The Useful Duck!

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Sunday, October 12, 2014

I am still a very positive person

We finished silage.
Of course the dump box jammed in the up position again...
So we put the other box on which dumps on the wrong side so you have to pull out of the row to load the truck, but if you overload it you can get like 8 tons in it.

Finished up as the moon was rising above the Amity hill.


Started in on annual ryegrass. The price is terrible and it should have been planted two weeks ago.

I worked the ground and was waiting for a sprout. I got the sprout, my brother sprayed the sprout and now I'm planting.
Things are of course, going wrong...

Note the light and the truck bed...


$3,000 in tires and the outside dual is going flat...

I'm using the seeder meter invented by a farmer by the name of David Berckes. You drive a set distance and collect seed from one tube. Then you weigh the sample and it gives you pounds per acre. It is a little hard to use on low seed rates but beats lifting the drill and turning the wheel a thousand times...

The seed rate is varying by 10lbs per drill fill up. I do not understand. Drive 2 at 30 gives me 30lbs/acre, Drive 1 at 30 gives me 10lbs but at 35 gives me 22lbs but then at 34 I get 19 and then at 33 I get 12 but then it opened up on its own to 50 and I planted like 80lbs, (in the dark) and then I went back to 34 which gave me 18 pounds so I left it alone and then when I put extra bags in I planted 30 acres on what should have been a 20 acre load of seed...

Then Wilco gave me 10-34 liquid fertilizer that comes out of suspension and fills the screens in the fertilizer orifices with grey and black goop.

Then I noticed a drip on the pump and discovered one of the drain plugs was wearing out so I replaced it and then my brother hit a rut and broke the three point mounted sprayer off the tractor and I helped him and then his wife made me have a steak for lunch and then someone came for hay and when I went back to plant my tire was flat and the drill wouldn't fill itself with fertilizer and so I cleaned goop out of the filter again and then I noticed a drip on the other drain plug on the pump.... So I wiggled it and it blew a thin stream of fertilizer directly into my eyes.

I'm too cheap to buy sunglasses so I've been wearing these wraparound safety glasses which have a tinted lens for gas welding. The stream would have hit me right square in the eye if not for the glasses. 
It is amazing how the fertilizer will wear out the plug. Left one is old plug, right one is new plug.

So i went back to the shop to wash my face and there was a fellow loading his own straw and so that took a while.

And then the seed rate was wrong again...
I'm going to go to church and then I'm going to attempt to plant Vetch. Tuesday it is going to start raining. I have to plant for a couple other people yet. I wanted to work up some hay ground at Muddy Valley but once again, it ain't gonna happen.

In the mean time my little helper disassembled the silage chopper and took the day off...


It never changes and it never really gets any better. I keep thinking of Ed Winkle's post of several days back. You have a good year and then it is just frustration once again...
Have a nice day...

I just downloaded some trucker music so perhaps the afternoon will go better. Nothing like trucker songs to cheer you up....


3 comments:

  1. things go wrong and things go right, hopefully the right outweighs the wrong. This weekend has been a good one for me. I should really do a blog post about it but my slight hand injury ( non serious) from today makes typing a little slow.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ralph, I shouldn't complain when there are people who are having trouble actually harvesting their crops... However, the little frustrations sort of add up...

    ReplyDelete
  3. And nothing gone wrong that can be improved by whacking it with a Whitworth wrench. 'Cept whatever is tuned to the trucker station.

    ReplyDelete

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