Re-bailing straw bales 21.5.

Last year was a really bad straw year and we were worried about not getting any but asking around did the job again. We found straw bales from a person in Joensuu who had thought to built a straw bale garage but then did not (for our luck). He had harvested them a few summers ago when it was a good straw year and they were kept well. We collected about 280 of them last autumn and 111 more this spring with a van and trailer and stored them in our shed. But they are way too loose for building a house so they needed to be re-baled. 

This May we loaded them all (in two goes) on the tractor trailer of my dads and drove to our neighbors who has a baler that does small square bales (not the big round ones that are much more common these days).

The re-baling was really fast and went very well. There was four of us doing it.

We brought 391 loose bales and re-baled them into 156 tight bales. So 2.5 loose bales into one tight bale. We need in total 360 tight bales for the house so we still need to pick up 500 loose ones and re-bale them. In good weather of course.

Tight bales with kids and their daddy. The tractor looks tiny... The bales are going back into our shed to wait.