Northern Farmer

After this week I can probobly screw my head on straight again. Very busy working at the neighbors harvesting, helping him bring in his corn crop. By worldly standards it’s small potatoes, but we aren’t set up like the large farmers and never intend to be. It’s satisfying when the harvest is in. Only one more “harvest” job to do yet, and that’s get the neighbor’s old two row corn picker and pick our open pollinated seed corn. I was thinking about picking it by hand, but I’m a little intimidated by how much there is out there, plus most of the cobs I can’t even reach. They sure are high up there! Come payday, January, we’re going to invest in an old fashion corn sheller, the hand crank type. I see they still make them and looking around the internet I found some places that sell the exact same model much, much cheaper than some of the homesteader supply places. A person has to be a little careful when buying “homesteading” supplies and tools. I think some outfits want a person to think these are rare, hard to find items. Surprisingly, they’re not, when a person looks around.

The to do list is getting larger by the day for the coming winter. Amazing how as a person gets older instead of a long boring winter there’s not enough of that even. As we continue down the path to simplicity the simple type jobs are piling up. Want to build alot of old fashion tools out of wood and iron. Need to build at least two more chicken tractors for Rachel. Want to restore an old, old international plow that I aquired this past summer. Get this, want to build an ox yoke. Want to keep restoring the work horse stalls in the big old barn. Want to build a still for replacing gasoline. Want to set up our own family use meat processing room. Going to order blueprints from Small Farmer’s Journal for building the old fashion horse drawn farm work wagon. And meanwhile, always looking for that dream team of halflinger mares.

This small partial list just goes to show the winter activities around here, of coarse that’s all after the daily chores are finished and any disasters are taken care of. Soon, I’ll be at the half century mark, and hopefully in a few short years, Lord willing, horses and simple equiptment will be doing more and more on this farm. About ten miles from here is a small town cafe that we go to a couple of times a year, and I mean it’s rural. On the walls over every booth are large old photograghs of the town taken before the turn of the twentieth century. We always go to a different booth every time we go so I can study the photo. It’s so amazing! Look at the photos and then look out the window and we can see the same buildings that are in the photos. But the hustle and bustle that was once in the town, teams of horses everywhere hitched to the plain old farm wagons. And the people around when the train would come to town. Sometimes I sit there and just wish.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2005 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.