Road Lime Dust

 An odd title, I know.  Not sure how else to put it.

Here is a photo I took Wednesday morning when I was helping Gary with a load of hay.  He had to take both the truck and hay trailer and his tractor to a different field, a few miles apart to get the hay from that second field.  So I drove the truck with the trailer whilst he brought the tractor...really he uses the old backhoe with a hay spike on it.


This is along one of the gravel back roads.  You can see how dry it has been here by the amount of dust coating the trees and plants alongside the road.  Gary says this dust is basically lime dust that people pay good money for to put on their hay fields as treatment.

Over the years he has been pleased that on this particular field this is how we get our lime, rather than having to pay for it to be spread by machine. However, in the past few years he'd noticed that we weren't getting the same good quality of hay.  So this past Spring he took in soil samples from all of our hay fields to get them tested.  You probably guessed it.  Too much lime on this particular field; waay too much.  So we had to put a different soil amendment on it.  A very good example that there can be too much of a good thing.  

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