Another farm bites the dust. I know. I was biting the dust all day right along with it. Best planting day ever. Or so. Didn’t think it would go that well the way it started. When I went to tighten up one of the no till coulters I saw electric fence wire wrapped around a couple of the coulters. That took some unthreading with a pair of pliers. Lots of cutting and pulling one wrap at a time. Then after I had tightened up the crown nut and replaced the repacked hub cap I couldn’t get one of the coulters to take grease. The very first one! Maybe my son was right and they could get plugged in a few acres. I had greased them last night right before the last patch on the home place. It took forever to find a 5/16 inch socket to remove the grease zerk. I found five that were either 9/32 or 11/32 if not seven. Finally I had everything ready to go. And go I did. I was on the next door neighbors farm directly to the west of the home place. A lot of the field I was planting has half mile long rows. Some even longer. Not that many shorter. Most shorter rows are quarter mile long. After laying out planting the turning rows on the ends that we turn around on I kicked it up a gear. I figured the more I ripped it up with the no till coulters the better job the drill would do. Not to mention the acres flew by. Used less fuel. Like the patch I had just planted the neighbor kept his cows out gleaning stalks a little longer than was maybe pertinent. That’s why I’m planting them near first so I can finish with a heavy load of beans still on the drill to help it go in the ground. I have the first three farms planted to soybeans with one to go. The fifth farm is all corn and hay and pasture so LAST FARM !!! Slight chance of rain first thing after sunrise tomorrow with a better chance at sundown. I better get to sleep so I can hit it early, weather permitting. One of these days I want to write down what beans I planted where. But not tonight. I’m too spent, I can hardly stand to write this. If it weren’t for being able to call Last Farm !! I may not have made tonight’s post. I hope your day was as productive as mine. Hope I can say the same thing tomorrow. See you then, see you there. Cc
I didn’t see you there, I didn’t see you then. Ii wasn’t here then to see you. Sorry about that. Beans are planted on two farms. I was able to get started yesterday. By fits and starts that is. I started on the farm up north of town. Right by the highway. I wanted to get that done and get back south of town. Down here where I run for the roses. Or was that a run for the roses? I was smart enough to start back on the out of sight corner so no one can see where I planted one pass with five out of the twenty two rows on the drill plugged up and spilling over the overflowing tubes that carry the seed down to the openers, which is where most of them were plugged up. Critters like to make cocoons or egg sacks down in the bottom ends where they narrow and change shape from a round tube to an oval tube to fit between the double disk openers. Fortunately I had a Vice Grips to take the spring clamps off of the rubber flex tubes directly above the openers and the wire I use to Roto Rooter out the obstructions. I had tightened up a no till coulter bearing as I greased them and after re-greasing them tonight I see I have a couple more to tighten in the morning. Like the planter’s no till coulters, I have to remove the hub cap and remove the cotter key so the crown nut can be tightened. Messier than it is hard because everything under the cap is covered in grease. Messianic? I said messy mechanic. This morning I grabbed the High Lift jack just in case and sure enough the tractor front tire was flat again when I got up there to start bright and early. Another shard of cornstalk sticking through to poke a hole in the inner tube. These damn BT stalks are the hardest thing ever on rubber tires. They don’t seem to break down over the winter as much as I remember stalks doing back in the old days. Sure we used to disk all the stalks before we drilled beans back then but I don’t remember having tire trouble the first time running over them. Progress I guess. Some progress isn’t all that great. Water progresses down a drain, does that make it good? What if water is progressing through a freshly cracked hole in the dam? Same problem I have with progressives. Down the drain through a freshly cracked whole. Gotta go. Cc
Or none of the above? The landlord was willing but the circumstances were not. I started out the day checking the cows up north and going to find breakfast. I have given up hope that the stay at gone mom is going to ever offer up breakfast without a fight. She’s niether ready, willing, nor able. I came home to switch out the implements on the 1466 from the disk to the three point mounted Great Plains 15 foot drill mounted on a Great Plains coulter cart. I use the combo to no till plant soybeans into standing cornstalks. Well, not actually standing since the combine chops them down to only about a foot or two high in the fall during harvest. More like undisturbed cornstalks. Or un tilled cornstalks. Hence the moniker no till. The only problem was (at that time) that I had parked the trailer after hauling hay last time right in the way of getting out the drill. I had been parking it there all winter. So when I hooked it up to move it out of the way I decided to go pick up the rolls of old barbed wire and hog tight that the help had rolled up tearing out line fence over on the west farm. I quickly made a side board to replace the one I had broken loading hay last time and ran over to pick up the piles. I sorted out the wooden posts and the steel T posts towards the front of the trailer and piled the wire directly behind them on the trailer. It took up the whole trailer. On the way home to park it I ran into the landlord who wanted me to reseed his hay’s thin patches and told him my duals weren’t on last year when we drilled in the thin patches about this time of the year and that if we tried it this year I would be running down nearly the whole swath trying to drill in the standing hay. He decided to mow it first and told me to go ahead and plant beans first. I gladly agreed. When I got back home and had unhooked the trailer I could see the tractor’s front right tire was slowly going flat. Two tires in two days, I hope this isn’t a beginning trend. When I got back from getting the tire repaired I went out and mended fences to let this herd out to pasture here at home. Then after I had opened the gate they only stood there mooing at me when I called them into the new eats. I tried to coax them in for a half hour. They acted like they didn’t trust me. Surely they will figure it out, it’s the same gate they went through last year. The sun was going down and I was tired so I came in after bolting the tractor tire back on. Tomorrow’s another day. Besides, if I die tonight I don’t have to worry about it do I. So even if tomorrow’s NOT another day for me it will be for someone. Let them worry about it. Let it be their curse. I couldn’t be that fortunate. So I’ll be planting beans tomorrow, circumstances willing. See you then, see you there. Cc
Almost forgot to post a log entry. Bad watchman. Y U NO LOG ?? Asleep at the switch ?? Actually I got lost inside The Automatic Earth and the time flew by while I was reading. Then when I started to get tired and went to shut down the computer I realized I hadn’t even gone to CoCreator’s Blog to make a new post. Today I put the corn planter back into the barn I store it in over on the west farm. Two years in a row I have put it away dry without a rain on it after finishing planting. I wanted a rain too. I suppose the drouth is back on. I took the 1466 back home and put it on the disk to disk some gulleys shut. Last time I tried that two years ago we got a gully washer right as I was finishing up the bean planting on June 1st. Washed all my nicely disked shut ditches right back out again before I even had a bean growing in them to hold the soil. I really don’t know what I think I’m doing. All the neighbors disked their ditches shut to plant corn and they have all been washed out already. Some before their corn was even up to hold the soil. If at first you don’t succeed try try again. I wanted to do it back in early march and quickly plant oats there to hold the soil. This year it would have worked too, we had no heavy rains until corn planting time at the end of April. The oats was huge by then. I noticed an older brother having luck doing that two years ago when doing this failed. Yet everyone keeps doing it. We must be insane. The Brome Grass is heading out and I think the Blue Grass is pollinating. I saw some hay flowering today. Alfalfa hay. Some folks are cutting and baling hay this weekend already. My older brother says not to worry, he is going to mow and rake and bale mine for me. He has all the new equipment and loves making hay I think. I don’t mind paying him to make it. His baler has net wrap and his bales shed water like a shed. I think I’m planting beans tomorrow, the landlord willing. He wants me to drill some grass seed where his new hay is thin. That will mean cleaning out the drill and switching it over to run oats/grass seed. His hay is big enough to cut and bale so I hope he wants to do that first. I only need four or five days to get the beans planted. Less if all goes well. Yea, like that’ll happen. See you tomorrow. If I remember that is. Cc
I have finally let the girls out into the pasture up north. Happy Mother’s Day. One more bale to feed down here on the home farm and these girls get the pasture. Turn the cows out on Mother’s Day and turn the bulls out on Father’s Day. That’s the general rule of thumb down here on the farm. What? You thought Mother’s day and Father’s Day was about Mom and Dad? Silly town kids. That’s only the Farmer’s way of remembering what days the girls go out to pasture and what days the bulls join them. Nine months later, calving season. That is if you have a bull pen to lock up the guys the rest of the year. Left to their own devices cattle go at it anytime the dams are in standing heat. I know. The first year we farmed my little brother and I tore down the old dilapidated bull pen that Dad had built back in the 1950′s. We recycled (of course) the boards and used them on a pen fence around an old cement hog/calf platform that Dad had poured back in the 1960′s. The poles (it was a ten foot high bull pen fence) we recycled into regular fence posts, some used on the platform fence. I only have three bulls for all my cows so the bulls are left out with the herd. I calve year round, there is one long season here. That’s how I know that cattle breed when in heat no matter what time of the year. Left to their own devices. Kind of like people. Whom, more often than not, don’t end up co-creating a new living being. Instead of making them moms and dads usually it only makes them tired and ready to sleep. Like a baby can make you a mom or dad. A baby can make you tired and ready to sleep but it doesn’t necessarily make you a mom or dad. No, being a mom or dad takes a lot more than a roll in the hay, it takes many years of raising Cane. Even then there’s no guarantee that you’ll raise an angel. Free choice and all. It’s a good tradition to give moms and dads a day each year to be recognized for their contributions to the perpetuation of the species. Even if the government is the real parents now from cradle to grave danger. Or should I say from conception to internment. That is the grave danger we are always in, the group can snuff out the individual at any point. From abortion to hospice. It takes a village to run a guillotine. You’re truly on your own. If you want to live that is. If you want to die, well, misery loves company. You’ll get all the help you you’ll need. They’ll turn you out to pasture. The graze of God. Cc