Farm Rec, or the Simple Pleasures of the Poor

    There’s always work to be done on the farm.  It’s possible to work all the time, but we all know that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  So, a rule for the past few years, quit at six.

    Other cultures don’t pay so much attention to the clock.  So a 9 a. m. meeting may be 10 or 11 or maybe even tomorrow.  You might have noticed, though, that those cultures adhere strictly to the clock for one thing—quitting time.

     And so we try to honor quitting time here.  Watch Jeopardy! at 6, at 6:30, hit the golf course!

      Golf course! Real cow pasture pool. You only need one club, like a 9-iron. No putting, no driving, only approaching.  All holes are par 3, par 27 for the round.

So here we go. Hole 1 tees off in front of the garage and goes south.

  

    Ignore the old tire in the right foreground and focus on the one in the right-center, to the right of the spruce sapling.  That’s goal one.  Object: hit the tire with the ball.  You don’t have to get it into the tire, just hit the tire.  If you should get the ball in the tire, you don’t count that stroke.  So, it’s possible to get a hole-in-zero.  It has happened once or twice, but quite rare.

     Hole 2   There are no penalties EXCEPT for going into the garden on the left.  Throw out the ball and take a one stroke penalty if you land in the garden.  Otherwise, you may take the ball out of any rough or any hazard without a penalty.  No penalty for a lost ball. No penalty for going into the neighbor's field on the right.

      Winter rules prevail all year around (improve your lie with the club, within a club’s length of the original lie.)

  Hole 3   Hazards from left to right, machine shed with current bushes, tumblebug, and ’57 Chevrolet pickup.

   Hole 4   Wide open spaces with tall (sometimes) grass rough.  No penalty for throwing out of the rough.  The real penalty is looking for your ball.

    Hole 5   Head north, north towards Alaska.  Really rough grass on the right.

  Hole 6    Still going north.  Hazards:  machinery row on the right and behind the hole.

 

    Hole 7  Hazards:  Ponderosa pines on the left, tall grass on the right.  Mosquito alley in the wet times.  (The usual stiff south breeze keeps the buggers at bay until you get out of the wind on the north side of the pines.)  And the relaxed snow fence in the background.

    Hole 8   Hazards:   Still the pines on the left with tall grass on the right, the sage bush center left.

    Hole 9  Back to where you come from.  Hazards:  All over the place, pines cedars and elms on the left, not to mention house and garage (pretty well protected by trees) behind and left of hole with tall grass on the right.

    And here we are again, back in front of the garage where we started.  You can see the forest better in this shot, the one that protects garage and house from errant golf balls on Hole 9.

     We can make two or three rounds before sunset.  It’s not always relaxing (frustrating at times) but guaranteed to take your mind off the daily cares and woes.  It provides exercise for those who need it, and often it is a pretty time of day when the wind subsides and the temperature cools.

     Green fees are inordinately inexpensive.

Waiting for the Rain

     Tillage operations are on hold until it rains.  We are, of course, in very dry times.  Temporary neighbors, some guys working on the wind towers, report their corn crops in Minnesota and Iowa are gone.  Some of the corn here still looks ok, but rain is needed soon.

     There’s never any lack of stuff to do, however.  Monday, a year-long project came out of the shop, backfiring.

     Time to finish the haying business.

 

    Not horses or cows shall dine on this hay.  Instead, it will serve to conserve moisture and suppress weeds.  Lazy man’s gardening.  From this,

                           to this.

   Tuesday morning was nice and cool, a good time to pitch hay.  It even tried to rain—at 8 in the morning, unheard of!

      A rainbow struggled in the west—also unheard of.  Rainbows are always in the easet here.

     Total moisture, .03”.  Helpful only to the nasal passagess--it smelled great.

     On Monday, business in the city had to be taken care of.  A trip to the county clerk in Hugo relieved me of a few hundred as I licensed two trucks and the 4 X 4 pickup.  Collector plates, which last for five years, went on two of the three vehicles, thus the high price.  On to Limon for 30 gallons of motor oil and a bottle of propane.  Expensive sort of day.

      The big disappointment was the tractor, a John Deere G, I have been working on for a year. It had to have its crankshaft refurbished.  As mentioned earlier, it kept backfiring, sending exhaust through the carburetor and the air intake.  Some diagnostic work revealed that somehow I got the thing out of time when replacing the crankshaft.  That means another several hours in the shop.  Oh Deere.

   On to one final project, assembling a birthday present, a new barbecue. 

     After unpacking that, and the garage doors, I think all packing material should be recyclable.  A trip to the landfill is in the near future. 

    Stay tuned for the next exciting adventure—fun on the farm.

Wind Generators 2

     In the last exciting adventure of the wind towers, the mass of rebar and concrete had been covered, leaving a pad with threaded bars protruding.  To that pad, a pillbox has been added and a series of deliveries ensued.

     What’s in the box?  That’s easy.

    Ready for blastoff?  Then the BIG trucks arrived.

      The difficulty is to demonstrate how big this thing is.  Count the axles, each with 4 wheels.

    Turning corners requires the back axles to castor.  A little help from its own hydraulic system.

    Then they laid cable between sites.

     And finally, some blades arrived.

      Meanwhile, cranes dominate the western horizon doing their thing.

    The windmill forrest, as the Goodwife calls it, grows rapidly.

Round 4 or Wind at My Back

      The inch and half of moisture the first week of July brought on a few weeds.  If we were doing chemical weeding, those big ones would be called escapes.

    We’ll just call them survivors, who didn’t die with the last operation.  Here’s a close up for the soil scientists.  These are new growth.  You have to look hard to see the new weeds just emerging.

  Miller bar to the rescue.

  I wonder how many acres this old machine has gone over.  It works by going under the soil surface.  Weeds, dirt, everything goes over the bar which knocks the weed’s roots loose.  It works pretty well if you don’t go too deep.  It leaves the soil relatively undisturbed on the surface, so it can be hard to tell where you have been and where you need to go.

     Whenever I start a tillage operation, I have control of the wind.  That is to say, however I lay out the land to farm it, the wind will arrange itself so I have a tail wind in one direction and a head wind in the other. This time I followed a path the wind guys created to lay underground cable to neighboring wind towers.  Its general direction was east-southeast. For two days, the wind blew out of the east-southeast.  The wind hardly ever blows out of the east.  I got covered in dust.

     But, after 30 hours of tractor-riding in 100 degree heat, with dirt plaguing me half the time, the weeds are gone.  For now.

    So off we go to Kansas to our local friendly auto dealer to have a 100K checkup on our car.  We just thought it was hot in Colorado.  And dry.  Here’s what Kansas looks like, even after some rain the first week of July.

     No, that’s not the African Veldt.  It’s Northwest Kansas.  It got up to 110 degrees both days we were there.  Before the early-July rain, the local fire department guys were called out at least once a day with multiple calls on many days.  They’re unpaid volunteers.  Support your local fire department.

     We had near-100 mile per hour winds on Saturday before Memorial Day.  It knocked all the fronds off the asparagus plants.  Heat and drought haven’t helped it recover.

     The horse radish is doing ok.  We’re happy to be back in Colorado.  Upper 90’s and low 100’s are better than 110.

      Mowing and yard time again.

Farm Maintenance

    It rained!   An inch and a half!  Time to do some maintenance, starting with the garage doors.  The old ones needed changing.  A dog chewed a hole in the lower left trying to get out of the garage.

      And the opener pulled a hole in the top.  The instructions for installing the new doors said it would take between nine and thirteen hours to complete (along with cautions that if the garage door is the only way in and out, you will be inside the garage for the duration--until the door is functional).   The 9-13 hours was right on target for the first one.  The second one took less time--the value of experience.

    The problem is, it isn’t done yet.  Now what to do with the leftovers?

    The new steel doors don’t let in light like the fiberglass ones did.  It is pretty dark inside now.  And the new ones are a bit heavier. 

   Most of the fence posts have been driven.  That was a lot easier after it rained.  And the wire-pulling job is done. The rain has refreshed the grass and the weeds.  Mowing will be in order soon.

    But some of those things will have to wait.  It is time to start Round 4 on the summer fallow.

Windpower

      In the last exciting adventure of the Invasion of the Wind Towers, cement covered the dome-shaped mesh with a cylindrical batch of rebar still protruding.

     Then they formed up the cylinder.

   And poured it.

And the result:

     Then the cover up:

    It has been pretty dry, so a little water was necessary.

      And we are back to normal, sort of.  It is amazing that they filled the hole with miles of rebar and tons of cement and then ALL of the dirt they dug out originally.  The power of compaction.

    The boys took off July 4^th and it rained 1.5"  That slowed them down a little.  But they have added a pillbox to the pads.

 

     And the tower bases and blades continue to roll in.

More to come.