Life on the farm

With the weather changing and a very high chance for frost tonight – it’s time to start to play the – ‘Should I cover the flowers or not’ game.

Now granted the flowers do look a little bit on the shabby side, but I think it must be that if you let the frost get them, that really means that summer is over. So last night, into the drawer I went. I keep all the sheets and stuff in this one huge drawer in the laundry room and out they all came. Then I went outside make the judgement on who will live and who will die. I only grabbed so many of the sheets and pillow cases that I have extra and who ever didn’t get covered, well ….

So last night before we were headed out for the night, I had to cover the stuff up before we left. I covered up the obvious ones – mums, the flowers in the big tubs, you know the easy ones. Then I started on what other ones should get covered. The potted ones by the house and the potted ones by the Roadhouse were an easy choice. By this time I also took what I could inside the house and I realized that I had used up all the sheets and cases that I had. But as I was walking out of the house to the car, I felt bad for the ones in front of the house that were only partially covered. OK, so back into the house I went and grabbed some towels to cover them all up. This whole game thing is just way too stressful!

Then this morning? Yup, you guessed it. I took all the covers off of them before too many people would see our yard. Trust me, it had a lot of sheets and towels in it. Then in the course of the day it started to rain. Now normally, who cares right? Well, unless you have all these sheets out there hanging over the fence. So outside I went to gather up all the stuff and bring it in the house.

Any now? Well, it’s still supposed to get cold tonight so I better get done with this post so I can get back outside. You guessed it, to cover the flowers again 🙂

This morning the bin wasn’t working again and after Daryl crawled up in it before work, he realized that the belt was bad. His plan was to pick one up after work and then replace it. So after work he went to the parts store and bought two belts, one to replace the one he knew was bad and the one to have as a spare.  When I got home, I noticed that he was just climbing out of the bin and looking a little ‘goofy’. He had this grin on his face and it didn’t take too long to figure out what he was laughing about. He knew that the belt that he replaced was bad, but not until he actually took it off and replaced it did he know just how bad. Check it out

It looks like this belt had seen better days!

Well, the bin is full and running good now, so we’re getting cleaned up to hopefully check out some Halloween haunted houses tonight. Sounds like fun!

Daryl was having some trouble with his combine last night, but tonight he was in the fields again. He wanted to get the bin filled as long as he had the heat going on inside of it. After 3 loads shelled tonight after work, he was able to start unloading the loads into the bin and that should fill it. It’ll be another late night for him, but he’s happy that he got done what he did. I was watching the gravity box with corn unload into the auger tonight when he had to run into town quick tonight before the gas station closed,  and I’ve never noticed the bin sweat before. He said that it happens when the corn is starting to heat up and the moisture is coming out of it. It makes sense doesn’t it, but I guess I never paid that much attention to it before.

The water is running down the outside of the bin tonight

As for me tonight, well I wasn’t very successful in getting much done. I’m hoping that I’ll have more luck tomorrow night after work. I was checking out the garden while I was watching the bin tonight, and decided that I should really try to get that cleaned up before winter really comes and sets all the weed seeds into the ground for next spring. But I’m positive that it’s not going to be a fun job cleaning the garden out at all!

I hate wind. Now I’m sure there is a good use for it, but honestly I haven’t found it yet. Wind blows around everything in our yard and makes a mess! I found the top part of our flag over by the chicken coop tonight and the pillows off the front porch by the garage. The chairs are scattered, all my mums are tipped over,  and corn stalks are scattered in the front lawn from the fields. Wind makes me very crabby! OK, can you guess how I really feel about it?

On a positive note, I took a look at the yard by the front ditch today and it doesn’t even look too bad. I mowed it last night literally in the dark and I’m amazed on how it turned out. OK, that’s a good thing. Well, there’s one more good thing. William is home for the night and it’s always nice when he’s able to spend some time with Daryl and I. Maybe I’ll get rid of this headache and stop being so crabby. My only hope is that it for sure can’t be as windy tomorrow can it?

I really wanted to go running tonight after work, but you know when you really want to do something.. and then there is the stuff that you should be doing? Well, the ‘should be doing’ stuff overruled, and I ended up mowing lawn tonight. Man was it a dusty night! Since we live so close to the road, and it’s harvest season, there was a lot of traffic going past our place tonight. At first I thought, well it’ll slow down – yea that didn’t happen. Then I thought, well the wind will die down and it won’t be so bad – yea that didn’t happen either. Daryl and I were trying to figure out just how many semi’s and other farm equipment went past our place in the 3 1/2 hours and we both agreed that at least 50 times someone went past our farm. And let me just tell you that this was a lot of road dirt flying at me when I was mowing. OK, so I was going to run and to be honest I was just a little bit worried about someone running me over when they were driving by, so mowing did make the most sense. So I thought, OK I’m only going to mow the ditches and the front lawn. No big deal, and then I can get cleaned up and be done with this. So I used the rider and mowed the one ditch and over by the windmill and the Roadhouse. Things were going good. Then I thought that I’d better start in front of the house. But did you ever have ‘one of those feelings’ ? Well I did. I thought, I wonder just how much gas I have left in the rider? Since we don’t have a gas barrel at the farm, this is an important question. Well, I looked and didn’t like what I saw. It was very much past the E on the gauge. So I drove back to the barn and got out the push mower. Now this is where the exercise comment comes in. The push hasn’t been started for sometime now and if you ever tried to start a push lawnmower that has sat outside in the last couple of rains and hasn’t been used for awhile, you’ll know what I”m talking about. Yea, not an easy job to get it started! I pulled a couple of times and then pushed the gas thing, and then pulled some more. I thought to myself pretty bad things and kept trying.  But eventually it started and off to the front of the house I went. My plan was to get the front lawn mowed and then mow the other ditch and do some trim work in the other ditch. OK, I got the front of the house done and it was looking pretty good. Then moving to the snake ditch. I’ve found so many snakes in this ditch this summer it’s crazy, but it was so stinking windy and getting late, I thought to myself.. I double dare any snake to come out tonight. It’ll for sure be their last. (pretty tough huh!) Well no snakes came out and I got the ditch mowed. Now I’m sure that the people driving by thought I was so snotty because I never looked up and waved to them. But honestly if I did that, I would have spent the whole night just waving by the road and not getting any mowing done. OK, now I moved over to the other ditch and was getting pretty tired of walking behind the mower. But I knew that it was my only choice and soon that ditch was also done. So as I was pushing the mower through the yard I saw the lawn by the road was  looking kind of sad and I remember thinking – just how long could this actually take?  Well, that was a dumb move. Because it took a very long time. It took so long that it was dark outside when I was mowing,  and I was just king of guessing where the rows were because I couldn’t see anymore. We have a requirement on our rider lawnmower that it has to have lights because I’m usually mowing late at night, but now I think that we’ll have this requirement on the push mower also. Then I thought that maybe I need one of those miner hats with a light on it. OK, maybe not. I looked way too unattractive the way it is to start with out there covered in dirt, that I better not add to it. So after all of this going on tonight, I decided that I got in a couple hours of walking behind the push mower and who in the world needs to go for a run when you can do this?

Daryl was able to get all the beans out that were dry, so he switched the bean head to the corn head on the combine and has been out to the corn field since.

Putting the corn head on the combine

A lot of farmers have been talking about the corn getting wrecked so bad this year by root worms, so we’re hoping that we only have a small patch down because of it and hopefully it won’t effect too much of the crops. When you have root worms in your fields, what happens is that the corn isn’t very stable in the ground and it just literally falls over. And then when you go and try to combine it, it really isn’t fun at all. Not only are you worried about picking up all the corn with the combine, but you have to sometimes combine the rows only one way. That means that you combine to the end of the field and then just drive back to the beginning again through the field and then combine the next row. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it’s not fun! It doubles the time to get the same amount of corn that you should have gotten in the first place.  So like I said Daryl’s hanging out in the corn field and didn’t want to stop to get anything to eat, so I called  to see if he wanted me to bring any supper out. He said that he was having some trouble with the combine and I said that I’d be right out. Now, I’m pretty sure that there isn’t much (or anything) that I really could do to help, but I thought I’d go and see what was wrong. It always scares me when he’s out in the field at night and then he says he’s working on the equipment.  But he figured out that a bearing was out and needed to take it into town to get fixed. Since it was dark and the highway that we were going to go on is always crazy busy, I followed him to town with the light’s flashing on the car. I don’t know for sure, but I think that there are a lot of ‘town’ people that probably don’t have any idea where the emergency lights are on a vehicle if they ever needed to use them. And for the farm kids, they pretty much grew up with someone along the line telling you to ‘follow me with your flashers on‘. So you had to learn quick on the vehicle that you were following just where the flashers (emergency lights) were because you never know when you’ll use  them to follow a load of rocks on a hay wagon or a combine at night.