Fall Chores 2022

      Twenty Twenty-two proved that Eastern Colorado is the best next-year country in the world.  Maybe a bit of an exaggeration.  It was a disappointing year, farm-wise.

     The wheat crop was 38 bushels—not per acre.  A total of 38 bushels, which sold for $300.  The price of wheat went as high as $10 per bushel.  None of us in the neighborhood had any wheat to sell.  Typical!

      I did raise a bumper crop of sunflowers following the disastrous wheat crop.

 

 

      Not much income from that kind of sunflowers.

     The millet crop looked good.

 

 

      It yielded a little over 800 bushels, total, about five bushels per acre.  That sold for $19.50 per hundred-weight.  A hundred pounds equal two bushels.

      Nothing to do but plant next year’s wheat crop.  Keeping the weeds out of the summer fallow wasn’t too great a challenge, given the dry conditions.  But we did have occasional rains throughout the summer, enough to bring the millet up.

      A dry spell was broken about mid-August.  I actually began planting wheat on the last day of August and finished before Labor Day.  That hasn’t happened for decades. 

      When I was a kid, the farmer I worked for started planting on August 21, unless that was a Sunday.  As the summers got hotter, the planting date got pushed back. 

     Last year, I planted in October.  A lot of that wheat didn’t come up until April.  Some of it either never came up, or sprouted and died in the drought conditions that persisted throughout the winter of 2021-2022.

      In August, I had the moisture, so I planted.  I have wheat up this Fall!

 

 

     The wheat was up fairly well when it rained over an inch in less than 30 minutes.  Thus, the mud in the lower part of the picture.  I should have a good stand next spring when the winter wheat breaks its dormancy.    

     The wheat up, the millet done, nothing to do but clean up and put stuff away.

     There is always some sadness, along with some relief, when it comes time to shut down for the year.  True, it is nice to be able to relax a bit and look forward to days that don’t hit 100 degrees.  But the summer is over and colder days loom ahead.

        This year, I had to remove the old green machines to make room for the “new” stuff.  The new combine is a 1995 model, a 30-year jump from the old 1964 John Deere 95 combine.

      Putting a machine out in the open to rust away after it has been shedded during the off-season for thirty years is a little like sending a trusty old work horse from the stable to the glue factory.

 

 

        Except for the junk that always finds its way into a farm building, the shed was empty.

 

 

       I had to remove the top section of the combine’s exhaust pipe and the air intake apparatus to get clearance under the doorway.  It went in.

 

 

 

     Then the tractor, and the trucks.

 

 

      In the Fall, an old man’s fancy turns to firewood.  The felled elm tree has been split and stacked.  There remain the smaller branches to be dealt with.

     And look forward to next year!

     I live in a good “next year” country.