1947 GMC Truck

      We are the second owner of the 1947 GMC two-ton truck.  Our neighbors bought it brand new. World War II years were good years for the farm economy.  Commodities were in demand and the prices were high.  Farmers had money—but not much to buy, particularly in the field of equipment.  All factories were converted to producing war materials.  Farmers bought a lot of new equipment when it became available eafter the war.   

     Thus the ’47 GMC came to our neighborhood.  When we got it in the mid-fifties, it was a cripple.

     It looked a little strange when it came to us.  The grain box sat five or six inches behind the cab, instead of the normal separation of an inch or two.  Between the cab and the front grain wrack stood two hydraulic cylinders about three inches in diameter and about four to five feet long.  They were attached to the front of the truck bed and provided the hoisting function for the truck bed.

      The hoist was powered by a six volt electric motor attached to a hydraulic pump.  To raise the bed, you closed a valve and pulled a switch similar to the headlight switch on older vehicles.

     There were two problems:  The front end hoist could only raise the front of the bed four or five feet, not high enough to empty the grain out of the truck bed.  And, the six volt motor didn’t have enough power to raise much of a load.

      The lack of a functional hoist wasn’t too big of problem.  In those olden days, a lot of farmers still hauled their wheat to town in a pickup.  The grain elevators still had a hoist that would raise the front end of a pickup high enough to let the wheat slide out of the pickup box.

     The routine was to pull off the scale and into the elevator proper.  At the front of the passage was the hoist.  A couple of ramps led the pickup front tires up and down onto the hoist platform.  The high end of the ramps acted as chocks that wouldn’t allow the front wheels to roll back off the ramp platform. 

      If the tailgate of the vehicle being emptied wasn’t positioned over the grate of the elevator pit, the hoist operator would raise the front wheels off the ground a few inches.  The farmer could pull his vehicle forward or backward to get it right.  The elevator’s hoist was suspended by heavy cables to two big wheels or pulleys on tracks overhead that allowed the hoist to move horizontally with the vehicle being emptied.

      The tailgate came down and the elevator operator would raise the front end of the vehicle until all the grain could slide out.  The front end came back down and the pickup would clump over the hoist platform out of the elevator and back to the scale.

     The elevator’s hoist was strong enough to raise our truck.  That worked well until one day a greenhorn was manning the hoist.  He raised the truck up, then up some more.  The back end of the truck bed touched the cement.  He raised it one more time.  The rear wheels started to come off the ground.  Then there was a sound of splitting wood and the guy quickly let the hoist down a bit.  But it was too late.  The two wooden stringers that provided the support for the truck bed and also rested on the truck frame when the bed was in the down position had cracked along their length. 

     The GMC truck made one of its many visits to the shop of Ed Berridge, the local mechanic, welder, blacksmith, Mr. Fixit of all things mechanical.  Ed affixed two steel plates to the cracked stringers to support them and keep them on the job.  He would also redo the hoist.

     He used the same two hydraulic cylinders that were sandwiched between the cab and the bed.  He put them under the bed, mounted on a shaft that he welded to the bottom of the truck frame and attached the piston end of the cylinders to the underside of the bed.  He replaced the puny six-volt motor and pump with a bigger pump connected to the power take off from the truck’s transmission.  He moved the bed closer to the cab.

     Now the truck engine drove the hydraulic pump.  A rod coming up through the floorboards of the cab shifted the PTO shaft into gear. 

     To raise the hoist, shut the valve, pull the PTO into gear, release the clutch and give the motor a few rpm’s.  No more front wheel elevator hoists for the old GMC.

     Good thing, too, for over the years, those hoists hanging from grain elevator ceilings have disappeared.  As truck beds got longer and longer, the old hoists, raised up as high as they would go to get them out of the way, still got in the way of the front end of a 20 foot truck bed raised to dump its load.  So the hoists were removed.  No more raising pickups to dump them at the elevator.  Pickup farmers had to become truck farmers.

     It wasn’t the unorthodox hoist that made the GMC a cripple, however.  It was a jagged scar running down the side of the engine’s cylinder block, a scar left by nickel welding rod. 

       In those olden days, farmers used water for engine coolant.  After all the work was done, sometime in September, they would store truck (and tractor, too) for winter and drain the water from radiators and engine blocks.

      In the case of our GMC, Chuck, the previous owner, awoke with a start one frosty October morning and said, “I forget to drain the water from the truck!”  He drained the water then, but it was too late.  The water freezing in the narrow cooling passages of the truck’s engine block expanded and forced the block to crack.

      Ed Berridge to the rescue.  Ed welded the crack, did a masterful job, and the water no longer leaked down the outside of the block.  It still leaked on the inside, however, leaked into the crankcase, into the motor oil.    

      When we got it, if the truck sat for a few days, it was necessary to drain the water out of the engine oil before starting.  With wench in hand, you crawled under the truck, loosened the drain plug in the bottom of the pan.  It was a little bit of an art.  If you turned the drain plug out until it was hanging by a thread or two, the water, heavier than the oil,  would trickle out.  When the water was gone, the oil, thicker in viscosity than water, would be more reluctant to exit. 

      That worked well if you judged things correctly.  If you misjudged or got into a hurry, the plug came all the way out.  Water and then oil came out in a rush.  The effort to get the plug back into place ended with a fistful of motor oil if you were lucky, a sleeveful if unlucky.

     Dad tried a number of radiator additives to seal the internal crack, but none of them worked. The day came when the engine used oil and didn’t have much power anymore.  Time for an overhaul.  But there was no need to put money and time into an engine with a cracked block.  Another neighbor had a good idea.  He had an old engine block, not quite the same, a few years newer, a bit larger, but otherwise with the same dimensions.  It used the same head, bell housing, etc.  With new pistons, the neighbor’s block would work.  The price was right.  We could have it if we came to get it.  Dad got it.

     There was a problem.  The neighbor’s block had lain in the dirt for a few years and was in pretty bad shape.  Dad thought it would be okay if he took it to Ed to have it “boiled out”.  When Ed looked at it, he said in his inimitable mutter, “[When they] look like that, we usually throw ‘em away.” But he threw it into his solvent tank for a day or two, anyway.

     Dad took on the job of overhauling himself.  Late that fall, the old truck got worked into the school house shop somehow.  It was a tight fit all the way around.  Dad bought new pistons and rings from Montgomery Wards.  There were a few adaptation problems with the “new” block, but eventually it was all together and backed out of the shop.

         At harvest time, the rebuilt engine developed an ominous double knock that meant only one thing:  a rod was “going out.”  What to do?  We had traded the old ¾ ton Ford for a smaller  ½ ton International.  There was no way we could haul all the wheat with that.

      We decided we would drive the truck slowly from field to bin without damaging the engine further.  That worked until the bin got full.  The old truck chuckled around field and bin, never getting out of 2^nd gear.  Perhaps that is how it got the nickname of “Chuckle Truck.”  We were down to the last resort, piling wheat on the ground.

      So it came to pass that the truckers, Brother John and I, started a pile on the ground, on the short buffalo grass.  We had a pretty lengthy pile when it happened.  I raised the front of the bed a little too high.  The load shifted to the back of the bed.  The weight all on the back end of the truck swung the front end of the grain box up in the air so high that the pistons came out of the hoist cylinders.

      The pistons swung back and forth suspended from the floor of the bed.  The top end of the cylinders fell to the ground and commenced draining their oil on the grass beneath the truck.  John jumped into the back of the truck and began shoveling wheat over the tailgate.  I tried to prop up the cylinders so they wouldn’t drain all the oil out onto the ground, but lacking any thing to use for a prop, I knelt beneath the truck and held the cylinders up by hand.

     After shoveling a while, John jumped out of the back of the truck.  With his weight gone, the front end of the bed outweighed the back.  Down came the bed in a rush.  The piston on my side of the truck embedded itself about six inches into the sod.  On its way down, it came very close to me.  My first inclination was to look up to see how close I came to being cold-cocked by the truck bed.  A few moments later, I began to wonder about the result of being in the path of that descending piston that stuck itself into the ground.

      There was no moving the truck with the hoist rams stuck in the ground.  We propped up the cylinders with a 2 X 4 or two and left to tell Dad.  I think we studied the problem over dinner.  The fix involved using the Farmhand to raise the front end of the truck bed until it was high enough to get the piston rams back into their cylinders.  I don’t know exactly how that was done, or how the bed was let down slowly enough to get the pistons on both sides lined up at the same time to get them back into their proper place in their cylinders.

     I wasn’t there when that all took place.  I don’t remember why, but it might have had something to do with my mother’s Adams apple bobbing, her hand to her lips, her face paling a little when she heard the story of the truck bed coming down with me under it.

     Anyway, the hoist was restored to normalcy.  We finished the harvest without a repeat of the over-balanced truck bed.  We were very careful not to raise the bed too high.  After harvest was finished, another neighbor lent us a truck to haul the wheat off the ground into town.

      The GMC limped to town to Ed’s shop.  Ed reoverhauled the engine, replacing the failed rod bearing.  He determined that we had not cleared all the oil passages of the dirt and rust, so the failed rod bearing was not being oiled properly.  He took care of that.

     He also made an addition to the truck bed.  He welded two lengths of old roller chain to either side of the truck frame and the bottom of the bed.  He called them snub chains.  When the front end of the truck bed gets so high, the chains come to the end of their length and prevent the bed from going any higher.  No more would the bed get over balanced and pull the rams out of the cylinders.  When the bed is down in its normal position, the two chains hang looped beneath the truck bed in front of the rear axle like a couple of dangly ear rings slightly out of place.

     Since that trip to Ed’s shop, the old GMC has run fine.  It sits in the shed with its third engine, its revamped hoist, with 34,885.7 actual miles.  They have been hard miles, mostly in stubble fields, dirt paths between fields, gravel roads, with few miles on paved roads.  If it could talk, it would probably tell of endless hours of boredom sitting in various sheds. 

     It could tell a lot of interesting tales, too, some of them rather scary.

The Basketball Goal

      Once upon a time, we had an old red barn that ran north and south some 30 feet or so north and west of the meter pole in the farmyard.  Dad always said it was made of “native lumber”, which I guess meant it was made of an inferior grade of pine.

      The walls were vertical 1 X 6’s.  There were gaps between the boards and at the bottom of the wall many of the boards, secured to nothing, twisted, warped and curled.  There were a couple of windows, covered on the inside with the residue of countless flies and millers, and on the outside with an overspray of red paint, left by some fly-by-night painter whose paint didn’t stick to the old boards very well, but clung to the glass all right.    

     Inside, the barn was divided roughly in half by a stanchion where the milk cows stood while being milked.  On the north side of the stanchion was a manger of sorts, a manger that always provided me an image for the first Christmas, a pretty humble birthplace indeed.  There must have been some concrete under the hay and manure of the “milking floor”, as I recall hearing the old iron scoop shovel hitting cement whenever Dad cleaned out the gutter, which was close to the right distance from the stanchion.

      The “cow door” opened outward on the east wall a short step south of the gutter.  A scoop shovel toss east of the cow door lay a semi-permanent manure pile.  Dad tried to train the cows to do their thing before entering the barn.  Some of the milk cows were amenable.  One old cow, a roan we called “Blossom”, would contain herself for hours so that she could evacuate bladder and bowels right in the middle of milking time.  Thus the existence of the manure pile.

    The north part of the barn was mostly a calf pen for the milk cows’ offspring, fenced off from the manger that formed the south border of the pen.  There, young calves were trained to drink their “milk”, either skim milk from the separator or a powdered milk substitute combined with warm water, from a galvanized milk pail.  The training consisted of getting the young calf to suck two fingers spread apart.  When the calf was sucking well enough, the trainer directed the calf’s nose down into the milk far enough that his sucking drew up some of the liquid.  The trainer could remove his fingers and the calf would continue to drink.  At least that was the theory. 

     In a step towards modernization, we bought a couple of buckets that had teat-like valves sticking out of them.  The calf didn’t have to be trained, just directed to the imitation nipple.  The buckets had brackets that allowed them to hang on a wooden rail.  That worked well until the calf got big enough to knock the pail off the fence rail.

     I remember Dad installing tarpaper around the inside of the calf pen walls in an attempt to protect the calves from cold north winds.  It must have tasted good.  The first generation of calves disposed with most of the tarpaper.

     The “people door” to the barn was in the southwest corner.  In the southeast corner was a loft where we threw the alfalfa we harvested from north of the Pratte’s house.  In June when the alfalfa was ready, Elmer would call to let us know it was time.  Up we would go with the old horse drawn mower and rake and the Ford pickup.  We would mow and bunch the hay.  The bunches were thrown onto the pickup, hauled to the barn and thrown up into the loft a forkful at a time.  The milk cows got the alfalfa.

     When the REA came early in the ‘50’s, the meter pole had a yard light mounted on it to illuminate the barn and adjacent chicken house.  Our cousin Keith outgrew his basketball goal.  Somehow, the entire apparatus landed in our yard. The “apparatus” consisted of a basketball rim mounted to a square composed of one-inch boards, which were bolted to a 6 X 6 beam.  The beam had to stand on the ground to get the required standard ten feet from playing surface.  No burying the end in the ground to help stabilize it.

     Those two seemingly unrelated events, the arrival of electricity, and later, the basketball goal in our yard, colluded to provide a perfect recreational opportunity.  The south end of the barn was the perfect place for the basketball goal.  The old splintery beam could be fastened to the barn wall.  The yard light was perfectly positioned to light the court.

      Many a fall and winter evening were spent playing “21” or “horse” under the yard light.  Sometimes, if there was a piano student either waiting to take a piano lesson or having finished his lesson and waiting for a sibling to go the course, participated in a game of two-on-two.              

      There were hazards.  The east wall of the chicken house formed the west boundary line of the basketball court.  It was an unforgiving boundary.  No heroic jumps across the line to divert an errant ball back to a teammate on the court.

     On the east at a diagonal from REA post top to an anchor in the ground ran a cable guy to hold the meter post upright.  It too could be hazardous.  In the dark, it was a little hard to see.  It could take your feet out from under you if you ran into it.  It was the eastern boundary of the court.

     On the school court, we were taught to shoot the layup and pass under the basket and go back in line to wait our turn for the next layup.  None of that on our court.  Going under the basket would run you into the stickery old beam at worst, the barn wall at best.  Layup shooting had to be modified.

      The greatest hazard entered the court from the chicken house.  The chickens were free range, free to poop wherever they wished.  Rarely did a game occur without a timeout to clean the chicken do off the basketball.  Ugh!

     The basketballs presented a problem, mainly keeping them aired up.  We had no air compressor.  When we needed to air up a tire, we pulled a spark plug out of the old Ford pickup, replaced it with the “Engineair”, hooked the hose to the Engineair, which used the engine’s cylinder to run a spark plug sized pump.  It was slow and way too much trouble for a basketball.  A series of hand pumps served, none very well.  Then there was the problem of finding the “needle” needed to insert into the basketball’s bladder.  They seemed always to get lost, or one would break off in the ball during an inflation attempt.  At least one ball with a broken needle inside rattled as it bounced off the bare ground.

      Erecting the goal was an event, well, really two events.  I don’t recall the successful attempt.  I probably wasn’t present. I remember pretty visibly the first attempt.

     It was probably a Saturday morning, a late fall Saturday morning when football season would have been over and basketball season had begun.  My two older siblings and I were all present dressed in warm jackets.

      There were two problems, how to raise the all wood-structure, and how to secure it to the barn wall, both way beyond my ken or skill at the time.  With about 12 feet of 6 X 6 post and 15 or 20 feet of 1 X 12’s forming the backboard, the thing was heavy.  We probably had made an attempt or two to raise it into place, but the weight coupled with the surety of getting a handful of stickers from handling the old beam insured failure.

     Dad to the rescue.  He placed the teeth of the Farmhand fork beneath the bottom board of the backboard.  The grip on the backboard was tenuous.  With the Farmhand, he raised the goal upright and close to the right place.  Our job was to hold the thing in place once he got it there, hold it in place until Dad could fasten it to the wall.  We failed.

      When the backboard slipped off the Farmhand fork teeth and started to fall, I beat feet.  No way I wanted to be under that.  The goal with its backboard slowly slid against the barn wall as it arced like a big second hand on a clock face.  It picked up speed and landed on edge with a crash.

     During that second or two Dad yelled something, “Catch it!” “Get out of the way!”?  I’m not sure what he said over the popping of the John Deere tractor.  In an uncharacteristic fit of anger, he backed the tractor away, drove it to its place by the gas tank and shut it off.  At least I thought it was anger.  In retrospect, it might have been fear and relief that nobody got mashed.

     Anyway, there would be no basketball game that Saturday morning.  At least not in the yard.  We did have a couple of makeshift goals, one a bottomless coffee can hooked to a ceiling joist in the basement, and a similar one fixed to an interior shop wall which we used during inclement weather.  Various rubber balls or tennis balls served as the basketball.  We learned to shoot flat shots because the ceilings thwarted high-arced shots.

     So the basketball goal lay horizontally, leaning against the barn wall.  It was a tribute to its construction that the backboard, goal and post remained intact through the experience of crashing to the ground.  Then one day it was in place, where we wanted it, where it belonged, fastened securely to the barn wall.  Had Dad figured out a way to do the job himself?  I probably wasn’t present for that event, as I have no memory of it.

      We put a new net or two on the rim, but they didn’t last long out in the weather all year long.  The goal, at the standard ten feet above the “floor”, provided many an hour of entertainment for us.  With the yard light, a game could extend into the dark of a fall or even a winter night.

      The goal stood there until the old red barn came down, replaced by a new barn further east and north.  The beam and backboard succumbed with the waste wood left from the barn’s destruction.  Most of the destruction mess disappeared with a man named Roy Snavely.

     Mr. Snavely had a reputation for salvaging lumber from old buildings.  Grandma had called him and told him about the barn.  I think she wasn’t pleased with how long the waste lay there.  She misrepresented the amount and type of lumber to Mr. Snavely, not intentionally of course.  He had asked her if there was any dimension lumber when she called him.  She thought there was.  When Roy arrived with pickup and trailer, he could see that there wasn’t. 

      Dad had salvaged most of the good two inch stuff.  Roy contained his disappointment stoically.  He explained that he could use the scrap lumber.  He would drag a dead cow into his hog lot, cover it with the scrap wood, set the pile on fire and let the hogs clean up the cooked carcass.  Hmmm.

     He filled his trailer, but there was still some scrap let.  I think the old red barn faded into complete oblivion when we trimmed the Chinese elms.  The elms north of the house had been let to run wild.  With handsaws, we attacked the thick underbrush.  A sizable pile of branches from that trimming operation formed over the former site of the barn.

     That pile of branches served for a year or so as a fine place to hide during games of “Cowboys and Indians in the dark.”  A cap pistol fired from a hiding place in the pile at an unsuspecting enemy, who was trying to get the drop on you, was quite effective at scaring that enemy.  The branch pile also served as camouflage for BB gun toting hunters preying on sparrows.

      Eventually, the branch pile dried and settled, and on an appropriate windless day, it went up in flames.  The remains of the old barn and the wooden portion of the basketball goal, if there was any, disappeared forever.  Only the metal rim remains, resting comfortably in the metal pile behind the shop.     

       

         

Planting Grass Again

     How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb?  Three I think.  One to change the bulb and two to share the experience.  Or something like that.

    Here’s one for you.  How many guys and how much equipment does it take to plant, or “enrich” 100 acres of grass? 

 

      Six guys, three tractors, a disk and three drills.  That’s how many were involved, anyway.  There was a bit of a rush.  We had a March 14 deadline.

    It all started five years ago when I reenrolled about 200 acres in the Conservation Reserve Program.  The program rents “highly erodible” land from the farmer and takes it out of grain production.  The program began in the 1980’s when farm commodity prices reached record lows (when adjusted for inflation).

      Some goals of the program were to keep the family farmer in business, to reduce commodity stocks and thus increase prices, and to slow down erosion of soil from marginal land and preserve it for a future when grain might be needed to feed the world.  It was a pretty

ambitious program.

      One result (or maybe something that happened concurrently) was a soil-mapping project under the auspices of the Natural Resources Conservation Services, formerly known as the Soil Conservation Services among other names.  Agents took soil samples from every county and district in the nation.  They sampled based on a grid map so that all the farmland would be graded, labeled and mapped.  In our area we had sandy clay and sandy loam for example.  We heard such names as “Vona Sandy Shale”. 

      To be eligible for the CRP program, the soil had to be designated “highly erodible”, a designation not hard to get in this area due to high winds, dry weather, and rare but regular gulley washers.  If nothing else, the nation can now check out the soil type nearly everywhere in the land.

     The program’s attempt to keep the smaller farmer alive was both a populist idea and an attempt to keep the American consumer out of the hands of the Monsantos and Exxon Mobiles when it comes to our food supply.  Such giant corporations involved in food production could have the power to manipulate market prices and put the squeeze to the consumer if they so choose.  At least that is the theory.  How successful the program was at achieving that goal is debatable.

     It had some effect on commodity prices, however, as wheat reached prices of over $10 per bushel in the nineties and again in the early 21^st century.  By comparison, wheat exceeded the stellar price of $5 per bushel in the early 1970’s when we sold tons of the stuff to the Russians.  Of course, one must consider inflation.  $5 in 1970 would buy a whole lot more than $5 would in 2010.  (The CRP program can't take sole responsibility for the rise in farm commodity prices, as there were many other things going on, like corn ethanol production and increased exports due to bad crop years elsewhere in the world.)

      For certain, turning the prairie to grass again kept a lot of soil out of the Mississippi delta or from drifting back to Oklahoma.  In those ways the program was successful.

      Events lead us to enroll in the program in the first place in 1989.  Dad died in 1987, and Mom didn’t want to rely on the farming gamble for a livelihood any longer.  My failure to find gainful employment in Colorado closer to the farm sent me back to Kansas to resume my old job. The siren song of a CRP contract sounded and we bit.

     The first two years of our participation were a nightmare.  All the farm ground had to be planted to a cover crop by some date in June.  The cover crop had to be cut back to around 16 inches later in the fall.  A grass seeder had to come in with drills that could handle all the residue from knocking down the cover crop and plant a mixture of grass before some date in November.

     The next spring, weeds took over before the grass could establish itself, something I didn’t anticipate, but the NRCS boys knew that would happen.  So that summer, the weeds had to be cut back to the same 16 inches as the cover crop the year before. 

     The following spring the grass and clover got the jump on the unwanted vegetation and established a weed-free stand.  Things were a lot easier after that.  For a few years, a summer’s morning was scented by the clover growing all around the farmstead.  There was a mild drawback to that.  The sweat bees loved the stuff, too.  A walk to the mailbox would result in quite a few bites from the little devils.  Long sleeve shirts with the collar buttoned recommended.

       We were offered an option to reenroll in the program in 1998 at a reduced price because all of the work required to establish the vegetation would not be required.  We took that option.  It was about that time the Goodwife coined the term “fake farm” because we had no animals and no crops other than ground cover.  At that point, we still had a variety of grass and clover. 

      Then came the early 2000’s, the driest time I can remember.  An old neighbor took a short leave from the nursing home and went for a drive in the country with his nephews who were farming his ground.  He remarked that there weren’t even any sunflowers in the road ditches, something they did have in the 1930’s dust bowl years.

      One grass beat out all the other varieties during those dry years.  The clover disappeared.

     In 2009 I got a letter from the Farm Services folks saying the CRP program was being discontinued, no contracts would be renewed.  So I bought a bunch of fencing supplies, thinking to graze the grass in some capacity, either as cattle owner or landlord to a neighbor.

     I had five or so miles of steel fence posts driven into the ground when I got another letter that said in essence, “Hey, wait a minute, just kidding about that last letter.  Congress has decided to renew the CRP program after all.  Would you like to reenroll?”

     I felt somewhat like the silver ball in an old pinball machine:  swatted uphill by this paddle, ricocheted off that pillar, dumped into a hole and spit out, all the while trying to avoid going down the drain.                              

     I had started fencing, but I wasn’t nearly done.  I had no corrals, no watering system in place, and I had my dad’s love of cattle (I think the only thing he liked about the cattle was eating them).

      I intended to farm two of the best fields after having grazed them for a year.  I could reenroll the other two fields and have a little guaranteed income while I gambled in the wheat business.  While not well-equipped for handling cattle, I did have the old machinery left, some of it in fairly good shape yet.

     When the NRCS fellows came out to evaluate the two fields I wanted to reenroll, they did not like the single grass predominant condition.  As part of the new contract, I had to agree to “enhance” half the fields in the first year, and the remainder somewhere in years 4-6.

     It wouldn’t do to plant one field in year one and the other in year five.  They wanted strips no wider than 300 feet.  The existing grass had to be “discouraged” before more grass could be planted.

     I gave up fencing for a while and turned to tractor and oneway disc.  I marked off 300 feet and took the 820 and two oneways out to try to turn over some sod.  Soon I had unhooked one oneway and was trying to turn sod with one.  I wasn’t able to do that sufficiently.  I called Neighborly.  Most of his farming is done chemically, but he maintains his tillage equipment.  He still loves to till the land with implement rather than chemical.

     His big tractor and tandem disc took about five or six hours to do the job.  A problem was how rough the disc operation left the field.  It turned over big strips and chunks of sod.  I felt sorry for the guys drilling the grass seed.  That had to be a rough ride.

     Five years sped by and it came time to do what is termed “mid-contract management activity.”  I had some options at the outset.  Originally, I signed up  to use chemical to discourage the grass on the remaining strips.  I didn’t like the rough terrain left by the disc operation.  Then I landed in another pinball hole.

     A further goal of CRP is wildlife encouragement, specifically, bird population.  Someone somewhere determined that nesting season for the fowl of the air and field went from mid-March to mid-July.  Therefore, there would be no nest-destroying tillage or planting operation during that time.  I had to have the grass planted by March 14.

     But by March 14 most years, the grass is still dormant.  Spraying dormant grass with Roundup or other grass killer has no effect.  I would have to disc again.  Call Neighborly.

    In late February, snow still dwelt among the dead grass stalks.  The ground was still frozen.  A disc operation would be impossible.  Never underestimate Mother Nature.

    March winds blew.  Snow melted, earth thawed and dried.  Neighborly called and said he thought it would “go”.  I said I’d be there in two days.  When I arrived, I had a yard full of equipment.  The grass seeder had moved in prepared to disc ahead of the drills.  He was relieved to know he would not have to disc, only plant.  He, too, was under the March 14 deadline for all of the seeding he had contracted to do.

     I thought I could tell by looking what strips we had done five years ago.  It was easy to tell during the growing season.  We would do the strips between those strips.  But alas! After the winter snow cover, I had trouble distinguishing the difference between the old and the new.  The best tools for discovering the difference were my feet.  As I walked across that which had been disked five years ago, I would hit clods and drop into divots.  As I walked across the rough ground, suddenly I wouldn’t be stumbling anymore.  I was crossing smooth ground.  Step back and eye the line.  I could see a fine difference in the residue.  Drive in a metal rod to mark the border.

     Finally, I put the “stick” on the front wheel of the 4X4 and marked off 300 feet.  I cross-checked the wheel revolutions with scouting by foot and drove in some stakes.

     The disking started late Wednesday afternoon and was completed shortly after noon Thursday.   Neighborly’s son lined out the tractor’s GPS guidance system so once the first line was established, he could come a lot closer to the 300 feet per strip by following the arrows on his monitor than I could with measuring wheel and foot scouting.

     The planting started about noon on Thursday and was done by Friday afternoon.  There were three men running that operation.  We didn’t run the disc as deep this time, largely due to the wet soil.  The discs plugged up if it went too deep.  The surface isn’t nearly as rough this time.  The boys running the tractor pulling the drills didn’t have near the rough ride. 

      It remains to be seen if the effort of the six of us and all the equipment will bear fruit, or grass seed, or bird nests or whatever.  Experience tells me it will be at least a year before we will know.

       In the meantime, we could use a wet March blizzard.  Please don’t tell any cattlemen I said that.

         

    

     

        

     

Planting Grass

     We “put down the boards.”  Literally.       

     Having a grass lawn was important to my mother.  It must have been, for it was a lot of work, for all of us.

     This was back in the day when the house projected above the treeless prairie, defenseless against the relentless wind, subject to being surrounded by sunflowers, kochia, and a blue-bladed grass so tough even hungry cows would ignore it, with no Ford tractor and rotary mower to whip the vegetation into shape.  It was the same era when 100 Chinese elms went in 30 yards north of the house.

     The elms weren’t big enough to stop any wind yet.  Nothing stopped the south wind from having its way with the farmyard. 

      Two other impediments hampered the establishment of a bluegrass lawn.  The tank house supplied the water pressure, which wasn’t much when it came to irrigating a lawn.

     We still had chickens, free range chickens.  We didn’t know we had free range chickens.  We just knew that during the day, there were chickens anywhere and everywhere about the yard.  They had sense enough to go back through the trap door of one of two chicken houses at night.  There they could find a water source, nest boxes (which they didn’t always use), roosts, and a grain trough that got filled regularly in winter, not so regularly in summer.

      At some point, the chicken house south and east of the house came down.  There was still the one north and east of the house, between the house and the old red barn.  Chickens and newly planted lawns don’t mix well.  Not if the goal is to actually have a grass lawn.  Chickens love to scratch through the fine soil, to dig nest holes to sit in and dust themselves.

     The first stage was to level and grade the soil around the house.  The house used to stick up higher above the earth.  1930’s soil from the fence line just south of the house provided some fill.  When that work was done, the house stood six or eight inches above grade instead of the foot or so before the work.

     The answer to the chicken problem was a picket fence.  Dad did that pretty much himself in the fall when the wheat was planted and the hay was stacked.  He dug holes about the size of a two pound coffee can.  Into the holes he drove steel T posts.  He filled the hole with cement that surrounded and anchored the posts. 

     Two rails made of 2 X 4’s were bolted horizontally to the posts. Then came the pickets, cut from one inch lumber, spaced about two inches apart.  Dad cut every one of those pickets with his “Monkey Wards” PowerKraft saw.  He had a jig of sorts so that he could cut the pickets to length and get the correct angle on the top without measuring every one, I think. 

     One day we came home from school to find Dad limping around.  In the assembly line process of cutting pickets, he had developed the habit of pulling the saw back until he felt it hit his thigh.  Unfortunately, the blade guard failed to retract once.  The blade took a nip out of his thigh.  It was bad enough he went to Hugo to get the wound patched up.

     The yard protected from the chickens was nearly ready to plant.  I remember planting several times.  Mom learned from experience the best way to plant.  We worked in some old cow manure that laid around long enough to be fine and not lumpy.  Then we raked as carefully as if we were floating fresh concrete.  The grass seed scattered on top of the corrugations from the raking stayed in place better than on a smooth surface.

     Two things still had the power to destroy the careful seeding:  wind and water.  Careless watering or a rainstorm would send the soil running, carrying the light seed with it.  The wind would quickly dry out the soil surface, a no-no for sprouting grass seed, and drift the seed everywhere.

     We planted more than once.  Eventually, we planted in sections.  The whole yard was too big of a project.  I remember once going to visit neighbors, a birthday party or something.  On the way home, Mom gasped and said, “Oh my gosh!  I forgot to turn off the water!”

     The old Chevy made haste getting home.  Sure enough, the hose turned loose to run on the new soil north of the house was still running.  There was a big shallow mud puddle just west of the 500 gallon fuel tank that stood next to the north wall of the house.  (The tank held distillate, our winter heat source.)

     Mom found it easier to keep the surface wet if the soil got a good soaking prior to planting.  Unfortunately, a two or three hour soaking was too much.  We did the best we could to restore the grade north of the house, but for a long time there was a depression where that mud puddle stood.  It would puddle up after a heavy thunderstorm or when the snow melted and stood on the frozen soil.

     I suppose it was possible to spend all day on a windy day keeping the soil watered so it couldn’t blow away.  But Mom found a better way.  She gathered a bunch of old 1 X 12’s and laid them side-by-side between house and picket fence forming a sort of wood pavement.  Every day the boards would come up, a row or two at a time, water applied, and the boards went back down.  It was an arduous task. 

      The boardwalk (but you better not be caught walking on those boards unless you were watering) served two purposes.  It kept the nasty wind from the seeded surface.  It kept the soil moist.  I can still remember the aroma that arose when the sprinkled water hit the mixture of Mother Earth and old cow manure.  It was like the fresh smell of a brief shower that soaked down the dusty surface on a hot summer day.

      When the grass began to sprout, the boards came off, but stayed nearby.  Many a time we covered tender shoots of grass with the boards if a strong wind or thunderstorm threatened.  The work was not done even when the grass sprouted and took root.  Plenty of weeds found their way into the planting via the blow dirt and the cow manure.

      It was a while before the grass was strong enough to withstand mowing.  The planting remained off-limits.  The oldest brother caught the devil for straying off the sidewalk with his baseball spikes on.  Once, it must have been harvest, I sat on the step, took off my boots and emptied the wheat from them onto the grass.  When the evidence of that act was discovered, I was ordered to “march right out there and pick those wheat seeds off the lawn.”  Which I did.     

     The grass had to be mowed.  The first two mowers were reel type where the power was supplied by the pusher.  I couldn’t push the first one.  It was second hand.  As I recall, it had wooden wheels with steel rims.  Behind the blade came a wooden roller, a lot like a rolling pin.  The handle was all wood.  It had no grass catcher.  Mowing was followed by raking and gathering.  We thought the milk cows would enjoy the clippings, they smelled so good, but the cows usually ignored them..

     The folks bought a new mower, from Wards, Sears, or Gambles, I don’t recall.  It was all metal except for tires and plastic caps here and there.  It was much easier to push, but still a goodly task, especially if the grass got too big.  It had a catcher with a galvanized tin bottom and canvas sides.  It hooked to the blade plate on the bottom.  A wire on the back hooked it to the handle.  That mower rests in retirement in the farm shop today.  A series of second hand power mowers came and went before the new Comet came from Gambles.

        The picket fence was another problem.  It had to be painted, a terrible task even Tom Sawyer would find challenging.  The gates failed.  The lawn was healthy enough to fend for itself.  We used it for a football field with many a piano student whose turn at the keyboard was done.  The chickens invaded, leading us to nickname the south lawn “Debris Field”.  Contact with fresh chicken poop was both unpleasant and unavoidable.

     To replace the fence, we planted Rocky Mountain Junipers to form a hedge.  It took over the picket fence, which got removed a little at a time.  The picket fence didn’t invade the grass.  The hedge did.  It sent out roots throughout the grass, robbing it of moisture and shading it from sunlight.

     As long as Mom lived here, she applied many a gallon of water to keep the bluegrass going.  I wasn’t that dedicated.  In the drought of the first decade of the 21^st Century, I gave up watering the grass.  That decision probably cost the life of the blue spruce on the northwest corner of the house.

     The bluegrass clings to life, going great guns in the cool spring weather after the snow melts, going dormant in June’s heat, sometimes recovering during the summer monsoon.  It spread from its original planting north under the clothes line and into the elm patch. 

     Apparently, some of the washed and blown away seeds established themselves down wind and downstream.  A big patch of bluegrass grows on the east edge of the farmyard.  Another patch grows in the draw running from near the house well southeast into the Lickdab, nearly a half mile away from the original planting.     

           If my mother would come back today, she might begin our visit with some pleasantries, but the second item on her agenda would be to take me to task for letting that lawn go to dust.  “Think of all the work of planting, watering, and putting those boards down!”

      Yes, and shoving that old push mower around window wells and fence posts, and trimming along all of that picket fence and house foundation with the old sheep shears before the days of string trimmers.  A bluegrass lawn was, and still is, a lot of work.