Such a Tide as Moving. . . .

    First there was this:                       

    Then there was this:

     Then there were none (almost):

   What once looked like this,

 

now looks like this:

 

or 

 became

      In general, the lovely house now looks like

     What has been boxed for four months is now waiting patiently to be unboxed and placed in a new home.  The struggle continues. 

     We have lived without the internet for five days.  The purchasing department has been too busy finding, fitting, cutting shelf “paper”, opening boxes, and deciding where things should go to shop around for the best deal on an ISP.  We hope to be back in the internet business this week.

     One result of our double move?  I don’t suppose I can get you to cancel Christmas, but please don’t give me anything.  I have more “stuff” than I can ever use.  Give your Christmas gifts to someone who truly needs it.  Adopt a favorite charity.

    

        

     

Frank’s Place

   

     Last week’s deluge filled not only the dam on the Lickdab.  It brought up a bag of memories from “the old days” as we used to term it to our parents and their generation.  I now understand their amusement of having their childhood viewed as “the old days.”

     Standing by the overflowing dam brought back the only time that I can remember of seeing my dad in a bathing suit.  It was a warm Sunday afternoon.  We all loaded up in the Ford pickup and trucked down to the dam, Mom and Dad and baby in the front, “the boys” standing in the back hanging on to and looking over the grain sides of the pickup.  When we arrived at the dam, it was full then, too.

     Dad, barefooted, stepped into the water a ways, then took a dive forward, swam across the pond and back.  For a while he was swimming beneath the surface.  When he reached his starting point, he stood up and walked back onto the grass, the water dripping off him as he wiped it out of his hair and eyes.  I stood there and watched it all, fascinated.  I didn’t know he knew how to swim.

     Playing in the mud and water was always a fun pastime.  We could make dams in the streams that followed in the wake of an afternoon thunderstorm.  We made boats out of everything we could, little pieces of wood, paper, scrap metal and floated them down the shallow muddy streams of the run off.  The fun only lasted so long.  Certainly by the next morning the estuaries were all dried up and navigation had to be overland.

     When the dam and creek filled up, however, it afforded a larger window of time for playing in the mud and water, time to create fancier and larger watercraft.  Thus it was that we built rafts to float on the dam.  The cargo was us.

     The materials for raft-building were readily available.  The Frank Horak homestead site was nearby.  There was an old house, the remains of a granary, and a still-functional barn with a corral.  There was plenty of old wood, one-inch planks and some dimensional lumber.  I guess we must have recycled nails.  We even had a reclaimed hammer we found on the premises, a camping hammer Dad called it.  It survives. 

     The raft story is a three bears story.  My oldest brother had the biggest raft.  It might have been four or five feet by eight feet.  It was made by nailing two cross boards across several side-by-side parallel boards.  He could stand on it and pole it along. 

     My older brother had a smaller raft.  It might have been an old barn door.  I don’t remember for sure, but it would support him.

      The baby bear raft was three boards, one-by-sixes nailed loosely in the form of an H.  I wasn’t a very good nailer, a deficiency I have never overcome.  I spent far more time trying to get the three boards to stay together then I did in the water.  I suppose a snowboarder or a skateboarder could have stood up on it, but I couldn’t.  I had to straddle it like a horse.  Even then, it drew four or five inches of water.  I had to propel it by kicking my legs, most of the time my feet touching the muddy bottom.

     I have no idea how much time we spent building and modifying the rafts and getting them to the water.  Probably a whole lot more than we did navigating for sure.  I seem to recall that the bigger two rafts stayed around for multiple uses, while my puny effort floated off the next time the dam overflowed.

      The material supply for our rafts, the Frank Horak place, also provided other entertainments.  Of course the house was haunted.  It was a two-story with a basement.  It wasn’t a great feat to enter the main floor.  The steps were gone, so it was a bit of a climb to get into the house.  Going upstairs was a bit riskier, especially when the stairs deteriorated.  We did go upstairs some.  But I never found the courage to enter the dark old basement.  What would we find there? Snakes?  Spiders?  Ghosts?

    In the 1950’s, Dad tore down the old house to build a new barn.  The basement is now a small square cement hole in the ground which has collected a lot of trash.

     There was an old barn that we still used some when I was a preschooler.  I remember Dad and Harold Drier, the cattle truck driver, “working” calves (castrating the young bulls) in the old barn after the cattle going to market were loaded on the cattle truck.  Being a cattle truck driver must have been a lot of fun then, too.

     There was a loading corral which we kept up and improved upon using lumber from the old barn when it began to collapse.  To get to the corral to load, the cattle truck had to cross the Lickdab, which in many, many cases was no problem.  It was dry with gently sloping banks.  But there were two occasions when it wasn’t dry. 

    The first occasion, I was too young to help when the truck got stuck in the creek bottom.  It took our tractor and two or three neighbors’ tractors with plenty of chain to get the loaded truck dislodged and on its way.

     In the second incident, I took the truck driver, F.T. Link, up to the farmyard.   F. T. drove the pickup, and I drove the tractor down to the site where we were able to get him out of the creek without too much trouble. 

     After that last incident, we decided it made more sense to have a loading facility at the farmyard corrals rather than maintaining a separate place with the disadvantage of needing to cross the Lickdab to get to it.  The new facility got used only a few times before the cattle business came to an end.

     There was one other entertaining feature of Frank’s place, an old cottonwood tree.  It was the sole tree on the place.  It nestled in a dent in the creek bank.  It was dead for as long as I remember.  Dad always said Frank salted it to kill it.  Mom would chip in, imitating Frank’s pronunciation, saying that Frank didn’t want the “Federal Landbank ‘teeves’” to get that tree.  They foreclosed on him, along with several other homesteaders in the area.  Apparently, the tree was one of Frank’s prized possessions, and he refused to have it fall into the possession of the evil lender.

        You could still climb it in my earliest memories, but the limbs became brittle and broke with weight.  It was dangerous beyond my risk tolerance.  Eventually, it fell down and rotted away.

   

     The tree stood in the hollow above the water puddle.  In the background is the remnant of another old corral.

    Now, if we had to build a raft or anything else from the Horak place, it would have to be made of old concrete or wire. The wood has all rotted or washed away.   Scavengers have removed all the household items that once were scattered around the homestead.

     A footnote:  Nate Einertson once told me he was born in Frank’s house.  His dad Alfred was working for Frank and Olga was cooking and keeping house for Frank.  Part of their pay was room and board.  They were living with Frank when it came time for Nate to arrive on the scene.

      In the foreground closest to the water is the old granary foundation.  Above it is an old well.  The basement is above and to the right of the well.

  

Dam the Lickdab

     Tableau: The two truck drivers sat stopped in mid-chew, forks suspended in action.  They were fascinated by the sudden movement by fellow diners, the move towards the windows that lined two walls of the truck stop café.

     In one booth, two boys about 2 and 4 years old stood on the seat cushion, foreheads pressed against the window.  Most adults showed a little more restraint than the boys, only a few actually  rising and going to the windows, but everyone else turned, leaned, stared out the windows.

     It was raining.  A crack of thunder attracted everyone’s attention.  The two truck drivers were from Indiana.  They had seen rain. 

     “Those two kids have never seen it rain,” I said to the drivers, feeling the need to explain, to excuse the behavior of my fellow prairiebillies, as they must have thought us.  They smiled, acknowledged my explanation, caught each other’s eye, resumed eating. 

     The scene was sometime after 2002, a year dryer than the thirties according to one old neighbor.  He said the sunflowers grew in the ditches during the thirties.  In 2002, the ditches stayed winter brown, and even the dandelions in the farmyard dried up and failed to bloom.

     Well, it’s gone and done it again, rained, .9” in about five minutes.  There was enough hail to remain in unmelted piles the next day.

    We have had rain this summer, plentiful by recent standards, milder thundershowers, day-long drizzles.  This was a toad strangler, a gulley-washer, a turd-floater, a cow peeing on a flat bed rock.  Water “stood” everywhere.  Actually it was running everywhere.

     There was a calm after the storm.  I stepped out of the shop where the noise of the hail and driving rain left my ears ringing.  The Goodwife stepped out on the porch at the same time.  We surveyed the scene.  Then the silence overtook the visual. 

     “What’s that sound?  Is a car coming along the road?” she asked.  No, for two reasons:  There was no vehicle to be seen, and the noise was stationary. 

     “It’s running water,” I said.  “We better go take a look.”

     “We’ll get stuck,” she said.

     “Nah.  It came too fast.  It ran right off the roads.  It hasn’t had time to soak in.”  In the first mile we met a neighbor out checking the damage to his newly-planted wheat.

      “Have you ever seen this?” the Goodwife asked, as we topped the rise and saw the water gushing down the Lickdab.          

     “A long time ago,” I said.  It must have been more than 40 years if she has never seen “this.” 

  

     “We used to call this a waterfall,” I said as we watched the muddy water spilling over the creek bank.

     At the top of the next hill, we stopped and got out to check out the scene.  The dam was already half full.  “What’s that brown stuff?”

     “Probably flotsam and jetsam, don’t you think?” I answered.

     On the way home, another neighbor passed us, out checking his corn and newly-planted wheat.  “Get the millet all picked up?” I asked.

    “No, we lacked about four hours of getting done.”

     The Goodwife was amused.  “The rain sure brings out the farmers.”

     The rain fell on Monday.  On Tuesday, I took a hike to check out the dam.  The water had stopped running.  Some of the overflow went around the west end of the dike the way it is supposed to, but some went around the east end.  The erosion from water going around the wrong end of the dike will create an oxbow which will circumvent the dam and leave it useless.  A little more dirt work is required.  It will be awhile before that can be done.

     My visit to the dam brought back many memories.  When it held water, it was our swimming pool.  But that’s another story.

     Running water and rain still fascinates us drylanders.  Indiana truck drivers will just have to go down the road if they need to find a saner populace. 

Farm Update

        The wheat is planted and up, the hay is made.  The neighbors have proso millet windrowed ready for harvest and corn to pick, but my farm work is basically done for the year.

      I planted wheat September 6-9.  It rained nearly a half an inch on the 9^th, about three hours before I would have been finished planting.  I thought it might crust over and I might have to replant, but the wheat came through.

September 15

September 16

September 17

 

September 24

     Watching wheat grow is a little more entertaining than watching paint dry.  I finished planting on September 16.  The drills are cleaned out and stowed.  On to other chores that have been put off.

     The tumbleweeds that plagued the neighbor a year ago also made themselves unwelcome here.  They are a definite fire hazard.

  

        Ford tractor and rotary mower to the rescue.  Keep an eye on the exhaust.  Don't let the flammable  buggers get too close

      The tractor, the 830, developed the annoying habit of using oil, pushing it out the exhaust during the last few weeks.  So, apart it comes.

      The problem doesn’t seem to be with cylinder, piston or rings.  So the head is scheduled to go to the machinist this week.  I hope they will find a problem and fix it.

      A bindweed patch sprang up in the summer fallow.  I could use tractor and machine to keep it under control before I planted wheat. 

       Speaking of pests, the deer are up to their usual tricks.

      The most effective repellant is sprinkling used cooking grease, pan drippings, etc. in the branches about head height.  Unfortunately, that takes a lot of time and is not 100% effective.  It’s not a very flattering self-appraisal that I find myself agreeing with Kurtz in Heart of Darkness,  “Exterminate all the brutes,” he says.  A novel idea.

Weed Hay

     Making hay from tumbleweeds caused me to remember the 50’s and even the early 60’s when for at least a couple of years, we found ourselves approaching Fall and Winter with not enough hay to get our cattle herd through the winter.  So, we cut tumbleweeds in the wheat stubble and used it for cattle feed.

      The process was a little different then, no 30-foot swather, no big round bailer.  For some of those years, we used a five-foot horse drawn mower, drawn in this case with the “Old D” John Deere.  The sickle was driven by lugged iron wheels on the mower.  Lubrication of the pitman bearings was done by dripping oil into spring-capped oil cups filled with cotton.  The iron seat on the mower was superfluous since the operator had to sit on the tractor instead of sitting on the mower guiding the horses.

    Some time later, Dad bought a John Deere No. 5 mower, the 7 foot sickle driven by the tractor’s power takeoff shaft, and with no seat.  The “D”, lacking a PTO, was reduced to pulling the horse-drawn dump rake.

      The seat on the rake was not superfluous.  In some ways, replacing a horse with a tractor was a step backwards.  Even though the horse had been replaced by the tractor, the rake still required a rider to hold down the foot pedal that kept the rake’s tines in position to gather the hay, and to step on the trip lever that raised the rake tines and dumped the gathered hay.   With the tractor, it took two people to do the raking.

      Riding the rake wasn’t the desirable job.  It was dusty and the hold-down pedal could kick up when the rake went over uneven ground or a rake wheel dropped into a chuck hole or rut.  Your right knee was always in danger.  At high speeds (6 mph with the “D” in high gear) the rake tines could fly up and hit the bottom of the seat when you stepped on the trip pedal.  Of course, there were always insects such as flying ants and gnats to aid and abet the dust and pollen in the hay field.

     After the hay was mowed, we raked it into windrows with the dump rake.  Getting a windrow and not just a bunch of random dumps was important.  The rake operator had to step on the trip lever at just the right time so that the dump lay in line with the previous dump.

     When all the hay was raked into windrows, we went down each windrow and raked it into a series of piles.  The rake operator got a workout then.  He had to trip the dump lever frequently and even help the rake to dump by shoving down on the handle used to pull the rake tines up by hand.  The handle was designed to raise the rake tines and hold them up when “roading” the rake.

      When the hay was raked into piles, Dad would use the farmhand with the hay fork to pick up the hay and bring it to the stack, near the corral where we would keep the cattle during the winter.  He would pick up a few of the piles until the fork was full.  He would set that first forkful on the hay stubble and back away from it.  A second forkful would be deposited on top of the first, and a third forkful on top of the first two. 

      When the pile was suitably high, Dad would back away several feet from the pile, throttle up and take a run at the pile.  If all went well, the fork, back end a couple feet off the ground, front end riding on the ground, would hit the pile and come away loaded.  At just the right time, he dropped the rear end of the fork and raised the tip, then raised everything and headed for the stack without ever stopping.

     Standing on the stack, you heard the tractor throttle up, and you knew a load of hay was headed your way.

     I was too young to help with the haying before Dad bought the farmhand.  I guess you either threw loose hay onto the hayrack, or if a binder was used, threw the bundles on the hayrack and hauled them to a stack near where the cattle would be fed in the winter.

     I was old enough to stack hay hauled in with the farmhand.  I remember coming home from school, changing clothes, and heading for the haystack.  One person could easily keep up with the farmhand, depending some on how far the farmhand had to go to fetch the hay.  What I remember is a haystack with its entire length covered with piles of hay that needed to be stacked, a rather depressing proposition for a kid with a pitch fork in hand. 

     The main idea of a haystack was keeping the water out.  Moisture would cause the hay to mold and rot.  Having a neat, straight stack was secondary, but still important.  Having straight edges and square corners was not as important as having a straight vertical wall.  Slanting towards the middle of the stack would result in hay sliding down the side.  Slanting away from the center would result in the stack caving off when it got higher and heavier.  Either deformity would result in having to rebuild the stack.

      When I was still small, I remember being on the stack with my brothers.  The loaded farmhand fork approached the stack headed straight for me.  I tried to move out of the way, but the hay was still loose and my leg fell into a hole and down I went.  The hay from the fork came tumbling off and I was covered up.  It didn’t take long for me to scramble out from under the stuff.  The stackers and the tractor operator laughed as I crawled out.  I didn’t laugh.

    Usually the hay was millet and wasn’t bad to handle, no stickers or chaff.  The exception was when pig weed or red roots infested the millet.  That seed head was stickery and hard to get out of socks and cuffs.

       The weed hay was another matter.  The fire weed had a yellowish pollen that got everywhere.  Worse was the Russian thistle which had a stickerish branch that scratched any bare skin it could find.  How could an animal eat such a thing?  But they did, and apparently liked it. 

     One year, to ensure the cattle would eat those weeds, Dad bought rock salt in bags.  When a layer of the stack was complete, we would go along and scatter rock salt all over it.  A few stray pebbles from the salt bags found their way into my mouth.  Not bad.  (We used to take a few licks off of fresh salt blocks before they were put out for the cows, too.  It’s a wonder I don’t have hypertension.) The cows throve on the salted weeds.

     The most vivid memory of haying involved the horse-drawn mower coupled to the “Old D”.  It is also a painful memory.  We were mowing millet in the “field by the road.”  We had a stray dog who wandered into the farm yard one day and adopted us.  He went everywhere we went.  Somebody called him “Billy Whiskers” and the name stuck.

     Two or three of us were riding on the D, my oldest brother driving it, the others clinging to the fenders.  Billy was running along, sometimes behind us, sometimes off to one side or the other of the tractor.  As we came to the northwest corner, my brother turned the tractor.  Billy was standing in the millet where he would have been out of the way if we had kept going north, but of course we couldn’t keep going north because that millet was already down.

      So he was standing right in line with the mower when we turned east.  The sickle was invisible, being hidden by the standing millet in front of it and covered up by the cut millet as it fell, so Billy didn’t see the danger. 

    Uncle Ricky grabbed the D clutch and pulled.  It almost stopped, but a characterisitic of the old D was it didn’t stop on demand, especially when it was lightly loaded, as it was with the mower.  It made a final lurch, and Billy’s left hind leg was gone.

     Who was in a greater state of shock, Billy or us?  Billy yelped, tried to jump up on the tractor with us.  He couldn’t make it, and he was bleeding.  I’m afraid we weren’t much comfort. Taking a stray dog, even a loved pet, to the vet wasn’t a thing we even thought about.

     Eventually, Billy crept off, where, to die?  We continued on with the mowing.  What else could we do?  The next morning, Billy surprised us by showing up for breakfast as usual.  We thought for sure he would have bled to death.  But he was the same old Billy, only now he was a three-legged dog.  How long he lived after that, I can’t say for sure, only it seemed like quite a few years that we had a three-legged dog.

     The hay business came to an end in 1972 when Dad had a heart attack.  He was advised that the strain of caring for cattle during the cold winter could be fatal.  In a way, he was relieved by that advice, since dealing with cattle was never his favorite occupation.  He became a wheat-only farmer.

     For the last 40 years, the pasture has been rented by the same neighbors, and any hay that has been made in those 40 years has been put up by neighbors on shares.  Our share got sold and hauled by the buyer. 

Tumbling Tumbleweeds

     Back last October, Neighborly called.  “Say, would you mind if I mowed your stubble field?”  What?  Mow the stubble.  I didn’t have long to think about it.

     “I was coming home from town the other day when that wind hit (“that wind” was a strong southwest blast which spread east from the Rockies and went many states east before expending all its energy).  Tumbleweeds were moving all across the fields.  When I got home, there were tumbleweeds going over the top of my house.”

     “They had your house covered up”?

     “Not really.  But the yard was full of them and the wind was blowing so hard some of them were going clear up over the house roof.”  The pieces began to form a picture.  Southwest wind, tumbleweeds, my wheat stubble the source of the tumbleweeds.

     Doing things the “old way” means, after the wheat is harvested, the field is either left alone to grow whatever it will, or the field is fenced and cattle graze it. The dust storms of the dry 30’s and 50’s made farmers reluctant to till the soil after wheat harvest.  Leave ground cover to protect against erosion. 

     Having no cattle and little time for fence-building, I let the field go.  It grew Russian thistles and fire weeds, also known as kochia. The stems of these weeds become brittle after a freeze and the plant dies.  A good breeze snaps off the weed near ground level, and away it rolls, scattering its seed as it tumbles.

    Nowadays, the sprayer follows hard upon the combine, and the weeds don’t get a chance to grow in the wheat stubble.  Chemical fallow doesn’t spawn tumbleweeds.

     “There’s some nitrogen in those weeds.  Mowing them would keep them in the field,” he said.

      “Well sure, mow away.  I’m sorry you have to do that.  Send me a bill.”

     “Nah, I don’t want anything to do it.  Maybe it will help keep the weeds out of my yard.”

    “We will have to do something different next year,” I said thinking maybe I could build a fence and let some cows in on the stubble. 

     The mowing was done in a day.  Sometime later, I asked if mowing had kept the tumbleweeds out of the yard.  “Mmm, now they’re coming from the north,” was the answer.  Apparently a fellow “tiller of the ground” (ugh! following in Cain’s footsteps!) still exists to our north.

       Here it is nearly a year later, I didn’t have time to build a fence, and the weeds have flourished.  “We” will do something different this year.  This year, another neighbor will make hay out of the fireweed and Russian thistle, and any other weed that has had the temerity to raise its head above the level of the wheat stubble.

      Making hay out of weeds brought back memories of the 50’s, when the spring and summer were so dry we weren’t able to raise our usual millet crop, leaving us without hay to feed cattle during the winter.  So, we made hay out of the fire weeds and thistles.  I also remember using a pitch fork to pull weeds out of the fences as part of getting the pasture ready for spring grazing, and burning the weeds to keep them from rolling back into the fence as soon as the next breeze blows.

      But that’s a story for another day.

      Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the haymaking turned out to be a cooperation between neighbors.  I was drilling wheat when the 30-foot swather pulled into the weed field.  Neighborly called the Goodwife using his cell phone to say he was starting on the weeds.

      That was Saturday afternoon.  A little after noon on Sunday, the 160 acres were windrowed.  On Monday, Roger pulled in and went around the field once with his big round bailing machine.  Too damp yet.  The weeds needed a day or two to cure.

     Let’s see, hay on the ground, wheat freshly planted.  You can’t guess what happened next.  Rain.

      Well, there’s no satisfying a farmer.  He wants a rain when he wants it.  He wants it dry the rest of the time, especially for harvest and hay time.  Some dry weather is needed to plant, too. Plus a rain followed by sun and wind creates a “crust” on the soil surface that newly emerging seedlings can’t get through.

     However, the wheat first planted is  beginning to come up and looks good.

  It remains to be seen whether some of the later-planted wheat will need to be replanted.    At first I thought the windrowed weeds might have to be turned so they could dry enough to be bailed.  But the windrows are light and fluffy with plenty of room for air to get through.  A good breeze should render the weeds ready for bailing.

      Meanwhile, the truncated weeds should stay put.  With their tops cut off, they have lost their round shape and should find it difficult to go tumbling across the country when winter winds come howling across the plains.  “Stay!  Don’t go bothering the neighbors.”

Ag 501.327

      Theory and practice of Rodweeding

     Upper level course.   Instructor permission required.

Prerequisites:  Ag 401 Tillage Basics (Includes prerequisites for Ag 401—Ag 301A, Ag

     Psychology; Ag 303 USDA Regulations;   Ag 372, Horsepower on the Farm;  Ag 398,

     Basic Farm Mechanics)

Credit:  One hour (Includes 15 hour lab—lab fee required)

Lesson 1

     The rodweeder is one of the simplest tillage machines ever invented, rivaling the chisel in lack of complexity.  The machine runs a rod about one inch square beneath the surface of the soil which uproots the weeds, thus the name rodweeder.

     Early ag engineers (make that an inventive old farmer looking for a weed killer more efficient than a harrow and less disruptive to the soil than a plow or disk) found that to keep the rod below the surface of the soil it was necessary to turn the rod opposite to the direction of travel.

      The challenge was how to turn the rod backwards while dragging the machine forwards.  Most rodweeders harness a wheel used to carry the machine to turn the rod backwards.  One method used two gears, one driven by a shaft from a wheel, the other connected to the rod by a shaft.  The second gear is turned backwards by the first gear, a simple transmission.

     Other gear-driven methods used four gears and another shaft to connect the two sets of gears.  The gear machines drive the rod from one end of the rod.

    Most rodweeders use a roller chain to turn the shaft backwards.  This is accomplished by running a sprocket on the underside of the chain loop, which turns the sprocket backwards.

     This machine uses two chains to turn the rod.  One chain connects the double sprocket to a shaft or axle driven by both wheels (ratchets in both wheel hubs allows turning the machine without sliding wheels going at different speeds during the turn).  The other chain connects the double sprocket to a sprocket on the rod. 

      The chain can drive the rod from the middle of the rod by putting a sprocket on the rod.  The tradeoff is the sprocket on the rod goes into the soil deeper than the rod itself, and the sprocket and the drive chain have to be protected from the soil that will wear them out quickly.  Thus the boot with a chisel point on the bottom end.

    

    A problem with the boot is it leaves a bit more of a furrow than one would like to have.  An advantage of the chain drive is no universal joints are required as is the case for gear-driven varieties.  The chain drives probably take less maintenance than the gear drives.

                                  

      The rod is held in place by shanks with changeable points on the end.  A spool on the rod fits into a socket that bolts onto the replaceable point.  Spools and sockets are also replaceable.  The points are reversible.  When one side wears thin, remove the point, turn it over and remount.  The spools and sockets usually outlast the points.

    The rodweeder doesn’t take much horsepower to operate, so standard procedure is to hook two side by side.  The problem is, so that a little green trail doesn’t spring up where the two machines join, it is necessary to overlap the rods by six or eight inches.  This requires pulling one machine slightly in front of the other.

       Many rodweeders use cables to hitch to the tractor.  Cables allow offsetting the two machines.  A yoke keeps the machines from bumping into each other, or from straying too far apart.  The yoke fits loose enough to allow for the offset and for turning corners.

      Best use of the rodweeder is for preparing a seedbed for small grains such as wheat or barley.  While it uproots the unwanted vegetation, the rodweeder creates a firm seedbed suitable for small grains.

     (Note: if you found this lesson perfectly useless, you should bookmark it to be reread during a 3 a. m. attack of insomnia.  If it still proves useless, the class will have to be moved to the education department.)