2022, animals, Family, Farming Update, home, pets, Uncategorized

Growing

40 Comments

Today’s post comes from Ben.

It’s been raining lately and we’ve got some heat too, things are really gonna grow now. We are at 722 GDU’s, pretty close to normal, and the forecast has us climbing fast this coming week. I found a new app to show growing degree days and it shows that day last week when it was nearly 90° accumulated 25 GDU’s. Two weeks before when it was so cool, we only got two or three degrees per day. Interesting how it all works. 

The chicks we got in April are about two months old now, they hop in and out of their pen at will. And they love being outside.




When I drive out in the fields to check on crops, the neighbors beef cows come right up to the fence to see me. Their cows have always been very calm and friendly.

We saw a stray cat around the barns the other day. Perhaps that’s where all the ducklings went?

One day Kelly and I were parked. We found a nice shady spot in town between appointments and had lunch, by a park. And another car pulled up and a family got out and showed us a turtle they had picked up in the street about a block away, brought him back to get him closer to water again. We joked he spent all day getting up to that road. But there’s nowhere to go up there, it’s all city. She’s better off down at the water. Kelly told the young boy he was a hero and he grinned ear to ear.

The co-op has been out and they have sprayed the oats with a fungicide to prevent rust and sprayed the corn for weeds. It’s a little frustrating as I work so hard to follow the contours of the hill to prevent water erosion, and the spray rig will run parallel to the waterways, basically up and downhill, because they need a border for the spray pattern. And then we got 2” of rain, and the water runs down their tire tracks. It’s just bad timing. A couple more weeks the corn would be big and well-established and enough roots to hold the soil. Or if it was drier, the sprayer wouldn’t of left tracks like it did, and if we hadn’t gotten 2” that hard and fast, it wouldn’t have been a problem. 

I ordered 100 bushels of cracked corn last week, it’s the corn I throw out for the chickens and the ducks. Last summer I took the bottom off this bulk bin and cleaned all the old, moldy corn out of it. It emptied completely and cleanly this time. I have corn stored at the elevator in what’s called “grain bank“. It’s just the volume of corn, it’s not my corn exactly, and when I need corn, they deducted it from my balance. A bushel of corn is 56 pounds, so 100 bushels is 5600 pounds. (Remember I’ve talked about test weights before; when sold, it’s all about the weight.) 
The co-op cracks the corn and delivers it and puts it in the bin and the chickens and ducks enjoy it. I ordered it Friday, and it was delivered about 6:30PM Monday night. A reminder it’s not only farmers that work late, but the support people too. We appreciate it. Here’s the bin and the box inside that I get the corn from.

Ducks and chickens are doing well. Daily egg production is dropping off a bit as the summer goes on. But they’re still averaging maybe 14 eggs / day. Tuesday it was 91°. Wednesday, I got 8 eggs. Thursday I got 22 eggs.

EVER GET CAUGHT ‘PARKING’?

GIVE A NICK NAME FOR YOUR CANNOODLING

40 thoughts on “Growing”

    1. Nope. But I did verbally “chuff” enough in 7th grade English class and that discussion that the teacher finally told Me to keep my comments to myself.

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  2. First boyfriend I had (and only one in high school) was in 9th grade, before either of us could drive, so any necking (I kind of like the term “necking”) was done in our basement “rec room” – unfinished basement, but there was a fireplace down there (right under the living room one). Didn’t get caught, but only happened once or twice.

    I think I was pretty naive.- I remember going to a drive-in movie with some guy who wanted to go farther than I did – I was lucky he wasn’t overly aggressive, but I think it’s the last time I went to a drive-in with someone I didn’t know very well.

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  3. My first boyfriend and I “parked” in the boat while it was up in the boat lift at our home on Cannon Lake. It’s doubtless that my Mom could see everything from the kitchen window.

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  4. I lived at the end of the road up Jake’s Hill. We were on the back side of the big hill, part of the chain of hills from Thunder Bay to Duluth. It was a steep climb up from the lake side. But that was a prime “parking place” overlooking the town and the big lake. My father worked nights on the docks by choice so he could farm in the day. So here he came along behind the one or two cars at 10:40 at night.he made a sport of coming up slowly behind them and watching them skedaddle. Then a house was built right off that high point of the road. That ended my father’s sport. Then a local realtor started aggrandizing our road, selling lots for as much as $400. Now Jake’s Hill is called Grandview Heights.

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    1. Speaking of father Looie, he would not approve of your chicken housing. But he never asked the chickens.
      When I was 16 my father was working construction in Duluth, the docks all but closed. We moved the chicken coop up to front side of the barn by making room in the hayloft although our hayloft went all the way to the ground . Once we had the old hay out and built the basic frame built, he turned the rest over to me. That was a shock. It meant laying many many board feet of shiplap across the top side of the frame and then on the inside of the new coop. I had learned about laying shiplap in detail starting at about age 10. The lumber we had cut and sawed then had milled. It could be a bit wonky, requiring tricks yo bend it into place. I could still lay shiplap eith as much pleasure as I did then. Then I built the roost and brought in the nesting boxes. My mother and I laid the sawdust and moved the chickens. They took to it immediately.?

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      2. So my coop isn’t fancy enough for Looie? It was the old corn crib; we kept ear corn in it. The photo is just one side and it started as a pen for the young chicks. Then the older ones started using it and they prefer to roost on the side panel there. Some of them. Some are up in the rafters, but I couldn’t get a good photo of them. Chickens don’t fly, but they hop really well and they can work their way up to the rafters without too much trouble. Here to there, to there, to there.

        Shiplap; that’s all my dad used for a lot of years too. The styles changed a bit over the years so some has grooves in the middle and some doesn’t.

        I’ll have to show you pictures of the main pen and nest boxes. Hopefully Looie would approve of them. 🙂

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        3. That includes the three roosters and some older, retired chickens. I’ve always said I’m running a chicken retirement farm.
          Older chickens may only lay an egg every couple days. Plus there’s about 5 being ‘broody’, so they’re not laying.

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        6. About 15 hens and one rooster. They laid about 8-10 a day on an average. Lower in winter even though they were in the cattle-heated barn.

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        8. As I understand it, egg production is also affected by light. Most chickens lay more eggs in spring and summer when they are exposed to more natural daylight. Thanks to tim’s delivery service, I now have twelve colorful eggs in my fridge from Ben’s farm.

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        9. Yes I use a 15 watt light bulb on a timer in the winter. They need 16 hours of light to lay the most eggs.
          I have it turned off now, and will turn on again maybe late August.

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  6. i had a girlfriend or two between wives and one was a hottie who set up a date downtown in a night when it was 25 below. when i met her there she told me to leave the minivan running and we sat and had a drink or two and she wanted to go out to the van i went out and she said let’s get in back and she revealed that she was totally naked beneath the full length fur coat she had just bought and as she was having her way with me a parking lot attendant thought he’d be a good neighbor and shut off the car left running in the parking lot and he was so embarrassed but i was not affected in any way. thanks for the replay ben
    i hadn’t thought about that in 20 years

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      1. That made me laugh! In response to that I am so tempted to claim that I was the woman involved, but, no. Sure is funny, though. I hope no one got “frost-butt.”

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  7. Stepped out on patio last evening and three turkeys were Easter Parading by. They looked at me and came over to check me out. I guess I looked hamrless so they walked on down Fiften Avenue.

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  8. I would park down a field road. Now that I know better, I’m sure dad saw the tracks. He could (and I’ve learned) how to tell fresh tracks in a gravel road; I know if the feed truck has been in by the tracks in the gravel plus he’d see the tracks in the grass field road.
    A few times we parked on some lonely stretch of road elsewhere. My sisters talk about being caught on the road by dad.

    Our driveway was popular for that until we put the gates up. Now they park in the shaded part of the township road leading into our road. There’s more traffic there than they think and between us and the neighbors, we interrupt a lot of action. I call myself Mr Coitus Interruptus.

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  10. I am just back from a girls’ weekend at Lake Okoboji with my high school girlfriends. I knew these people since I was 7 years old and one of them was at my 7th birthday party. It was my first solo venture out of the house in the 6 weeks since my surgery. I am thrilled to announce that I did it! I rested a lot. I also learned that a linear foot of lakeshore on Lake Okoboji is priced at $14000. On nearby Spirit Lake and West Okoboji each linear foot runs “only” $4000-6000. A bargain.

    Conversational Connoodlings were as follows:

    *Aches and pains—we are all old now. There were 2 canes and 1 walker in the group (none of those were mine)
    *The lack of girls’ athletic opportunities when we were young
    *The apple tree in Debbie’s back yard
    *When our parents died
    *How Debbie’s mother taught me and many women in town, to knit
    *Retirement
    *Gossip
    *How on a 6th grade field trip to Wells Blue Bunny Dairy, Jimmy Miller, who spent most of 6th grade sitting in the hallway because he was so naughty, spit in the vat of cottage cheese we were looking at and ruined it.

    We were all talking about what squeaky clean teen-angers we were, which was true. I broke up with my High School Boy Friend because I had more fun with my girlfriends. I did not ever try parking with anyone until after high school. Never got caught then.

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  13. Sounds like I might have missed out, but making out in a car was just not something that was within the realm of possibilities when I was a teen. For one thing, no one had a car. Also, you have to be at least 18 to get a driver’s license, and they are expensive. So being caught “parking” is one of the calamities that I was spared. Found plenty of other way of getting in trouble, though.

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    1. Yes, I do think they’re in a car.

      I also think that Wake Up Little Susie was about a couple in a car at a drive-in – if it wasn’t a drive-in, someone would have woken them up and shooed them out.

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