Yesterday I felt like a “real” farmer. We haven’t gotten any real rain in weeks, and finally, rain was coming yesterday, for sure. We would have a few good showers late in the afternoon and then the next day (today), it would rain all day. My hog pasture mix arrived the other day, so if I was going to sow it, yesterday was the day. The rain would water the seeds in and get them interested in germinating, and if I didn’t get the field planted before the rain I would have to wait at least another three days, maybe even a week or more depending on how much rain we got and what the weather was like in the days following.
The rain wasn’t going to arrive until mid-to late afternoon, but I still had a lot of work to do in the field. I still needed to drag up half of it with the s-tine cultivator and then run over it again with the discs. I also needed to run to Cobleskill to pick up a few bags of oats to mix into the pasture mix. I was going to have to race the rain.
As things usually go, I wasn’t ready to start working in the field until noon, but at that point, I realized that I likely wouldn’t be back inside until dusk, so I had a quick lunch. After lunch I fed and/or checked on the animals and then headed over to the field on the tractor.
A couple of hours later, I had dragged up the field with the s-tine cultivator and run over it once more with the discs. The west end of the field was in good shape with a reasonably fine seed bed. The east end, however, which is up near the woods was still pretty chunky and could have used another pass with the discs, but I was worried about running out of time.
A while back, my neighbor purchased a tow-behind spin spreader, and I had asked earlier in the day if I could use it, and he said yes, so after I was finished preparing the field, I drove over to his place, stopping on the way to put Monk the Dog inside my house. When I got to my neighbor’s, I was surprised to discover that the spreader was for a lawn tractor. Feeling like I was running out of time, I was undettered. We just tied the spreader to the tractor draw bar with baling twine and off I went.
While driving back to the field, I realized that the temperature had dropped a few degrees. I looked down the valley toward where the rain would be coming from, but the sky was just a dull grey. The easiest thing for me to have done would have been to just stop in the house and check the radar on-line, but I was kind of on a roll, and when I had checked the radar at lunch, the rain was definitely on the way.
Once back in the field, I mixed the pasture mix with the oats at the proper ratio and poured it into the seeder. Then, satisfied that all was well, I started off. Once moving, I reached down for the end of the baling twine that I had strung from the seeder and looped around the three point hitch lever and pulled it, which pulled the handle on the seeder forward, opening the seeder hopper to the width I had set it at for what I hoped would be the proper spreading rate. That little lawn seeder, even though it was a bigger model that can hold up to 200 pounds of seed just bounced all over the place, and the handle that controlled the seed hopper opening was loose, so it kept sliding back to the closed position with every bump. I had to hold the rope to keep the hopper open.
After about two hundred feet, the baling twine that was holding the seeder to the tractor broke. The seeder nosed down to the ground behind me, and as I set the parking brake and hopped off the tractor, seed just kept pouring out of it onto the ground because the hopper slide handle was in the open position. just pushed the handle back to close the hopper and then picked up and threw the pile of seeds around. I retied the spreader to the tractor and started up again. After about fifty feet, it happened again, and that was that. I only had two acres to do. I wasn’t going to screw around with that stupid spreader anymore. What I really needed was a three-point hitch mounted spin spreader, but, again, with only two acres to do, neither buying nor renting such a thing made any sense.
I left the silly spreader sitting in the field and roared off on my tractor to my garage to pick up my hand-cranked spreader that you sling over your shoulder. It appeared I was in for a bit of a walk. I was getting nervous because with me broadcasting the seed on foot, I still had a couple of hours of work. After I broadcast the seed, I needed to run over the whole field with the drag to bury and pack down the seed a bit.
I roared back to the field, noting that the temperature felt a few degrees colder, but the sky still hadn’t changed. I parked the tractor along the hedgerow and walked over to the spreader with the hand-cranked seeder slung over my shoulder. I used a coffee can to scoop the seeds into the seeder. Completely full, it held only about twenty pounds. Oats are bulky. I am always nervous about overspreading the seed. You can always go over the ground twice. If you overspread and run out, however, you’re screwed, so I usually set the discharge rate conservatively. As it turns out, I had it set at exactly half the rate that it should have been. I would need to go over the field twice. I wasn’t annoyed, however, because if I had set the spreader at the proper rate, I would have had only enough seed in the spreader for one length of the field, which would have meant that I would have needed to go over the field twice anyway, except one whole length would have been walking back to with an empty spreader to get more seed. At half the proper rate I had enough seed for a whole round trip. The distance might be the same, but walking with seed spinning out of the spreader the whole time is much more satisfying than walking with the seeder empty.
Twelve round trips later, I was finished. A nice 3.2 mile walk.
I still had to drag the field, but at least I was finished walking! Or, so I thought. All day, every time I had seen them in my travels here and there, the sheep were kind of just lounging around, when they should have been grazing. I chalked most of it up to coincidence — they will graze and then sit and chew their cud. However, seeing them just sitting around every time that I had seen them was too often to be coincidence. So, after spreading the seed I drove the tractor back over to my place and hooked up the drag, but before going back over to drag the field, I walked out to the sheep pasture (another half mile, round trip!). Sure enough, the grass was getting low. I had figured they would get one more day out of the paddock, but I figured wrong.
While standing on rubbery legs, I debated for a minute or two just leaving them in that paddock until the morning, but, it was only 5:30pm. There were still three hours of daylight left. Lambs don’t grow and ewes don’t make a whole lot of milk when they are just lazing about, so I set to work moving the sheep into a new paddock. As I set up the corral, which is a single section of electronet, the whole flock of sheep stood in the corner. The ewes were bawling at me. Once I had the corral set up, I opened the old paddock and the whole flock barreled into the corral and started chowing down on the new grass. Over the next twenty minutes or so, I moved the four sections of electronet that had formed the old paddock to the new one. The corral, which had been just outside the old paddock was now enclosed inside the new paddock. Once the netting of the new paddock was all set up, I took down the corral, giving the sheep access to the whole paddock. Even though the grass in the corral was just as fresh and new as the grass in the rest of the paddock, as soon as the sheep saw me starting to take down the corral, they rushed over the opening and sprinted en masse into the new paddock. I put some water in the new paddock, hooked the paddock fence up to the electrified perimeter fence, checked the charge on the paddock fence with a blade of grass (starting to feel a shock at four inches from the fence is about 5000 volts, starting to feel it about one inch from the fence is about 2000 volts). Satisifed, I left the sheep to go finish planting the field.
On my way to the tractor, I stopped at the house to get Monk. As I crossed the hedgerow and turned into the field, I saw that the turkeys had already discovered the seed. There was a group of five of them down at the east end near the woods happily scratching away. As soon as they saw me, even though I was over 800 feet away, they scurried into the woods. I have seen as many as twenty-five turkeys in that field. That many turkeys might eat half the oats and all of the field peas I sowed before they even have a chance to germinate.
I had beaten the rain, but it was getting late, so I dragged the field in third gear, while I bounced all over, and was finished in about half an hour.
On my way home, I fed the two groups of pigs and the Icelandics, who are still behind the barn.
Once back inside, I emptied the dishwasher, washed the pots and pans from the night before, and made dinner. Jennifer got home, we ate, and I went to sleep.
This morning I woke up to discover that the rain had never come, and even though it was predicted that it would rain all day today, it might not even shower. It looks like the band of rain tracked further east and less north than they expected. Those turkeys are going to have a feast while those seeds just sit there waiting to germinate. By the time we get some rain, there might be no seeds left.
