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Dry

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Today’s Farming Update comes from Ben

Daughters program held their second annual prom on Friday. It was fun to see the participants dressed up and waving and dancing. Daughter came out blowing kisses. That’s been her thing from her cheerleading days. She loves the limelight. She does have a tendency to light up a room when she enters. I had to laugh, staff asked me if I could tie a tie and I did that for a couple of the gentlemen. Another lost skill that means I’m old. And I thanked my dad for teaching me how to tie a tie.

On Tuesday night, Kelly and I had dinner at the Mayo Clinic Foundation house. It is the former home of Dr. William J. Mayo and his wife Hattie Damon Mayo. We were there for the Pathology Residents Graduation, the program that Kelly works with. It was a full 5 course meal with 3 forks, 3 glasses, a charger plate

and food I couldn’t pronounce, and was held up in the third floor Balfour Hall. (The Mayo’s oldest daughter, Carrie, was married to Dr. Balfour) We had time to snoop around the house and see some Frederic Remington statues, Dr. Will’s study, and wonder at living in such a place as this. The gentleman who was the guide said he’s been there for 18 years.



I’m still working on the shop project. I don’t feel like I got much done on it this week; Been busy with ‘stuff’, just not that stuff. Last Friday they poured the outside slab of cement and I’ve started to back fill that. It needs about 10 days before I can start driving tractors on it. I picked up some windows for the shop and hope to get them in next week.

It’s not like I’ve been busy cutting grass…

The baby chicks are doing real well, just starting to get tail feathers. Of the eggs I put in the incubator, we only got the one early chick, and then we got five guineas. Kelly spent several hours on Saturday trying to convince one of our broody hens that they’d like to be the mom they think they’re already doing in their heads. But none of them wanted anything to do with an actual live chick. We tried getting them to sit on some actual eggs over in a side pen, but they didn’t want that either. You can lead a hen to eggs, but you can’t make her sit on them. The guineas are living in a cardboard box in our entryway.


Crops are still looking pretty rough. The oats is just starting to head out, (we call that the ‘boot stage’), and, according to the seed dealers, they haven’t seen any oat fields in our area that look good. It’s about knee high. It should be almost waist high. I expect there will still be an oats crop, it just won’t be that great. And with the shorter height, there won’t be as much straw either.


The corn is still doing all right, it’s about knee-high. It will be canopied soon. But it’s coming up on a point when it will be taking up massive amounts of nutrients and moisture. Moisture requirements are between .2 to.3”/day at its peak and this will also be when the length and girth of the ear are set. Stress then makes bad yields well before the ears even show up.

My Soybeans. Ugh. They still look terrible.

There are plants out there, but they’re small, and many haven’t emerged. I drove to Northfield on Wednesday, and it appears if you were able to plant soybeans early enough, and they got some of that moisture in the ground, they got off to a good start. A lot of beans were planted in dry ground and it just hasn’t rained. I’m wondering if it wasn’t also the fact I planted with the drill, and most are planted with a planter, and that gave them better seed to soil contact than I got. Seed to soil contact is important, and most years I haven’t had a problem, perhaps because it’s rained. So, this crop feels like it’s already 3 weeks behind, even though it was planted when it should have been. We’ll see.

I baled the roadsides on Thursday. Not much there. I cut some waterways too and got 50 bales total. Most years I have 70 bales just on the road. The camera I added last year to watch the twine strings, was super helpful!

I find it interesting how the tools change by the size of the tractor. Our oldest tractor, the little, two cylinder John Deere 630, has a plain wood handled hammer, a straight screwdriver, and an 8 inch adjustable wrench in the toolbox. Our next tractor, the 6410, the one I use for just about everything, has two 10 inch adjustable wrenches, two screwdrivers, a claw hammer with a fiberglass handle, and some various adapters. Then our big tractor, the 8200, has a 12 inch wrench, socket set, a 4 pound sledge hammer, and one large screwdriver / pry bar in the toolbox. The bigger the tractor, the bigger, the tools I guess. It seems like, when I was growing up, we fixed a lot more things out in the field. Every tractor had various nuts and bolts, and chain links in the toolbox. Add a piece of wire from a nearby fence and you could repair and keep going. These days I don’t hardly fix anything out in the field. It doesn’t seem like things break as much, or it’s something I have to go home to fix.

My shadow, Bailey, has to go everywhere I go. Humphrey just keeps an eye on me so he knows where I am but then he might go sleep at the house. I was laying on the floor of the shop, on my new cement, changing the drawbar length on the tractor and there’s Bailey, right in my face to help. I can appreciate that she wants to be my friend and she’s such a good dog and she makes me laugh, but does she have to be my friend from half an inch away? Can’t she be my friend from 6 inches away?

She also had a 12” piece of barb wire stuck in her coat and trailing behind her. Eventually I was able to snip off the part of her fur holding it tight.

EVER HAD ANYTHING SNAGGED IN YOUR HAIR?

34 thoughts on “Dry”

  2. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    In 2011 Lou and I traveled to San Fransisco so I could attend a conference on Prolonged Exposure (an anxiety reduction technique that can be used with PTSD). It was a well-timed and great conference that also helped me avoid the remodeling going on in our offices.

    San Fransisco is challenging to navigate and walk to where you want to be, so I stood next to a building to study my map, and felt a warm liquid hit my head and run down into my shirt collar. I looked up (with my mouth firmly closed) to see pigeons. Of course. I still shudder to remember it. The responses to this question must include the ubiquitous bird poo experience.

    OT: we are in my mother’s last days. Her hospice nurse says she is very fragile. Next Tuesday, if she is still with us, I will go to sit with her, then travel to my high school friends’ reunion at Lake Okoboji. This waiting is rough.

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    1. So sorry, Jacque, it must be extra difficult because of the distance between you. My friend Philip, has been lingering like that for months now. When I saw him two weeks ago, he was too weak to speak, didn’t know me, and seemed pretty out of it. On Wednesday of this week, he was alert, able to talk and visit, and ate and ice cream. I’ll see him again this afternoon, but there’s no doubt that the end is very near.

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  3. I got pooped on by a robin once. The poop was in my hair and down the back of my shirt. Maybe that’s part of the reason that I’m not a big fan of robins. They do poop a lot and I haven’t entirely forgiven them. Messy, noisy birds that they are.

    This will sound utterly foolish to some of you but I got my hair stuck in a roller brush once and had to cut the brush out of my hair. My hair is long and thick enough to get really tangled. Looking in a mirror is a mistake because your brain tells your hand to turn the brush one way but that’s backwards. I’ve learned not to look in the mirror too much when using a roller brush or worse, a roller hair dryer.

    I’ve had gum stuck in my hair too. Someday I will cut my hair very, very short, but that day hasn’t arrived yet.

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      1. Add me to the “gum stuck in hair” club. I remember my mother using an ice cube to try to freeze it – only partially successful. So like many kids of my era, I just lost a little chunk of hair when she finally gave up and snipped it out!

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  4. It is dry here too but the corn the farmer planted by me looks quite good. Soybeans across the road look much better than yours but much of the crops will not be harvested. The gas station has opened the flood gates and plots are being sold off fast.
    Haying season always meant grease in my hair from crawling under things with a grease gun and to fix things. Boots found our repair work too static. He might as well go find some good shade to nap. Boots used to get sticks tangled in his long hair. If the sticks were a nuisance he asked to have them cut out. We trimmed his belly hair and feathers back in early summer.
    I see little boys are wearing their hair short like we did in my early childhood.

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  5. I remember getting my hair stuck in one of those “all day” suckers like a tootsie roll pop, but long and narrow – wasn’t there one called Holloway? Can’t find yet…
    And I’m sure I had gum stick in my hair at some point.

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