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EVIDENTLY IT’S WINTER

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This weeks farming update from Ben

Whew.

Ah.

Sigh………….

[Getting check-book out]

Groan.

Eyeroll.

Sigh. (In through the nose, out through the mouth)…………….

(There was several sighs)

I hope everyone had another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.* We had ham, mashed potatoes simmered in milk rather than boiled in water, cheesy biscuits (Gluten free. From a box. Red Lobster brand and very yummy.) and stuffing. I basted the ham with Dr. Pepper, then used a honey- whiskey-jam-glaze. Later, cleaning up, I almost made it to the garage door with the foil pan of ham juice and Dr. Pepper before I dropped it. The dogs enjoyed it. I threw out the rug.

Corn is out. All of it. They finished the last field on Wednesday. They got most of it out on Monday. Monday night I was able to chisel plow some of it. Tuesday it rained all afternoon. I kinda thought I’d have Wednesday to work up more corn ground, and then the weather people started predicting snow and I revised my work schedule. I was busy all day Tuesday, but decided to skip a rehearsal on Tuesday night and stay home to farm. And then it kept raining. And raining. Not a lot, maybe half an inch? But I knew I had to try. I worked until midnight chisel plowing. And I got everything that was harvested worked up. Yeah, it was a little muddy. But there’s enough corn trash (the stalks and leaves) that traction wasn’t really an issue, I just left a lot of mud on the road. Which is now frozen and kinda lumpy. It would have been nice to get the tractor and chisel plow washed off before winter really set in, but oh well. A good rain shower in April will do that too I guess. 

“A bad job of tillage in the fall is better than a good job of tillage in the spring”. 

That phrase has a lot of factors involved. In the spring, if it’s a good day for planting and I’m waiting for it to be dry enough to chisel plow, that puts me further behind for planting. It’s all a race against the clock and the weather. The sooner planted, the better. I’m very glad to have gotten done what I did. It was just starting to snow as I was working up the last field.

Yields seem to be pretty good. Test weight was good at 57 or 58 pounds per bushel. Corn price is based on 56 pounds per bushel, so anything over that is a bonus. Takes less corn to make a bushel, so therefore better test weight means more bushels. Moisture of the grain was 17-18%. It needs to be dried to 15% for storage, so there’s a fee for the elevator to dry it. Plus, shrinkage. Those extra points are water in the kernel, meaning a tiny bit of swelling. Meaning the elevator docks the total bushels (gross weight divided by the test weight) by some factor that they have devised, to give me ‘dry bushels’ meaning less bushels for me. (Any margin goes to the elevator.) For example, I had a load of corn with a gross weight of 84,800 pounds, truck and grain, at 17% moisture and 58 test weight. (When the truck pulls up to the elevator, there is a tube that plunges down into the corn, and sucks up a sample into the office, and they test it for moisture and weight. That’s where those figures come from.) Once the tare weight is determined when the truck is empty, the balance is the grain. In this case, 58,980 lbs. Divided by 56 (bushel weight) gives us 1053 bushels gross. Minus the moisture shrinkage gives us dry bushels of 1024. Shrinkage. This is why some farmers store their corn at home. They can dry it cheaper, they’re not paying for the shrinkage, and they can perhaps sell the corn at a better price later. Course there’s the cost of the bins and trucks and the entire operation, and managing the corn to keep it in good shape in the bin. And I simply don’t raise enough corn to make a pay back. I know, too much information again.

December 1, most of my loans will change their interest rates. So I used an operating loan to pay off all the fertilizer and chemical loans from spring and summer, and I’ll use the corn check, once I get it, to pay back the operating loan. 

We’re gonna be a little bit short this year. A few thousand dollars. Not the end of the world. 

The deer! East of our buildings is Silver Creek, and acres of woods and pasture. It’s a deer haven. I came over a hill and there had to be 35 deer standing there. Later that night, coming down the driveway, I bet I saw 100 sets of eyes. Deer all over! Stupid deer.

We only got a dusting of snow that night. Perhaps more coming Saturday? Every guess is different so we’ll just wait and see. I did plug in the water tank heater, the chickens heated water bucket, the heat tape on a water pipe in the barn, and turned on the ‘block heater’ in the house. I moved a pile of dirt that was inside the shed, left over from the concrete work. Added dirt to the edges of the new concrete, and added rock to the edge of the front walkway concrete. Got the snow blower in the shed and the rear blade on the tractor. Moved some other stuff from outside inside. And installed driveway markers late Friday. Kelly and I did the snowfence last weekend. Typically we do it the weekend after thanksgiving. We decided last week seemed like better weather. Good choice. 

I also mixed up the bags of cement last Saturday and got that done. tim, it’s all the same color. 

We’ve been watching ‘The Landman’ on TV, and it’s based on a podcast called ‘Boomtown’. So I listened to that in the tractor while doing fieldwork. It was a very interesting look at the oil boom- and busts- of the Permian oil fields in Texas. Me and Bailey had quality tractor time. She wasn’t interested in the podcast.

In the last month, I finished the college show, a Mantoville show, a Rep show, some outside rentals at the college, and the crops. No wonder I can’t keep track of what day it is. I knew I just had to get through this week. I don’t have ANY EVENING EVENTS this coming week. Next week will be the holiday concerts at the College. A couple afternoon rehearsals, and two evening performances. There is light at the end of the tunnel. 

Everytime I go into the shop I think how wonderful this is and how lucky I am. 

Remember the chicken that hatched some chicks a month ago? They’re bigger than pigeons now and with the weather changing, decided it was time to let them out of the pen. 

The first night momma brought them all into the garage.

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There are seven chicks. Two are on the floor or something. It was a whole big thing trying to get them all up on the garbage can. Perching takes practice.

After that, mom ditched them all. She’s still spending the nights in the garage, kids are left where ever she leaves them. I try to get all seven of them together at night, but it just depends.

There’s still some chickens laying eggs out in the pole barn. I would appreciate it if they’d lay them closer to the ground rather than 12′ up.

Does anyone here read the Smithsonian Magazine? 

I really enjoy it; it always has such interesting articles. The November issue has an article on the man who created and started the Hardy Boys books. I think I read them? I don’t remember them making a big impact, and I’m not sure if it was those or we had Nancy Drew. As usual, I expect mom picked them up used from someone, so we only had a few. 

*Thank you Arlo Guthrie

Finishing corn
A harvested field!
The last field. Done.
Snow in the furrows of a plowed field makes you feel good about your life choices.
I am thankful for good lights on the tractor.
Thank you Tractor and implement.
Chicken hot tub
Chickens in the pole barn enjoying the sun.

WHAT GOT YOU READING?

WHAT CHILDHOOD INFLUENCES DO YOU STILL HAVE?

60 thoughts on “EVIDENTLY IT’S WINTER”

  1. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I had a hard time learning to read because my family was in crisis around the time kids learn to read–dad was ill, my brother was born needing an entire blood transfusion due to RH factor and they thought he would be disabled (he was not) and then we moved. After all that, it took a long time to learn to read. My mother ordered a set of books and spent many ours teaching me to read. Mabel the Whale was my favorite book. Mabel’s fin got sunburned and the main characters had to help Mabel heal then return to the ocean. AFter I finally learned to read, then I discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books and I was forever hooked!

    Thanksgiving reminded me of the influence of my maternal grandmother, who was so capable in many ways. We would have all been stranded without her. I still do things she taught me (egg coffee, darning, etc).

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  2. My sister taught me to read as I was approaching 4. Probably with her school materials. I have told before how we played school. She was the teacher often using her school lessons. My early reading that I can recall were little big books that floated around the neighborhood. Now that I think about it, I think she used golden books to teach me to read. They also floated around the neighborhood.
    Aren’t we all the product of our childhood influences, for good or bad. My father was an angry old man, something I fought not to become, and I have succeeded.

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  3. We had a few of the Little Golden Books, Santa’s Toy Shop was one (I have the version from 1952 – later editions omit one of the two-sided pages). I memorized The Night Before Christmas and would turn the page appropriately, so people thought I was reading it.
    I guess I actually learned to read along with everyone else in First Grade.

    The music from my mom is one thing. And there’s always this pull to “be different” from her, tempered with “but not too different, and make us proud” from my dad.

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  4. My mother was a Grade 3 teacher and she and my dad showered me with books. My dad i loved to read to me. As an only child, I often had no one to play with, so I filled up the alone time with books.

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  5. My sister was three years older than me. When she was learning reading, she taught it to me after school. This is, I’m told, a learning tool called the Protégé Effect, which benefits both parties. She was cementing her own skills when she taught me, and I was getting a head start on reading. We had a few Dr. Seuss books, which use language in predictable rhyming ways, but also unpredictable whimsical ways. The early experience made me a lifelong reader.

    A great deal of my reading is now on e-reader or audiobook, but I still like having books around, and I have many of the children’s books that made impressions on me. Charlotte’s Web, Black Beauty, the Little House books, Mary Poppins, Dr. Doolittle.

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  6. My parents weren’t interested in teaching, not even me. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Smith, took me in hand and taught me to read. I’m forever grateful to her.

    I agree that our childhood influences follow us throughout our lives. Like Clyde, I try very hard not to be like my dad.

    I’m having enormous trouble reading and typing. I have a new “helper” around the house. Her name is Maggie. I got very little sleep last night and now I’m trying to entertain her while typing. You’re lucky I deleted all the typing she helped me with! Her name is Maggie and if someone can help me with a photo, I’d be happy to share one.

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      1. Yes! She’s a cockapoo at about 11 weeks old. She was so docile last night! Today she’s a different puppy! Into everything and she can’t tolerate when I open my iPad to read. Napping right now. May I email it to you?

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  7. I learned to read early, before kindergarten. We had some Little Golden Books and other picture books, and I learned from having my parents read them to me over and over and over (they gave me a hard time about it for years; my mom could recite some of those books from memory).

    I was a voracious reader. Winters in a little house in the middle of nowhere on the Iron Range were long, so there was lots of time to read. Beverly Cleary, Robert McCloskey, Caroline Heywood, Maud Hart Lovelace, Laura Ingalls Wilder, collections of fairy tales and Greek myths. Someone gave me Nancy Drew for Christmas and I got hooked on those.

    My dad’s side of the family, especially my grandparents and dad’s sister, were the biggest influences who shaped me. Everything that interests me can be traced back to them (reading, writing, art, music, history, cooking, politics, cats). My grandparents lived in a very old house with a big yard and gardens. The house was crammed with books, cookbooks, paintings done by my aunt and uncles, a piano with piles of sheet music, and all kinds of treasures.

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  8. I remember being read to at bedtime from Golden books when I was very young. Neither parent was much of a reader themselves and the books in our house were mostly for me — a couple of fairytale anthologies and a set of encyclopedias — but as soon as I could read, I read. I had scrounged from my grandparent’s attic some books that had been my dad’s or his brother’s when they were growing up. They were mostly volumes out of boys series, with titles like The Newsboy Partners and The Boy from the Ranch, but there was also Oliver Curwood’s Nomads of the North and a copy of Swiss Family Robinson that I read multiple times.
    My parents were friends with a couple who had no children of their own. For some reason they took a shine to me and gave me several books from the Oz series (I still have them).

    I couldn’t say that any one person influenced me philosophically. I have always regarded my parents as individuals with their own experiences and beliefs but I never felt obligated to emulate them. I learned some basic skills from my dad that I have used in maintaining our home and some rudimentary cooking skills from my mother but I am not a copy.

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  9. I’m a classic “my mother read to me”. We didn’t have a lot of money in those days so we didn’t have a lot of books. I had 10 or 12 of my own and she read them to me over and over again. In fact, there were people who thought I could read when I was four because by that time I had memorized all of the books and even where to turn the pages so it looked like I was reading, but I didn’t actually learn to read till I was in kindergarten from a wonderful teacher, Mrs. Anderson.

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    1. Of course, once Mrs. Anderson taught me to read and I discovered libraries, the barn doors were open, and the horse was not going back. Almost every title that everyone has already mentioned was on my reading list when I was young. I also read Nancy Drew but honestly, I like the Hardy Boys better. One of the elementary schools that I was in when I was in first grade had a series of historical books, each of which was exactly 200 pages long. Ben Franklin, Paul Revere a lot of other historical figures. I read them all. I read Wrinkle in Time (one of my lifetime favorites) right after it came out when I was 7 and that led me to The Dark is Rising then Ursula LeGuin. I’ve never looked back.

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      2. Neither Frank Dixon (The Hardy Boys) or Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew) were real people. The books were all ghostwritten by various people. I wonder why the Hardy Boys were better?

        Were the history books you mention the Landmark series? I had one about Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox and a couple of others I can’t remember

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        1. Further research sort of answers my question. The bulk of the first Hardy Boys books were written by a Canadian writer, Leslie McFarlane. The majority of the first Nancy Drews were written by Mildred Hirt Benson. So there were personal styles at play.

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        2. It’s most likely that those were Landmark.

          I’m not exactly sure why I like the Hardy boys better. I think it may have been that they seemed a little more adventuresome and freer. Let’s face it that Ned was a little bit of a drip and he was always hanging around Nancy.

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  10. OT. The passive aggressive battle of the lights has begun for the season. We put up the tree this morning. It has eight or so settings for the lights and YA and I each have our favorites. So as soon as the tree was on. I turned on my favorite. Then I went out and did a project on the front porch for about 15-20 minutes when I came back in, her favorite setting was on. She’s gone upstairs right now so we’re back to my favorite setting, which is the twinkling multicolor.

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  11. I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure mom read to me. And I know they both read a lot, and just provided me lots of books and opportunities.
    The ‘I can Read’ books: Danny the Dinosaur, The Firehouse Cat, Mittens for ___?, and so many others.
    And I loved loved loved the scientific encyclopedia’s that came with the 1969 set of Grolliers Encyclopeias. I read them / looked through them over and over.
    And then Laura Ingells Wilder was a favorite too. When I found a copy of Catch 22, left by an older sibling, mom didn’t approve me reading that. Well, what better way to encourage reading than to forbid it!

    My cousin David was a big influence in my younger years. It wasn’t all a positive influence.

    Course I learned so much from dad. Some of that protege effect mentioned.

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  12. My Mom started teaching me reading while I was in her womb by reading. Later, she taught reading phonetically. Already reading in first grade.
    We used the same pattern for our kids which caused some issues for them. Because they read so well, they were placed in advanced learners programs for which they were not qualified. My parental ego got the better of me in allowing that. They were/are excellent students but not geniuses.

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  13. Well, I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but now, after a month of being able to like everything, I’m back to not being able to like comments to the main blog.

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      2. Oh for crying out loud, after resubscribing twice, I’m now anonymous but I can leave a reply (log in optional). I’ll try logging in and see what happens.

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  14. As I’ve mentioned before, I was a late reader. In retrospect, I’m wondering whether growing up in a bilingual household had something to do with that. (I was three and one half years old when we arrived in Denmark, my sister was a little over a year old.)

    We had access to books both in Danish and English, both with lots of illustrations, and I tended to make up my own stories as I “read” the pictures. Mom always spoke to my sister and me in English; dad and everyone else spoke Danish, and so did Randi and I, much to mother’s dismay and frustration.

    Alice in Wonderland and a couple of books of nursery rhymes were in English. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and other little kids’ books were in Danish.

    Once I learned to read at the age of seven, I immediately got a library card. Also, the boarding school where I was a boarder for a little over three years, gave easy access to all kinds of children’s literature, including the Anders And magazine (a weekly magazine dedicated to the Danish version of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and his buddies.) There were several popular series of books dedicated to the exploits of Danish teen sleuths, the counterparts to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, I imagine; I’ve never read either.

    A lot of what I read as a teen was written in English, German, and Russian and translated into Danish. It wasn’t until I went to college at age twenty-six, that I was exposed to some of those books in the original language. (Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, Baroness Orczy, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Hesse, Joseph Conrad). Imagine being introduced to Shakespeare in Danish!

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      1. English was the first language I spoke, so I suppose that makes it my first language. By the time I was four, I spoke only Danish. As I moved through my childhood and youth, English was a language that I understood at a very rudimentary level, but never spoke. When English language classes became mandatory in high school, I got a solid C.

        Like tim, I didn’t know a noun from a verb, an adjective from an adverb, or a pronoun from a conjunction. Grammar was a mystery to me. I could speak English reasonably fluently simply because I had learned to speak it as little children do, but I had no idea what the rules were that governed proper usage. I’m still pretty hazy about all of that.

        In college, I got kicked out of my English as a Second Language class after the first week because I was asking questions about grammatical rules, so I never really learned them. My English papers were returned to me littered with corrections to my punctuation and English (as opposed to American) spelling, and comments such as “comma splice!”; I knew I was making a mistake of some sort, but it was never clear to me what the offense was.

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  15. I don’t remember exactly when I learned to read or who taught me. I’m pretty sure Mom must have read to me since we had a bunch of Golden Books. I have been a voracious reader as long as I can remember. When we got the World Book encyclopedias I read nearly every one of them cover to cover. Dad got the Reader’s Digest Condensed books for a long time. I read every one of those as well. In fact, I’m not sure if he read any of them – they sat proudly on my bedroom bookshelf. I wasn’t into the Nancy Drew series – more into the Bobbsey Twins. But I did love the Hardy Boys.
    I don’t recall my parents reading much (except the newspaper or magazines) but both my sisters and my three nieces are all avid readers.

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  16. I have tried several times to remember and have sister Cleo help me remember where books came from in my early childhood. We both mostly draw a blank. She remembers the Bobbsey Twins in the house. I know I read some but was not fond of them. No Hardy Boys books were there. My parents did not bring us to the library. My parents subscribed to farming magazines and bought Saturday Evening Post. I read them cover to cover, or just about. When I was in first grade the principal, Miss Priest, brought us to the school library and read Puss in Boots. I thought to myself what is this nonsense. I had never read a fantasy sort of book. As first graders we were not allowed to take out books that had real reading content. My teacher and Miss Priest were both very upset about the three in our classroom who could read. We would never learn to read properly you know.

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    1. The farming magazines. Of course I loved looking through those and all the pictures of tractors. Hoards Dairyman, Farm Journal, Successful Farming, The Furrow (that’s John Deere’s trade magazine).
      The milk equipment companies had some, the dairy we sold to had one.

      I don’t remember mom getting any women’s magazines. Even later in life.
      Of course they got Readers Digest. I would always read the joke sections. Later on when I realised condensed books meant they were edited it just made me mad about that.

      And dad loved his Westerns. His bathroom was full of Western books. He had all the Louis L’Amour books. I read a few. It seemed like real simple writing and I didn’t like that either.
      I was surprised, and a little excited to realize there was often one or two pretty steamy sections!
      Now that I think about it, THAT’S probably what got me reading. Looking for more steamy stuff!

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      2. My dad was a contradiction and reading terms. Scientific American, Astro physics, all kinds of heavy stuff. But he also adored Louis l’Amour and Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially the John Carter on Mars series. I admit I have not read any more but I have read a couple of the John Carter since my dad liked him so much. I found some interesting ideas.

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  18. I realize after reading your comments I forgot to mention the library! That became really important, with only the Little Golden Books… We went regularly, and took out plenty of books each time, I think. I remember Curious George, the Boxcar Children series…

    In college I finally discovered children’s literature via a course in the Elem. Education program, and it opened the doors to a lot more, including Winnie ther Pooh…

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    1. I listened to Peter Plys (the Danish translation of Winnie the Pooh) being read on the radio by a Danish actress who had a bedtime program for little kids.

      Johanna Spyri’s series about Heidi was a nice antidote to Dickens.

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  23. Jennywren:
    “To bed to bed said Sleepyhead
    Tarry awhile said Slow
    Put on the pan, said Greedy Nan.
    We’ll sup before we go!”
    Mom read me Robert Louis Stevenson and I loved the poems and illustrations.

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    1. The one book that I did not have memorized from beginning to end was The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Literature. It had a lot of poetry and snippets of longer prose. But it included Robert Lewis Stevenson among others. I kept that book around for years and years; it was falling apart and missing pages and the covers. I finally found a copy of it about five years ago and replaced it.

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  24. I don’t remember reading early. I don’t remember having an interest in reading. I do remember that the Catholic school didn’t start until second grade, and I believe that was because the nuns wanted to leave the teaching of reading and addition to the public schools to get started before they came in and cleaned up. I do remember in second grade when they broke us up into the reading groups that I was in the good reading group and I just don’t remember it ever being a challenge or a big deal. I enjoyed reading, but I didn’t spend much time reading. I spent a lot of time listening to music and jumping up and down on the couch in the basement and riding on my rocking horse to the music, I learned how to do speed reading in about seventh grade and found that I could finish Books quickly, but didn’t have much affection. I just gleaned the key information from them and so that wasn’t something that I continued on with today. I do most of my reading with books on tape, but there are times when my mind is wandering just like it does when I’m reading a hardcover book and I have to go back and find out what it was that I just consumed while my mind was wandering around thinking about whatever it was that occupied me at the moment we had testing in school and I always did very well at reading comprehension and abstract reasoning, and stuff like that and the thing that I did very poorly in was in understanding, grammar usage, verbs, and adverbs and nouns and pronouns we’re just nothing that we’re ever taught and nothing I ever understood but somehow I muddled through life and I really enjoy language and wordsmithing today and while I never get sucked into a series like the Hardy boys or the a is for alibi type of thing. I do find that when I land on an author, I enjoy. I will check out a bunch of their work the same way that we have seldom used side bars for recipes and whatever else I think it would be fun to have a section that list VS‘s books of the year and recommendations from people as to authors worth pursuing I have no idea how you do that and no spare time to look into it at the moment but it sure would be interesting to have go to spots for new ideas today. I let the library on my phone steer me towards what they think I might like based on what I have read and checked out.

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