It will never stop raining...

The rain would not bother me so much but I need to plant. I have to have the money. It is now too late to plant spring wheat. Oat yields are dropping, I never get called on to plant grass, even if there were contracts for grass seed. I sold some hay. I have some loyal Mexican customers.
Speaking of grass my cousin is injured. He hurt his arm in the bunny crash. I will do a quick recap of the bunny crash. My cousin and his two friends were going somewhere. The girl was driving. The bunny was in a cage in the back. They were worried the bunny was too cold. They put the bunny up front. The bunny went a little nuts and got in the way of the gas pedal. They drove off the road.
So my aunt takes Chronic Boy (her grandson actually) to the doctor as his arm hurts him. He moans a lot and acts like he is in pain. No one believes him but my Uncle (his grandfather). The doc pokes him and prods him and asks him if it hurts. It doesn't seem to give the response the doctor wants. The doc asks him if he has a job. He replies, "I work for my Grandfather!" The doc tells him he needs to get a real job...
Not sure what that was all about but it was funny!
Employee and I think it is a scam to either get a Medical Chronic Card or to keep scoring prescription painkillers. Pretty funny, but also kind of sad...
More de-evolution, I'm glad I'm just lazy...

Things which are painful to read and make you wish you lived in a different time...(of your own choosing)

What the FBI does not investigate and the sort of thing that has a direct link to 911 and is not in Iraq or Iran or any other foreign country that we can spend trillions on a pointless war to liberate people who don't really like us anyway and didn't want to be liberated anyway...
Click here for link... How would you like those folks for your neighbors.
Meanwhile, back at the Keystone Kops headquarters located in the Winston Smith Memorial building, they learn of impending danger. So now M-80's are weapons of mass destruction and local idiots are considered to be a dangerous threat to anyone but themselves... (Which is not to say that they SHOULD be allowed to have guns....) But, look a the other article...
Click here for the moronic "terrorists"
And of course the ladies who blew themselves up on the Russia train were just normal ladies with NO religious affiliation....
I just watched a PBS documentary about the Pacific Campaign and the invasion of Japan. We were a real country then and we made tough decisions. Now we are this group-think, new-speak, new-think, parody of a George Orwell novel. How the mighty have fallen...

I eat pie, sell grain, and deal with employee

I had pumkin pie and whipped cream for breakfast today. It is kind of like Thanksgving. There appears to be 2" inches of water standing in my yard. I checked the river levels on the internet. I was a little worried I was going to have to figure out how to get the fertilizer truck out of the river bottoms during a food. River is supposed to peak at 35 feet, we don't have to worry till it approaches 50 feet.
My former employee came back to work yesterday. He has grown a little. He said he is pushing 350lbs. My winter helper went to work for his father, but is still getting calls off of my hay and grain ads on craigslist.
A fellow wanted to buy some whole oats. He called my winter helper who relayed the message. He is very good on the phone. We had to get the truck out of a neighbor's shed. There were two dead JD 3020's in front of our old Ford cabover. Which was dead as well. We pulled everything out of the barn and I drove the Ford home with no brakes. We set up the auger and started filling big bags. Four tonnes of oats is a lot of oats loaded out 800lbs at a time.
Then it started raining. It poured. We were in the midst of putting everything away when the fellow showed up for his oats. He was a very nice older fellow. He had bought some Jersey Heifers from my dad years ago. He said they were a little wild. Then he mentioned he was going to run his oats through a hammer mill. I showed him mine and he told me how to lace the belt so it wouldn't damage the hammer mill pulley. But it was raining so hard we didn't get to talk much.
Later we worked on the International truck. We want to haul scrap. Unfortunately the employee's heart started racing. He took his medicine then laid down in his car for an hour. Finally he went home. I guess he went to the hospital as he called and said he was ok. He says it has nothing to do with his weight. I told him there was no way I was giving him the kiss of life.
I am worried. I can tell it will be a long summer...
This morning I got an email from some folks that came after hay Saturday. The lady sent her husband and he was worried the hay was not bright enough. He just took four bales as a sample. This morning I got an email from her saying it is wonderful hay and she wants three ton. I already knew it was wonderful hay but I told the fellow I didn't want to sell him something if his wife wouldn't like it. It is kind of funny...

I visit my old grain drill

Today it rained. I took a very long nap.
Yesterday was the last nice day. I planted 24 acres of spring wheat. It was all little fields. Corners of a large grass field that didn't do well and the farmer sprayed them out. It was fairly slow going. The strangest thing was that there was a turkey running around out there. I have no idea where he came from.
Friday I mixed up some feed for my chicken feed customer. First I had to locate some feed wheat. Then pick it up. Then i found some oats, then some clover screenings. Before long the day was gone. I did manage to disable by drill by attempting to install markers.
Then Saturday I got a planting job. I got the markers sort of on and working and started planting close to 5 p.m. I finished around 8 p.m. I made more money with a slow planting job than I did with a good feed mixing job. Kind of puts it in perspective.
Wednesday or Thursday I went to visit my old grain drill. I have a certain affection for the drill. I really didn't want to sell it but I didn't have time to rebuilding. I kind of wore it out.
The farmer who bought the drill had some leftover barley which is supposed to be really good yielding. He wanted me to look at his fields and he said he would make me a good deal on the seed.
So, I went over early in the morning.
He has a pretty good scheme for planting. He is doing grain rotations on deep red hill soil. I think it is pretty well drained. He no-tilled his barley into wheat stubble. He chopped the stubble in the fall and sprayed out the regrowth in the spring. He sets the drill to plant 2" deep so that it cuts through the stubble. He plants as early as he can get on the ground. The barley looks really good. It is two inches tall already.
I can't make that work. I leave the stubble tall and attached to the ground. I've had the best luck planting shallow and not chopping the stubble. I think it is because all the ground I no-till is wet and poorly drained.
When i got back his employee had loaded all the bags into my pickup. I tried to pay him and he wouldn't take the money. He said he appreciated my willingness to help him with no-till questions and that I had given him a bunch of parts with the drill. His way of saying thanks. I guess 800 lbs of barley is a good thank you.

He takes really good care of the drill. I like the old drill better than the new one. The old one has much cleaner lines. It is not cluttered with a tank and gadgets and what not.

This is the new Great Plains 1500. It is very cluttered with a tank and hoses and valves. Now it also has markers. What a mess of stuff!

Insane Doctor, gps failure, blah blah blah....

I was bringing the drill home yesterday and I thought of a funny story about a crazy environmentalist Doctor. Now, to be fair I will add that he is an Emergency Room doctor so I suppose he is kind of crazy but tell that to the county crew that came out to trim limbs.
If you will note the photo of my tractor driving down a narrow road you will see that the oak trees are nearly covering the road.

The crazy doctor lives at the top of the hill at an old dairy. He is converting the place to a natural habitat paradise but he has to have money so he rents it out to a neighbor farmer. This makes it a difficult place to farm. I've planted it once or twice.
The way the story goes is that those oak trees had grown together forming a canopy over the road. The canopy kept getting lower and lower so eventually vehicles would not be able to travel down the road.
The county sent out some of its highly ambitions workers to start trimming trees.
Well the good doctor went nuts at the violation of his tree space. Something about biodiversity and global warming and George Bush. They didn't pay a lot of attention to him till he grabbed his rifle.
The workers did not get real upset, they just called the sheriff and took the rest of the day off. The Dr. had to go to jail for the evening.
Then they cut the trees.
You can't fight city hall.

In these other two photos you can see a field I planted last fall. It is former hay ground and is on the wrong side of the hill to be good soil. And it is very wet. That is why the wheat is kind of yellow.
But, look at the skips and the wide guess rows. I planted this in the dark in blinding dust. All I had to go by was my GPS. It is not as bad as I feared but not as good as people like to see.
If you look at the last photo you can see that it looks like I forgot to do the corner. Actually I did the corner using GPS. The sputnick had drifted so I was offset half a drill width. I made my three passes down the corner but since it was offset, it didn't matter.
GPS could be amazing but I don't have the $3,000-$6,000 that it seems to take to make it work on hillsides.

Today it is raining.
I had four acres to do at home and then another 14 for a neighbor. Monday I have a 100+ acre job. But, it is on hillsides. My last job was supposed to be 150 acres but it turned out to be 92 acres. I need more work.

We take another beach holiday!

I am shirking...

Sunday I took Sadie to the beach. We drove out to Seal Rock to visit my friend Mel. He has an amazing house at the beach. It started raining. But of course the reason we went to the beach was that it was raining at home.
The wind was howling and the surf was high. We took Mel's remote control camaro and his Furby down to the beach. The battery went dead right away. But the Furby seemed to have a good time. Sadie had a Webkin's fluffy dog that rode along with the Furby. They seemed to get a long quit well. Mel must have the longest living Furby in the world. It has quite a vocabulary for a Furby.
Then it started raining again.
We played UNO last night. I lost repeatedly.
This morning is beautiful. It is just a bit cloudy but you can see blue sky. I need to be planting. Sadie will probably be disappointed if we don't spend a little time at the beach.

We spend all morning at the beach. Mel directed us to tidepools(see link-we were at seal rock) and explained limpets and anenomes and critters than have lots of tiny teeth and make holes in rock which I can't remember the name of. We found a whole pile of floats with Japanese writing on them. Mel collects them.

Then i came home and mixed some feed. This fellow wants me to supply him with 15 ton a month. We will pay me for grain plus $50 a ton to mix it all. I'm not so sure about this all. I need a barn with a concrete floor and then I need to buy a truck load of wheat, 15 ton of camolina meal at $250 per ton, and scrounge up some cheap oats and some clover screenings. So, I would buy all the materials, and he would pay me as he needed the feed? I think it would take more than $50 per ton to make it work. That is only $750 a month profit on what seems to be a lot of work and risk. Why do it?

I can't remember Jack but I can remember Hamish

My friend wanted to name his son Hamish. My first instinct was to suggest that a name like Hamish would help the kid to grow up strong and able to defend himself. However the name Hamish has stuck in my head. I am quite used to no one actually paying attention to me so I just assumed he named the little fellow Hamish. It was quite a surprise when my wife told me his name was not Hamish but Jack.
Her quote was, "You can remember the name Hamish, but not Jack?"
But, of course! I am slowly going nuts...
Yesterday I finished my 53.3 acre field. Somehow I got 65 acres out of it. I discovered my calc-an-acre had a calibration of 80 instead of 100. I think it should be 110. I absolutely cannot understand instructions.
I moved to the next field which was to be 150 acres. It is not 150 acres in one field or two fields or even three fields. The first field was 15 acres. I have not seen the next five. Hopefully I will not screw up any of these fields.