Rain!

Finally, some rain to keep me home and indoors for a day! It was dry enough that I welcome every drop of rain, but not dry enough to set back any of the crops so I am happy as can be today, I was going to turn on the irrigation to the strawberries, garden and orchard today but so far almost 5 inches of rain has fallen and it is still sprinkling a little bit so I don’t think I’ll have to worry about irrigating for a long while. A five inch rain here is not a real problem because I live on a hill and the ground drains almost perfect so there are no major puddles, the growing things are really happy and the pond is full and overflowing. With my crude measurements I found that the pond is now about twenty feet deep at the deepest point so I am sure that I’ll have plenty of irrigation water even if we do have a dry summer, now I just wish I could figure out a good way to stock the pond with fish and keep them there over winter, it would be great to have something in there that would eat all of the bugs and provide yet another food source for me.

I am not so certain that I’ll be so happy at finding out what the rain did at the other farm however, though this may just be a good push in the direction of giving thanks for everything. Usually when we get more than three quarters of an inch of rain over there it’s like one big mud flat, five inches of rain and I might as well check fields with a jet ski, in fact, I know a guy that did just that! Last night I was over there getting the plow/packer/drill set up so I could seed everything that is left in one pass, it’s a rare spring when it is dry enough to even get the moldboard plow out and it looks like I missed my opportunity this year. Oh well, I can always modify my plans one more time.

I have been driving back and forth to Rugby constantly these past few weeks and that sure is a good way to spend a lot of money! I can get to where I have been working (5 miles west of town) all on gravel roads through the hills, which gives for a very nice drive but two hours a day driving really eats away at both time and money, especially at the price of diesel now! I have been collecting used hydraulic fluid and filtering it for use in the car but that doesn’t help me out much when I drive the truck because I only run diesel or super clean new vegetable oil in a diesel blend in that since it isn’t as tolerant of odd fuel combinations and concoctions as the car is, and I would rather not experiment with a brand new $4,000 engine, I am crazy enough with my experimenting with the 500,000 mile beater!

I have slowly been working on the energy system in order to get situated a little better. As time goes by I have gotten a little more modern and civilized, which uses a lot more energy to accomplish. Somehow, keeping food fresh in 80 degree weather is not easy and since I failed to make a proper ice house this past winter I bought a freezer and refrigerator to keep food in. With that I have to get an inverter that will power them, and then I have to run the charger a little more often in order to keep the batteries up. I also built an electric fence after all attempts at building other fences just resulted in calves running around the garden and a bent and smashed fence. I have named them all Houdini even though they are females, the name just seems to suit their actions. So far electric has worked delightfully well, and I am a little ashamed to say that it gave me a little twinge of satisfaction to watch the first attempt at jumping the fence which resulted in a shock. Now this fencer is a little 6 volt battery operated one so the shock is very minimal but it does the job very well as long as there is no grass touching the wires. Now I spend much of my spare time moving fence and cows to fresh grass, soon I hope to have the entire place permanently fenced into small rotational pens so all I have to do is open a couple of gates and call the cows in. In order to do that I have to cut and treat several truckloads of wood fence posts, take down all of the fencing that is left at the other farm and put it up here and probably buy several thousand dollars worth of new fencing. Translated, that means that I won’t have all of the fencing done for several years!

One blessing I find in the rain is the fact that I just got done planting the major portion of the garden yesterday, and now that it is thoroughly wet I am sure germination will be very speedy. I had a walk behind planter for the first time and wow does that make planting go fast! I am used to digging a trench and dropping every seed one by one and then covering them. Now I just fill the hopper on the planter and walk up and down the garden planting as I go. After I got done yesterday and sat down to take a look, I realized what I had just done, I had planted all of the seeds that I had around which gave me about twice as many peas and beans as I had ever planted for our family of 10, only this year it’s just for me! How I am going to manage picking and preserving all of that is still a mystery to me but I’ll figure out a way, at least I won’t go hungry this winter! I also have a lot of corn going in this year, several varieties so I will have a lot of fun keeping them from cross pollinating. Last week I was planting a couple of acres of a variety of corn that Steve Zwinger, a guy that works at the experiment station in Carrington is developing. He is working on varieties specifically suited to organic production and this open pollinated grinding corn is a project that he has been working on for several years, on a garden sized scale, hand doing everything. Now he had enough seed to ship up to Blaine’s farm in order to grow several acres worth. After we got it planted there was still several pounds left in the bottom of the planter that Blaine didn’t know what to do with so I took it home and we will see how the variety does in the conditions here. It’s quite a change to come home to a little walk behind planter when I have been running a $55,000 12 row John Deere computerized planter and $130,000 John Deere tractor!

Speaking of driving tractor, when you do it for 12 hours at a time day after day you find that you have a lot of time to think, as long as you don’t have the radio blasting all good thoughts away. I can’t stand listening to the radio and I don’t have enough CD’s to last through the day without that getting old so I have a lot of time to just sit there and think without something bothering me. One of the things that I have been thinking of is an analysis of why I do something, whatever it is that I may be doing. In other words, what is the foundation reason for doing something, whether it be going to work someplace, planting a garden, raising animals, farming in general, choice of occupation etc. Those are some bigger things but the question isn’t limited to big things, it works for everything a person does like getting up early, eating a meal or snack, visiting someone, going to town, or reading a book. At the beginning of last winter I wrote out a list of what I wanted in life, after I thought of this why question I took out that list and applied the why question to each thing on the list and when I wasn’t satisfied with many of the answers I just erased some of the things, which really pared down the list! In setting there thinking all day while driving the tractor I came to the conclusion that the why question should always bring up only one answer, any other answer would be the wrong reason and that activity or project should be scrapped. Since I thought of this I have been making a pest of myself asking the few people that I talk to what their reason for doing certain things is (usually choice of occupation) and so far I have not received a single answer that lines up with scripture. In fact, after thinking of everyone I know, I can only think of two or three that I am certain would give a scripture based answer!

I find that if I keep the why question in use for everything life becomes tremendously more simple. I keep catching myself forgetting or doing things for the wrong reason but with exercise I am certain that I will be doing that a lot less than I am now!