Northern Farmer

Done! Done with chopping corn! The pit is full and I’m more than satisfied. There’s still a 16 acre field standing of Minnesota 13, looks good, and that’s for picking in later October sometime when its dried down and will store in the corn cribs. Oh Lord, what a feeling! Now its straighten up around here, clean up the silage wagons, oil up the apron chains and put them into the shed till next year’s chopping. Gotta cover the top surface of the silage pit with plastic in the next few days and then its sealed up till we pop it open in a while. The last few days we also had a total of two inches of rain and I even got stuck twice today pulling the chopper, but they were easy pull outs and there was not much problems getting er done today. Now to get my head screwed on straight again and try to remember what else I have to do around here. Gotta get a bunch of cows moved over the tar road into the Goliath filed to clean it up. There’s about one percent down corn as near as I can figure and they can clean it up over the next week or two. And as they are I’ll do as I did last year in the disaster drought and run a one wire electric out in the meadows and brush and they can graze till its all snowed under. Last year they were out there till December 1st and we brought them home that morning in a heavy snowfall, nice and fat they were! And my question was answered this year concerning grazing the meadows in late fall, they came back this year better than ever before, and we had the best meadow hay crop that I’ve ever seen. I tell you, you never get to old to learn when your farming. A person has to use every trick in the book in order to make it sometimes. But even with a full silage pit and plenty of hay I won’t forget the different things I had to learn last year to extend the feed supply and will probably being doing them for a long time. It helps allot saving two months worth of cow feed by using these different options that we never “had” to use before. Its some extra work, but fall being my favorite time of the year, I just love being out there doing those things!

Didn’t get to do any fishing, again, and probably won’t do all to much hunting, again, but that’s OK, cause I’m outside every single day anyhow, all day. There’s always a bunch of things to observe, to learn and to enjoy out there. Every day there’s something new to see in our Lord’s creation and it always amazes me. This morning I seen the first hint of red on a maple tree in the south pasture, and on a bad note I noticed Friday that when it got really nice outside and I was chopping corn that the Asian Beetles were thick around me, always in my face, down my neck and just made me miserable. So I know what we have to look forward to this October, and it ain’t good! I hate those things and I heard that they were brought here to eat soybean aphids. Well, all the neighbors that had soybeans were spraying for soybean aphids, not an Asian Beetle to be seen, then when the aphid time is getting near over with the Asian Beetles decide to hatch and move into our homes, and down our necks too! In my humble opinion that was a disaster bringing those things to these parts. But at least the hardware stores sell a lot of bug spray for em so I guess that helps the local retailers a small bit, but then again they probably use up the profits spraying around their own homes. A big cricket year again too! The ground just moves with them black things. Go in the garage to get my overshoes and a few dozen scramble out from underneath them when I pick the overshoes up, egad! But they must serve some purpose, just haven’t figured it out yet!

So get things back in order around this place this week and then Saturday scramble doing morning chores and head to our little country church and help shingle the double wide that’s along side of the church. Kinda a farmer’s holiday, go work somewhere else other than here, but hey, its a vacation in my eyes! Plus we should have a good time and good food to boot! (I travel and work for good food!) Save the church a couple thousand dollars in a few hours doing it our selves, the old fashioned way. I guess the ladies will be doing a clean up in the double wide while us guys are on the roof acting busy. Yup, looking forward to that. Then I also have to plan a big night for the kids at church. Last year I stumbled into a new thing, at least for me. We had our regular Wednesday evening children’s church on holloween last year and none of the kids do what the other kids do but I felt like doing something and they did too. So we had us our first annual Hillbilly night in the doublewide. Yup, it was a humdinger to say the least. I played guitar, banjo, and accordion, was dressed up in some fancy bib overhauls and did some old fashioned Holy Ghost preaching for good measure and it was one of the most fun nights I ever had. Well, seems like Hillbilly Night II will be on halloween again, a Friday night, and its gonna be a whole lot bigger than last years small event with me and the kids. So I got some real planning to do on this, figure out some old fashioned games, put together some music, I guess there’ll be a couple of hillbilly puppet skits being done and this thing is just growing before my very eyes! (What have I done?) Rumor has it that we’ll be inviting all and any area kids too. Now if anyone is wondering how such an event goes, well, if anyone knows me we just do anything that comes up. Never was that great of a planner, but there’ll be a general outline of events to keep me from being too confused. Being a farmer I’m used to changing everything on a split second notice because that’s how I live every single day of the week. Sure would be boring doing everything as planned, never really done anything like that around here! Ah the life of a low seniority country preacher, eh! Well, almost anyhow if the Lord wills it.

Yessir, life on the farm, never boring and if its hard for a rich man to get to heaven I’m pretty safe in that department, cause this farm sure has a way of keeping a person not rich! In reality though a person is richer than anything money can buy, I think about that allot. Who’da ever thought a person could live like this almost their entire lifetime, never getting wealthy, but enjoying every day so much! Its different, that’s for sure. Farming and following a call from the Lord to boot!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.