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Quackers

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Today’s Farming Update comes from Ben

Sometimes, the day doesn’t go as planned, does it.

Our power went off Monday morning at about 6:30AM. I was leaving to take the rented post hole digger back when I met a truck from the power company on the other side of a down tree over the road. That guy cut up the tree while I went back home for the tractor, and I pushed the tree off the road. He and I talked about how to check the electric line. (Our house is the only house on the mile long electric line from the North road to the South road, and it’s through the pasture and across a creek, and up a steep hill). They found a tree down on the steep hill that took out the line, but they were able to get to a flat spot and cut the line and isolate it so they could feed us from the North end. One of the guys commented that this must be an old line from the first few years of the electric co-ops. (The Rural Electrification Administration, REA, was started by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935) My dad would talk about using horses to pull the electric lines and poles through the pasture in about 1940, and how they laid there until WWII was over.

Getting to the North end was a little more difficult for the guys. It was muddy, and still raining, and the first truck got stuck, and they had to get a ‘track style’ bucket truck in to make the connection and pull the first truck back out. Meanwhile, I got the generator out—hadn’t used that in 10 years, so it was a good time to make sure it still worked. As I was pumping up the tires with a cordless air pump, the power came back on. Of course. But I ran it for an hour anyway. Still works! It was 1:30PM. I teased the electric guys –they didn’t know what they were getting into when they stopped at that downed tree at 7AM.

I got my post holes all dug. Surprisingly, only hit rock in 3 of the 12 holes. Then down to the pole barn and dug some holes there to add support posts to three posts that are nearly rotted off at the ground. It has
rained most of the week. I haven’t got much done on the fence because I need to pack the dirt back around the posts, and it doesn’t pack when it’s mud or clay. My summer padawan has helped pull the first wire and tear out the old fence. Maybe next week, when it’s not raining so much, we’ll get back to installation.


We’ve gotten enough rain, for now, almost 6” for June, not counting whatever we get Friday evening here. Growing Degree Units are just over 1000, about 180 above normal. The crops mostly look pretty good.
The oats have some color change on the different soils, the corn is almost canopied, and the soybeans are coming along. There are some wet spots in some fields, but thankfully, that lake isn’t in my field.

Got the 4-wheeler running with the new carburetor.


Ducklings arrived Friday morning.


WOULD YOU RATHER GO WITHOUT RUNNING WATER OR ELECTRICITY?

24 thoughts on “Quackers”

  1. Ben, my mother took hundreds of slides, which I digitalized and shared with my siblings. What my sister and I wish she had taken were pictures of daily life. She took only one picture of her vegetable gardens. No picture of hay going into the barn. She did take three pictures of trees being sawed into wood. None of digging the potatoes. I hope you two keep take pictures of things like that for your retirement years.

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    2. I think about my grandmothers diaries. She talked about a lot of stuff, but not the daily milking cows or doing chores. She’d reference some local place, but I have no idea what that is anymore. As I do my own journals, sometimes I try to reference things with a little more explanation. yet i know in 60 years, should someone read these, they’ll be thinking ‘blog? What blog is he talking about?’

      Or who’s this Paul he keeps referencing…

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  3. Boy that is a tough one. If no electricity meant no heat in the winter, I guess I’d opt for having that, and carry the water in. But as Wes said – for how long are we talking?

    At one time I thought I’d like to live “off the grid”. That was in my twenties, when I had seemingly unlimited energy to do things like carry water, figure out kerosene lamps… Now in my 70s, not so much.

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons, from JacAnon,

    This question took me right back to my grandparents’ farm which had a house without running water or an indoor toilet. At some point it had been electrified, but there was evidence in the house of pre-electrification–kerosene lamps and lamp burns on the edges of cupboard doors. My mother said to me that “We carried every drop of water we used.” Grandma’s sink area eventually had a hand pump with water piped in, but that froze in the winter.

    I don’t really think I want to live that way. Three times Saturday through Tuesday we had hours-long electricity outages. I did not like that either. Indoor camping, really, is what that is.

    OT–I am now Lou’s social secretary. We have a great social support system, but somebody has to manage it. This past week friends came to visit for 2 days, then we invited another family for a BBQ that was so much fun. We are going to visit his uncle at the VA Monday; his cousin is coming too; he has daily Parkinson’s Functional Living classes; there are caregivers here twice a week. Good Grief! Was he ever this busy before Lewy Body Dementia?

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        2. Don’t be jealous. We have had a cherry tragedy. The tree is loaded with ripened cherries that split, molded, then rotted because some of the rains came exactly at the wrong time. Just as the cherries were ripening, the generous rain gorged them with water and they split. And the rain kept me from harvesting them when they needed to be picked. Uff Da. So far I have 10 cups of harvested, pitted cherries.

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        5. this may not have been a good year for strawberries either for this reason. That’s why I picked mine a week and a half ago when they first started ripening because I saw all the rain on the forecast.

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  5. I’m not sure. Like most people, I’m very dependent on the systems we have for making life easier. I think I could go without electricity for a day or two but I wouldn’t want it to last longer than that. Being without water isn’t healthy and I don’t have a strong back for carrying it in. Also, I have stairs from the garage to the kitchen. If I ever lose my ability to climb stairs I won’t be able to live here. Carrying jugs of water up those stairs is no fun. I have two 3-gallon reusable plastic water jugs that I refill at the grocery store but I do that less and less, simply because I don’t want to carry those jugs up the stairs when they’re full. So I think I’d rather be without electricity, as long as it doesn’t last too long and it’s not too cold out.

    Waterville is inundated with flood water. There are places in Waterville that are on such low ground – basically filled wetland before there were laws against that. Those homes shouldn’t have been built in those locations, but what’s done is done. People live there now and they are suffering. All that water is coming through Faribault now and the river areas in downtown Faribault are flooded. Two rivers meet in Faribault, the Cannon and the Straight. The Straight River goes past the Stone House. I helped move things out of the garage yesterday and up the hill. But the video from Rice County Emergency Management shows extensive flooding there and no travel is advised in Faribault. Northfield is next. I know some volunteers spent the entire night sand-bagging along the river in downtown Northfield. I’m grateful for these people. My back hurts really bad today and I know I can’t go help anymore. I’d like to help though. I’ve never seen so much water in Faribault. It’s going to be a disaster area here.

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  6. We carried water into the house and had no electricity from my age of less than 1 to about 10 and no electricity. I carried much of the warmer after age 6. I have no bad memories of that. It was just the way it was. We pumped water to the cattle. The pump sat much higher than the barn.
    Oddly, my apartment had only lukewarm water this morning.
    Clyde

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  8. I would choose water to go without

    electricity branched into many areas during my thoughts of this question.

    water would be tough but a single challange I could wrap my brain around

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  9. I have never had to do without either water or electricity for more than short stretches in my life.

    I have a medical device that requires electricity, In an outage it wouldn’t be an immediate emergency, but if it became a prolonged outage, I would think about getting a generator.

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