Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Wheat Planted


     Here’s a rural legend for you.  Sorry, I don’t remember the speaker or the occasion.  This was a story my dad told. He quoted the speaker who said,
    “There was one time Joe Twoya, he planted wheat way out in the middle of November yet.  That wheat no come up at all.  Next year when he harvest that wheat, it make tventy bushel to the acre.”

     Joe was the man who homesteaded the quarter section where we now live.  Tradition has it that the original one-room “shack” still exists, nestled next to the “Ramsey School” that has served as the farm shop for over 60 years.

 
      Imagine what it was like to have that as your only refuge from the wide open pairie.   There were no other buildings, no trees (the trees were all planted during my life time), no running water.  They were a tough breed, those homesteaders.

    Anyway, the wheat planting was finished on Tuesday September 18, 2012.  It has a chance of coming up.  If it doesn’t, maybe it will make “tventy bushel to the acre.”

 

      Work continues on access roads and restoring compacted soil around the wind generator towers.

 
     Really compacted soil as you can see from the size of the clods turned up.  It would take an Olympic athlete to be a “clod-hopper” following that machine.

 
 
    Sunday was a day off from planting.  It was a new moon—not good for planting some say.  So I worked, er, played, in the junk garden.

 
      The peas are done, so remove the dead plants.  The beans are just starting to produce, in the background.

     Not a good tomato year either.  The plants have something bad.  The leaves roll up and the plant slowly dries up.  No amount of water helps, nor does fungicide or insecticide. 

 

 
     About 11 a. m.Sunday, a cloud blew in from the northwest.  Moisture!?  No, the nose tells the story—smoke.

 
                  Must be a fire somewhere to the west.  If it is in Colorado, I haven’t about it.

    Well, about time to return to Kansas.  Clean up tractors and put them in the shed,  do other end-of-season chores today.

      I’d mention “pray for rain”, but it’s like the last scene in “Cincinnati Kid” where the Kid loses his last coin to the newspaper boy.  “You’re tryin’ too hard, Cincinnati.”

     Don’t want to be tryin’ too hard to make it rain.

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