Planting Wheat

     Off to Kansas for an elongated weekend.  The Goodwife dropped me off in Colby on Thursday evening to meet with the barbershopping guys.  Saturday I helped the Lions take tickets for the Mud Bog.  The mud bog is a contest to see who can get their vehicle through a pit of mud and water the fastest.  Sorry, didn’t get any pictures of that.

    Sunday, the Goodwife and her quilting friend from California traveled to McCook where her friend put on a demonstration of quilting techniques.  No pictures of that either because she forgot to charge her camera battery.  (I got her a new camera for Christmas, one that has a rechargeable battery so she wouldn’t have to be buying new batteries all the time.  But you do have to remember to charge it.)

    Meanwhile I sang in a quartet at the Methodist Church to help introduce and dedicate a new sound/video system.  No pictures of that either.

    Back to the ranch on Monday.  Start the tree-watering process again.  To Denver Tuesday for our last Rockies game of the year.  Game time: 6:40.  At 6:30, drops began to fall.  It “rained” off and on throughout the game (Rockies lost 9-8 to San Francisco) never enough to stop the game, but enough to drive us up under an overhang.

 

    We left Denver about 4 o’clock Wednesday after a small round of shopping.  It had rained all day, nearly an inch.  As we approached the farm, we slugged through the mud on County Road 3N.  Could it be?!  Could it be?

 

     That’s right, .16” of moisture. (The whole inner tube has to be full to register one inch in this fancy new--hardly used--gauge.)  .16"!  Tell the car that.

 

    I spent the last hour of daylight washing the car.  In an attempt to keep down the dust, the wind--farm guys applied mag chloride and umpteen million gallons of water to 3N.  I guess that explains the muddy state of that road after less than a quarter inch of moisture. 

    Well, “nowt for it” but to plant wheat.  It has cooled off enough, it is September, and Neighbor Jay is planting. 

     So, let the record show that I began planting on Thursday September 13, 2012.  I got off to a slow start.  Had a little trouble clearing the electric fence wire enroute nto the field.

 

       Some 2 X 4’s under the front wheels and we cleared.  Still a final calibration to do before really getting after it.  Fill the drills.  I haven’t handled a scoop shovel in years.  Wait.  Make that a scoop shovel in wheat.  I have scooped some snow in the nearer past.

 

     Make one “round”, a trip east and back west in this case, refill the drill, measuring with a half-bushel measure.  Then you have to know how many acres you covered in the back-and-forth trip.

  

    Enter the 4X4, with a little attachment to a lug nut.  Drive along the south edge of the field counting the revolutions (you can see the black pipe from the driver’s seat).  Each revolution is 7.67 feet.  Multiply length of field by 48 feet, what the drill covered in the trip.  Divide by 43,560, the number of square feet in an acre.  Divide the acres covered by the pounds of wheat it took to refill the drill and you have your planting rate.  There’s a calculator in the truck.

    Result, I closed the seeding gates one teeny notch to get close to the 40 pounds per acre planting rate.

 

     Let ‘er rip, and off we go.  End of day 1.  Note the three essentials for drilling on the catwalk in the photo below:  grease gun, sun glasses, big hammer.

 

    There’s an old rhyme, the beginning of which I don’t remember:  Plant in the mud and your granary will rust, plant in the dust and your granary will bust. 

 

                                          Order up the granary-reinforcing package.