Did you ever build forts and tunnels in straw or haymows after baling season?
 

In my youth, after baling and filling the barns we would pull off a bunch of bales and incorporate rooms connected with tunnels and hidden entrances. Using wood to help support the ceilings. It could be scary as hell crawling deep inside hoping your brothers didn't trap you. But it was a great time. Flashlights weren't what they are today and it didn't take long to start dimming. We knew candles were a bad idea - today's kids?- probably burn themselves alive. Stupid effers.

Hell yes.
And it wasn’t even our straw.
Sec

That sounds like a good way to get eaten by cattle.

Where I grew up, there were generally two types of jobs for teenage boys: baling hay or working fast food. My dad was a manager at a fast food place so he pulled me into that world. I was a bit envious of the guys who would go bale all summer and come back to school with muscles, but I also knew that I would sunburn to the point of spontaneous combustion if I tried working out in the fields. So I came back to school pasty white and smelling vaguely like onion rings.

LMAO

Made me chuckle. I was also a member of the "use someone else's straw" to make hay tunnels. Great fun.

I bet some of you guys made tunnels of hay, hung out with you buddies deep inside and when the flashlights started to dim, you practiced kissing with each other so you could be ready for when the little girls started calling. :D

Fess up boys! :p

My dad was lifer military but farm raised. Every year we could get there, it was a trek to the farm to help with the summer chores. We had extensive tunnels and rooms built into the bales also!

Barn was big and builtin hilly country - both levels had direct tractor access so unloading was easier. Miss those days.

No, but I learned that there other things one can do with flashlights when the batteries run out . . . your girlfriend showed me one time. :p

To be fair, my aunt and uncle (75 and 73 now) were playing with fire and burned all of grandpas hay when they were kids.

I didn’t know about that until a couple years ago. I laughed. Hard. Grandpa was wound pretty tight at that point in his life.

I’m young enough grandpa had big rounds by the time I was old enough to misbehave.

Sounds like it would have been fun, but we were city folk.

Ahhhh baling hay and straw.

I loved the alfalfa smell, hated the sweat, dust and straw itch, but it was awesome to get pulled from school because “weather was cooperating”, and there’s something about finishing a field that just leaves one satisfied.
Busting shear pins before I was old enough to fix them myself sucked though, because my old man would get pissy....”Christ - how fast are you going? Slow down!....”

So you made forts out of bed sheets and fans instead?

We always dug ours in to the ground.

Fans?????? :spock:

TV Trays, Bed Sheets and blankets, clothes pins, furniture. :thumb:

This is the type of thread other team's fanships make fun of by the way.

I was a city boy, so when we visited my grandparents farm once a year, there wasn't a whole lot of time for playing. Besides, I was so sick of cutting, baling, and putting the hay up, all I wanted to do was go home. Farm life wasn't for me.

If you head over to DC, you can find plenty of people are still building strawmen to this day.

Hell yes a fan. A fan made a bubble fort.

Ah, but you see, you gained sustenance from the burgers you fried that were sourced from the cattle that spent the summer fattening up on teenaged hicks hiding in hay forts.

Turns out that the pimply faced kids working at Mickey D's are apex predators.

After chucking small square bales all ****ing day for days on end, the last thing I wanted to do was play in them. After doing around 1000 acres of square bale picking, you wanted to burn ever barn with hay in it that you came across

Hell yes we did. I grew up with parents who didn't let us watch tv or just hang out in our rooms to kill time. If the weather was decent, we were outside finding things to entertain ourselves.

I never lived or worked on a farm, more of a city kid. But we did used to build forts in the woods out of branches and ply wood.

My nephews used to do it when my brother had his farm. One of the first years they were there my bro was about halfway through the bales in the loft when he came across a room the boys had made outta the bales. He told me he just stood there stunned...staring at an old football helmet sitting on a bale in the middle of the "room". Looking at the half burnt candle sitting on top of the helmet the boys had been using for light in the room.

Hides were tanned that day, hides were tanned.ROFL

We would nearly fill the old red barn with hay. Had a large Morton building for the wheat and oat straw. Loved baling the wheat cause it was so clean, but the oat straw was so dirty with chaff it was a nightmare. Bad part about the hay was it weighed about as much as me . Occasionally we'd stack the hay rack eight high just to get the last few bales on. Driving the tractor with that load then trying to back it up if you had to was a real treat, esp when I could barely reach the clutch. Always had lunch meat sandwiches and kool-aid brought out to us for lunch.

The forts were a great fall thing to do when the pond got to cold to swim in.

JP

Yes, but it was always so hot and humid and the hay was pretty scratchy so I preferred snow forts or "caves" dug into the bank of the creek.

One of my grandfathers had a barn designed for round bales so there was no loft and it was mostly open from floor to ceiling. One year he didn’t have any cattle and half the round bales were still in there from previous years. My grandpa rigged up a huge plywood ramp that started high up in the bales and ended out in front of the barn.

Me and my cousins built tons of different wood carts that year. One cousin had these old diesel smoke stack exhaust tips that he attached to his. We ended up making them smaller and lighter over time since we had to lug them up the round bales on our backs. Grandpa didn’t make a lift system to get the carts to the top.

That was such an incredible summer. A bunch of boys about the same age and this huge funhouse was a dream. Very little supervision either, but no injuries or damage that I can remember. The barn had a pigeon coop and a wood shop that we tinkered in. One side had a big horse stall that we had to keep clean as payment for using the ramp.

That was the year we stole some zimas from an older cousin that he was trying to get his gf drunk with lol