Amen,
Linda
Memorial Day May 28, 2012
7
Amen,
Linda
Category Archives: Life on a Colorado Farm
This Week’s Sunday Stills Assignment—-Songs in Photos
I was afraid I could not do this week’s assignment….a song in photos!
Then I got an inspiration—
The Sounds of Silence, by Simon and Garfunkel
Lest we forget…..
Linda
Only Two Left, Only 2 !!!!!
There are some things on the farm a person just can’t do without, a shovel for one. I always seem to be in need of shovel….the scoop shovel is a good example. It’s very good for grain and then a separate one for cleaning out the chicken house and the barn (no mixing of shovels for food items, now, ya hear!
Then there is the shovel for the irrigation water, each field has at least two shovels in it….one for Terry and one for me. We like different types of shovels, the shovel that fits best on your shoulder and has a nice weight in your hand is what you look for.
Then I have a shovel for the yard…this one has a large shovel so I can dig up clumps of stuff in one or two digs, not a whole bunch of little ones.
I also have a little red shovel that I use for my water trough flower beds.
And I have two rakes….a leaf rake and a regular rake. I only need the two. They are for yard work and that is all.
There are other implements that are more than necessary but used only for that particular thing…like planters for planting and the lawn mower.
But the thing I use the most for all sorts of things is….
BALING TWINE!!!!
And I only have two left! (WAIL)
Baling twine is what I used to put the top on the chicken run with, baling twine holds my vines to the trellis, baling twine has been know to ‘tie the gate shut’ until one of us could get to town and get the proper latch.
Or to close the garage door until the opener can be fixed ….. that was three years ago and we still have that on the ‘to do’ list.
Baling twine is the farmer’s (at least us) answer to what others use duct tape for.
And I ONLY have two left!
How this all came about was last year when Terry decided to sell the cows, he decided that he would sell ALL the hay, since we wouldn’t need any to feed over the winter. We kept enough for the chickens and Misty’s goats, but that was it.
Gradually the bales were used and I stored the very precious, to me, twine so I would have some when I needed it.
I’m so glad I did.
Terry should cut the alfalfa sometime the first of June (depending on the weather), he will bale up the hay and haul it into the yard. He sell the hay….BUT I’m requesting several bales to hold me through the year. And on those several bales will be two strings of baling twine!
Linda
(P.S. No! I can not go out and cut off any length I might want out of the baler….I can’t EVEN think of that….{{{ shudder}}}!)
Crop Update
This has been the most unusual of years!
Terry is planting the pinto beans right now. He is taking his time — only planting one field, watching how the water is acting and assessing if he wants to get several more acres planted , if there isn’t enough water that would be foolish on our part.
He has left the 20 acres of alfalfa for later on in the year…hoping for more water. When the sweet corn and the wheat starts to come off, those farmers stop watering that field and the field sets until next year.
(Since we do NOT irrigate from an underground aquifer, but from reservoirs, all the water that is used on a farm passes on down to the next farm below it. This is how all farms from Montrose, Colorado, to Grand Junction, Colorado, are irrigated. Nothing is wasted and all is put back into the canals so that eventually the water ends up in Arizona, Nevada and California. That is where our water comes from….we get our water from Blue Mesa Reservoir and the Ridgeway Reservoir….people on the Surface Creek Bench get theirs from Grand Mesa)
The water from the sweet corn and wheat fields should allow us to have enough water to plant the alfalfa. We just might not get the acres we had hoped for into pinto beans, we will just have to wait and see. The decision to plant the rest of the pinto beans will be made by June 1st. after that it will be too late to plant the seed.
The other strange part of the farming this year is the heat…we build heat up until we are smothering around 90* during the day –with 20-25 m.p.h. hot winds ( the heat is very early for this time of year) and then cooling down in the high 30s or low 40s at night, making the corn turn purple. The purple color is leaf injury, although it doesn’t kill the plant.
The last two nights we were warm enough (48*) that this morning we saw the crown of the plant starting to green up, which is a welcome sign.
Well, hope I didn’t bore you…farming is a huge part of our every day (and sometimes worry at night). Often times people get to thinking it would be easy to be a farmer…just get some land, plant some seed, harvest the crop and make money.
I wish it were so easy.
Still those people are right in lots of ways—it is a good way of life. At 68 and 63 years of age Terry and I can’t think of anything else we would have liked to do (although we both worked in town in really fun jobs to support this way of life) and we can’t imagine doing anything different for the rest of our lives.
Thanks for stopping by….
Linda
The Ring of Fire Solar Eclipse 2012
The Ring of Fire Soalr Eclipse happened right on time yesterday evening. I had a hard time trying to figure out how to take a photo of it
- First I tried regular glasses that turn dark when you go outside
- Then I tried sun glasses
- Then Terry remembered his welding helmet….nope, it needed an arc for it to darken
- Then he remembered he had his OLD welding helmet
IT WORKED! But only for our eyes….I couldn’t get the camera to get a decent shot through the tiny vision glass.
But we got to see the eclipse even if I couldn’t take a photo.
The whole thing was really cool…and will not be back to our section of the earth until 2045…I’ll be surprised if anyone living here on our farm will be alive at that time.
But one never knows……
Linda
This Week’s Sunday Stills Challenge is the Color Pink
For this week’s challenge on the Sunday Stills site, we are to photograph something the color of pink!
I had a great time with this…I have lots of pink around the house, the yard and with the two granddaughters, but I settled for:
Just a few pink things!
Have a really nice Sunday!
Linda
My Yard in May
Weeds and all!
Linda
May 15, 2012
We had another high wind come through again. Wind without rain.
Just wind.
Our cottonwood tree must have decided it was time to shed a couple of limbs so as the wind blew, down came some limbs.
Thankfully the branch that holds the rope swing was not the one shed. And the climbing branches are still there, just waiting for one or three little grandchildren to climb on.
These two branches came from somewhere up top, lightening the load just a little bit for this wonderful old tree.
Linda
Along Came a Spider
The HUGE black and yellow garden spider (Argiope Aurantia), who lived in the corner of my upstairs eve, passed on. She was a wonderful spider (although very scary to look upon). She at moths, aphids, flies and grasshoppers, mosquitoes, sometimes bees and I saw several wasps. (Do NOT try to touch this spider….they will bite!)
As a little side note: male and female black and yellow garden spiders spin their own webs and hunt on their own during the day for most of their lives. Once mature, the males leave his web to hunt for a mate –I never met him, but I’m sure he must have been just wonderful. My spider was a beauty and she had very selective tastes.
Anyway, of course the poor fellow passed on, the job was just way too much for him.
I never named my spider, but she created a huge, large, GIANT web with heavy zigzagging, called ‘stabiliments’ down the center.
Our winter was just too cold for her (I am told in the milder areas of the United States my spider’s relatives can live for years.) and she passed. I saw her poor crumbled body on the roof shingle below her tattered web one day.
I left her eggs to spend the winter in their very dormant state inside their multilayered egg sac. They emerged Sunday…within thirty minutes what once was an spider incubator…was just a blank wall.
Close to where they had incubated an couple of darling barn swallows have taken up residents. More on that later.
Linda
Wordless Wednesday
Linda
