It sounds like I'm doing the right thing with this stuff! I think it's hay. jbest123 is absolutely right. We're "small" farm country around here. Lots of the equipment is what their grandfathers used back in the day. Our hills? lol Well, let's just say that I had relatives visit from Kansas and called to say that they weren't driving any further without an escort because they thought there car was going to fall off the mountains! We thought it was hilarious until we saw that they were genuinely terrified! lol I thought it was normal to have 2 barns on the farm and a few feeders, so the cows with the short legs on the right side would have a place to feed and the ones with the short legs on the left could use the other. :) They do occasionally walk backward but it's not pretty.

we've used hay and straw and never gotten any real sprouting porblems with either as we use them about 8"s thick, for us but we always have gotten sprouting from straw as when they harvest the grain crop the machines miss a lot of grain, so when we have used straw we have let the chooks scratch around in it first and they value add, but the sprouting is no worry it's not like they are realy weeds, and can be easily pulled and tucked back under the mulch as extra nutrient source. we have had good results with spoilt pasture grass hay's and again never any growths. the way we understand it is straw is a 'brown' good for carbon, and the spoilt hays's are green so they add lots of nutrients and nitrogen. we don't use any fertilisers so something is working. len Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

Tracy, I never feed OK alfalfa hay. The blister bugs are TERRIBLE here in Garvin County. I used to live in Murray County and they weren't nearly as bad there, nor were any bugs for that matter. The county extension agent here said it's because so many thousands of acres here are farmed, and when you have that many crops growing, you'll have an abundance of bugs. Ugh! I always get my alfalfa from Kansas or Nebraska. Such a shame that we grow beautiful alfalfa here, but the risk of blister bugs is so bad I would never risk feeding it to my horses. The blister beetles will actually climb up the walls of the barn and get into my horse buckets!! Nearly every day I will capture a couple of blister bugs near my horses feeding area and have to carry them out to the pasture and kill them. They even get in the dogs' and cat's food bowls and eat their feed. They have also eaten most of my hostas to the ground. They LOVE hostas! Pat, I have tried to feed my old mare alfalfa pellets mixed with her Purina Senior to fatten her up, but she won't eat the alfalfa pellets. The Purina Senior is a complete food, but I still try to feed her as much hay as she'll eat. My gelding is a fat boy and he'll eat anything. :) The guy I am planning on buying the hay from is supposed to start cutting again today. Hopefully I can pick up some hay early next week. If his hay doesn't pan out, I will go to Shawnee Feed to check out their hay. Thank you both for all your help! Dawna

Hey Kathy- I have missed you, too! Does your nose itch? It should cause I think about you a lot! If I won the lottery tomorrow I probably would quit my job. Work just interferes with the important stuff in life like creating ;-)! Yes those are all my collages. When each journal arrives in the mail I try to use a different approach to the collage to enhance the other artists pages. I find it very easy to go to the digital solution but harder to riffle through magazines looking for images. It frustrates me if things are not the exact size I want or if they face the wrong way. Digitally you can flip and scale and alter so it fits just right!