Our March to the Sea.

So we were all really sleepy after swimming, so we naturally made the pregnant lady drive home. I did wake up at some point long enough to discover my waterlogged phone in the pocket of my swim trunks.
Later that evening, having removed my call phone battery and left it to dry, Betsy and I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland to see Much Ado About Nothing. We went early to eat our box lunches while watching the Green Show, which happened to be a local belly dancing troupe. I was pretty excited when we got there because they had a doumbek sitting on stage and I was expecting some nice live drumming, but alas, they danced to prerecorded music.
The production of Much Ado About Nothing was pretty awesome. It was very cleverly set in postwar Italy. How did they come up with that? Here is a picture I found on the internet:
Let me take this opportunity to point out how disturbing the results of a google image search for "Oregon Shakespeare Festival Much Ado About Nothing" were for yours truly.

The next day Betsy and I hit the long and windy, er, winding road for the coast. It is very difficult to carry on conversations on Oregon Highways due to the fact that trucks there can haul a maximum of not 85500, but 105500 lbs. This makes for a lot of really cool truck-trailer configurations that you just don't see back in Kansas. Anyways one truck particularly caught my eye first for its multiple axle configuration, then for its white letter tires, and finally, as we pulled ahead I saw this in my rear view mirror (representative photo):
An International LoneStar! Awesome.

We stopped in Grant's Pass for some Pizza and a cell phone charger for my miracle phone which turned right on that morning. Then it was over the mountains, through the redwoods, to Brookings Oregon.
We stayed at this little Bed and Breakfast which we picked despite the fact that it shares its name with a song in the musical Sweeny Todd.

This is why we picked it:

Here is a view of the B&B from the beach:

And some shots of the beach itself:

Apparently the ocean has weeds too, and me without my Roundup:

Another shot of the B&B from the beach:

The ocean made us happy.

Lake of the Woods.

So we decided to go to a lake. Jeanette gave us a list of every lake in southern Oregon from which to choose from. Having never been to any of them, it was very easy to decide on the Lake of the Woods. It's chief draw was that it was a naturally occurring lake. We don't have that kind of lake where we come from.

Carol was there, taking a break from her hectic schedule of large animal maintenance massage:

We had some lunch.

After which Jonathan became suddenly and inexplicably filthy.
Then we played in the lake. It was just like any lake in Kansas, if you don't count the sparkling clear waters, snow capped peaks on the horizon or the hundred foot tall trees growing at the waters edge.














It was really fun to take my waterproof camera to the lake. It was so nice to be able to wade into the lake without worrying about getting a fragile and expensive piece of electronica wet. Not that I am the type of person who would go swimming for an hour in a lake with, say, a Motorola V3a RAZR cell phone in his pocket. That would be foolish indeed.

Oregon or Bust.

So we decided to go to Oregon to celebrate our tenth (10th) wedding anniversary. We had a couple of flight vouchers, and I always like to give Anna a chance to spend time with Jonathan. We started out our journey by driving to Denver. We were just going to hit I-70 at Oakley and go on over, but shortly before we hit Scott City we came upon the world's largest object being transported on Highway 83... at 35 MPH. I never got a good view of the object, as it was surrounded by pilot cars and such, but it literally took up three lanes of traffic. As Highway 83 only has 2 lanes, and after I thought about the fact that there is nowhere for such an object to pull over between Scott and Oakley, we changed course and took 96 west. Tom, our personal navigator, did not think this was a good idea at all, but I overruled him.

Here is a picture of Anna and I riding on the shuttle bus at the Denver Airport. We only found out later that driving Denver Airport shuttle buses is a favorite occupation of alleged terrorists. I think there is probably about 10 minutes between when this picture was taken and when we realized we had left Anna's booster seat in the car.
We got to Portland super late, and rode another shuttle to our hotel. We rode with a family of surfers (and their surfboards) who had just come back from two weeks in Hawaii, where they had attended two (2) weddings. They were from Bend, which seemed like an odd choice to me.
The next day we took the light rail downtown so we could check our bags in with Amtrak. Once at Union Station we ate at the restaurant there:



After lunch we went to an ice cream shop that the friendly Amtrak man told us about and then across the street to this cool splash park.
Betsy had pity on Anna and let her take of her dress and really have fun.
And then a fellow parent had pity on us and gave us the brand new pair of panties which she had been carrying around in her purse for a month in the hope that her own daughter would stop wearing diapers. Meanwhile, I talked on the phone.

Then we got on the train to Eugene. Anna and Betsy spent their time reading and stuff.
But outside the window it was harvest time, so I had plenty to see.
Like wheat harvest.

And edible bean harvest.
Anna got a lot of homework done.
After we got to Eugene, we took a taxi to the airport to rent a car. We were supposed to rent a car in downtown Eugene, but they didn't have any cars there, despite our three month old reservation. And the guy at the airport didn't even know about the Seinfeld episode about car rental reservations:

After we got our itty-bitty Kia, we drove to Target, where they just so happened to have booster seats on clearance.
Then we drove from Eugene to Medford, and I decided that three (3) hours of Oregon driving is equal to approximately seven (7) hours of Kansas driving in terms of fatigue. There were cars everywhere and we had to climb hills and come down hills and the road had this really annoying habit of curving every half mile. Ridiculous.

Random Interim Photos

This is what happens when you don't look at the weather forecast before you go home for the night.


This is What happens when you get in a hurry while driving through corn fields.


First load out of the new bins.


And some spectacular weather photography.

Wheat Harvest. The Last Day No. 2 (16 of 16)

The most startling thing about the shiny used combine was how few design changes had been made between my machine (1995) and this one (2008.) Dad really liked this combine and thought I should just buy this one from them until I showed him in the HPJ how much they wanted for it ($185,000.)






And that's the end of that.

Wheat Harvest. The Last Day No. 1 (15 of 16.)

We were in desperate need of a new sickle bar, which was not in stock on Sunday when we called. I decided I would go ahead and cut out the borders of the field first thing Monday morning so we could go ahead and clean out the combine while we waited for the loaner header they were bringing out since they didn't have the sickle bar for us.
You can see what a lousy job our header was doing. Then things got worse.


I pulled back on the stick. There was a ker-chunk, and the happy little combine could go no further. Deep inside the confines of the transmission, something had gone horribly wrong:
After the mechanic came out and confirmed what I suspected, the first step was to unload the grain tank on the combine into the grain cart:

Then tow the combine to the edge of the field...
...so they winch it onto the truck.
The truck had brought out a shiny used combine which the dealership had gotten back off of rental:

Here we can see my combine being hauled away while we resume harvest in the shiny used combine.

There was a nice harvest moon for our last night of harvest.

Wheat Harvest Days 11-13 of 16

First wheat in the new bins!



It is nice to have a lackey.

Boyd grew this PostRock for us, and it was the last of his wheat that needed cut, so we cleaned his machine out and were able to finish it up that night.


Note the brighter lights on the new John Deere on the left. Just like in the ads. Their combine is a mere 13 years newer than ours.

Keenan and Ari came out to ride the morning of the 4th of July.

Using all three tanks at once.


Dad went to see W. speak in Oklahoma on the Fourth, so I got to run the combine. There was a little down time waiting for the substitute truck driver.

And what kind of Independence day would be complete without fireworks? Lear's pictured above, and the city of Garden City's pictured below:


I apparently left my camera at home on day 14. But it involved roading everything back north. It was also the only day of the sixteen in which no wheat was cut. It was also the day that Levi went back home :( .

Wheat Harvest Days 8-10 of 16

This was the first time to use Chris's new auger.



Fr. Wesley came out too that day, but he didn't color any pictures.



An early finish.

I took advantage of some showers to spray my milo.


And back down south on day 10.

Wheat Harvest Days 6-7 of 16

This is what everybody wants to see first thing on a Saturday morning. I made Dad pull them out 'cause baby owls give me the willies. It's the hissing.






This guy wasn't so much of a problem.



They just don't design semi's for off road use.


Just a tip, if you are driving down the highway and your suburban catches on fire, just pull over right there on the highway. Please don't turn off onto a dirt road and park next to (and up wind of) someones uncut field of wheat.




The Joads move north, #1.

30 miles later (we took the scenic route.)

Wheat Harvest Days 4-5 of 16

Wheat harvest isn't wheat harvest without cleaning grain bins.


This picture makes me sad.


This sprinkler stopped purely out of spite.



I think that I didn't tell you about my new tank. I got a new fuel tank so that I wouldn't have to drive to town to fuel the truck anymore. It was nice to have.


Here I am making a house call in order to clean out Boyd's combine. While the new style machines are a lot easier (read possible) to clean out than my old 9600, they still manage to hide a lot of wheat. I figure I vacuumed up about twice as much wheat from the nooks and crannies of this 9760 than I can find in my 2188.

Wheat Harvest Days 2-3 of 16

The air conditioner quit during day 1. Dad was more than happy to let me run the combine while we waited for the fix-it-up chappies.


The crazy amount of straw on the ground is because we had to run the header as low to the ground as possible since this wheat had gotten hailed on. Of course, we were very fortunate, as this is what some of the neighbors wheat harvest looked like (if you can't tell, they are baling this wheat field for straw) :


If you look you can see how wide a space I left so as not to pick up any JGG into the machine.



Levi came to help with harvest. I cannot tell you how awesome this was.





With plenty of help, it left me as the truck driver with plenty of down time. Don't think that I let this time go to waste. I had important business to catch up on:


Levi has a pretty good fan base. I ended up banning Jairus and Cephas from using the radios since they wouldn't stop arguing about whose turn it was to ride with Levi.



I thought I didn't quite get all my posts picked up!

Wheat Harvest Day 1 of 16.

Random Pre-Harvest Pictures.

Irrigating Wheat.

Here is some of the PostRock at the Gray Havens pre-hail storm. This kind of wheat is just begging to be hailed on, or eaten by grasshoppers, or having someone park their flaming suburban next to it. What you see toward the top right is the lasting effects of the old road to the irrigation well.


I think the white heads had more to do with late season drought pressure than a freeze, and there certainly wasn't enough moisture to cause scab.



This is a picture I might bring with me next time I sign up for wheat insurance. This soil type is considered "High Risk" by the government because it was listed as unsuitable for dryland agriculture by Dad and his buddies back in the fifties. The thing is, back in the fifties, it WAS unsuitable for dryland agriculture because the only effective weed control back then involved tillage. And we all know what happens when this ground is left uncovered in a drought. With modern no-till practices, it is possible to greatly reduce the risk of blowing ground once you achieve a proper level of crop residue on the surface. With that problem out of the way, lighter soils actually become more desirable in a water-limiting environment. This has to do with how tightly the soil particles hold on to water molecules. Heavier ground has more water storing capacity, that is a fact, but is has this ability precisely because there is more surface area to which water molecules can bond. This surface area in the soil is competing with the plant roots for that water, and the plant has a much easier time extracting water from lighter (sandier) soils from heavier (more clay) soils under limited moisture conditions. You can see that in this picture. Notice how the lighter colored wheat follows the contours of the lower ground. This lower ground has a heavier soil than the hilltops do. And in a slightly droughthy environment, the plants on the hilltops were able to draw more moisture from the soil than the wheat in the valleys.



The head on the top is most likely a spring tiller, which would have a less developed root system. Basically the wheat was fooled by early season moisture into making too many heads, which came back to hurt it later on. Also this indicates that in this particular year, I would have been better off with a heavier seeding rate, which would have reduced the ratio of tillers to primary heads.
You can see (kind of) that the lower head still has pretty good seeds up into the more mature portions of the head:

The tiller head, however is largely without any seed:

But even in these tough conditions, this tiller was still able to reproduce:


Forward fast a a few weeks. I was actually in the insurace office buying hail insurance on my corn and we watched this storm on the radar. "I guess I'll probably call you in the morning about my wheat."

Scenes from Milo Planting.

Still finding pieces of the dairy...

These are the knockout wheels that push the milo seeds out of the seed disc on the planter. The one on the left wasn't working too well...


It's always fun to find pieces of your equipment laying in the field, like this gauge wheel.



Same gauge wheel, one day later.


Sometimes when you are fixing one problem (say a missing gauge wheel) you find another. Note the wiring wrapped around the trash whipper.

I have been "rained" out at the Gray Havens more than all of my other land combined over the past three years. I just plan on it now.

Here is the same picture with a red line added. The red line marks the change from what used to be the corner to what used to be an irrigated circle. This corner had already been planted to wheat when we bought the ground. Because of this, the ground we are standing on was in continuous wheat for 2008. As you no doubt recall, the fall/winter of 2007-2008 was incredibly dry, so we had a pretty poor wheat crop on this field in 2008. The wheat was naturally that much worse where it was continuous. What I want you to notice is the difference in ground cover on either side of the red line (much more cover beyond it.) This will be important later.

Miscellaneous Sky Pictures.