Uses for hay bale twine
One of these days I’m going to keep track of the hay twine we go through and weigh it. We put out around two large round bales of hay a week for our four horses and end up with a handful of twine like you see in this picture. The big round bales where we live are usually secured with a plastic poly twine like this and the smaller square bales use a biodegradable sisal fiber (from an agave plant). Every square bale of hay we open gives us two more pieces, about 16 feet total. I could throw it away but I can’t help but thinking there is a good use for all this leftover twine. In our old forum discussion about uses for hay bale string, we got some great suggestions, especially from user shellz9 who quoted an article by Amy K. Habak called “30 Hay Twine Uses”. Here are a few that caught my eye:
- Replacing missing horse blanket straps
- As hanger loops for horse tools like hoof scrapers and brushes
- For temporary fence repair (we use it for this a lot)
- As a quick temporary lead rope
Dora Renee Wilkerson, a visitor to our horse blog, has another great use for hay twine – rugs. Dora makes really nice looking, useful and durable rugs by knitting the discarded hay twine:
She even has a great how-to article for making your own hay twine rug.
Mikki came up with another use that’s especially handy in the muddy winter months: disposable boot scraper. Here’s a short video that explains:
What kind of things do you use hay twine for? Anyone built a giant hay twine ball yet?
