along beside him comes my trusty little daughter who had mercy on her mom and grabbed another fork and started shucking hay down the side of the dam with me.

Even the dogs had mercy on me and helped!

But they finally bailed out all too soon:
 

Raelee was sure thankful for the man on the tractor - she was free to make a lot of trips back and forth to the barn to fetch things we needed! She was just a tad too happy to do so actually.

And in somewhat less than a day, my mission was complete - though it did become the entire family's mission. We had drug hay up on the side of the dam and tossed it down the other side.

And Steph even got a picture of me working!  (Thanks Steph for taking ALL these pictures!)

 

And now I can dream of the flowers that will be on the side of the dam in a few months.

Thanks to my family, my mission was accomplished. Truly - thanks family for pitching in. Literally.

But my smart assed son-in-law said something to the effect he will laugh his butt off when the torential rains come and wash that hay right into our pond.

Then instead of a flower dam I will have a shallow pond. And he laughs...

Now I will toss and turn trying to figure out how I will get all the hay out of the pond.

Me and my bright ideas...