I feel like a broken record, when will winter end? Every week a little melting and freezing every night. Snow squalls every other day. Keeps things slippery and messy.
On the home front, I have given up on any idea of finishing my combining in April. There have been years that I was seeding in April. Definitely not this year. The earliest I ever started seeding was April 18 and that was too early. Those who sat around drinking coffee for another two weeks got a better crop than I did and less weed problems. My wheat didn't get going but the weeds did fine. You know how some years the crop comes up and just keeps going. That is when you know you put it in at the right date. Every year is different and you don't know the right date until the crop starts growing. A benevolent warm rain in there helps. I believe the snow mold or something on the soil needs to be washed down before things can get going. A good barometer of the right conditions is when the wild oats germinate , that's the time to get that wheat in.
My brother-in-law Ritchie swore by seeding by the moon. He would look in the Farmers' Almanac and try to seed his crop on the right moon phase. I never subscribed to that theory, but I would say he got the max for the least and grew some heavy crops. On a normal year, whatever normal is anymore, I have tried to seed at the end of April, the last couple of days is fine. My grandfather used to insist that if you wanted good grades the wheat should be in by May 10. I believe that. Fall frosts can quickly give you a No. 3 or the hated Canada Feed. I have been screwed four ways to Sunday having to take Canada Feed for some really good wheat. What makes it worse if you look on the Canadian Grain Commission Grain site and see that the port elevator your Canada Feed wheat went to loaded out only No.1 wheat. They call it sharp buying, They call it maximizing profits. I call it stealing. I am done shipping producer cars. They were good once and I have loaded many. Not anymore.
In a recent column I was talking about the little black bug swimming in the water just above the ice. It looks like a daddy longlegs spider without a body. I was wondering what kind of bug it was. Well, Janet Makey, bird expert and squirrel lover, looked it up on the Internet. She has determined that it is probably a Water Strider. Well, I am sure she is right as it seems to fit the description. Besides who wants to argue with Janet when she is right, hey?
I had coffee the other day At Lou & Sue's with Scotty Wiltermuth and Bruce McFayden. They are both good visitors. Horse stories were flying thick and fast, a lot of them unprintable but great for good chuckles. The talk got around to the fact that some cowboys will be short of feed and then how feed is put up. The country started out with horse drawn mowers with four and a half foot cutter bars. That is what my grandfather had. He used two outfits. That was a long day to cut many acres. After the hay was dry just about everyone used a basket hay rake pulled by two horses. As a kid I was assigned the job of racking hay into windrows. I learned how to step on the peddle to trip the basket and drop the hay at the right time. I know I hated the horse flies that pursued me and the horses relentlessly. I was born too late to see much of the horse drawn sweeps for pilling hay. Scotty said that he knew of an outfit with two horses on either side of the sweep. They would drive down the windrow until the sweep was full then they would pull it over to where they were making a stack. Then you had to have another team waiting to pull the sweep back off the stack.
About the time I arrived as (unpaid) hired help, my father bought a rubber tired LA Case tractor. He also bought a Farmhand loader from Ernie Snell and Ernie got the thing mounted on the tractor. Arthur was in business. It had a hay sweep and Arthur had his tractor in high gear. There was a stack forming frame but when Arthur hit that stack in road gear it was destroyed. Carl was unhappy about Arthur buying the tractor, those rubber tires would never last. Now he was really unhappy with Arthur and his road gear ramming ways. Now he was destroying things. He got in his car and went home. Arthur had the hay in the stack in short order. Then in the winter, Arthur had that hay packed into the stack so hard you couldn't pull it out with pitch forks. Karl got his friend, Waseca's blacksmith John Kolinoski, to build a double armed hook that you stuck in the stack and hooked your team of horses on it with a logging chain. In quick order you had enough loose hay to load the rack and you were off to home.
On our farm we progressed to an Oliver 70 tractor and a PTO-driven mower, seven-foot blade. Cut more in a day than two horse drawn outfits. Vic (the unpaid hired man) was the tractor operator. The horses and horse drawn mowers were parked. Soon Arthur had a side delivery rake and John Deere 14T baler. I learned how to manhandle square bales as they were stacked on the stooker, stacked on the truck, unloaded off the truck and stacked in the yard. Finally they were loaded and fed to the cows. No system had more work handling the feed back and forth. Then finally we bought a round baler
Bruce McFayden said there would be no big cattle outfits today if the round baler had not been invented. I agree with him. I marvel at the improvement to their design and how you can bale twice as much feed today in the same time compared to the first Vermeer. Unfortunately all of them, it seems, still can't build a decent, trouble free pickup.
Joke of the week from Gerry Ritz: An orchard in Florida needed workers to harvest their lemon crop. A woman from Canada applied. The boss said "what do you know about picking lemons". The woman replied "I have been divorced four times, I cheer for the Leafs, I have had three Chevy pickups and I voted Liberal." She got the job!
