June 2010 (Pre-Harvest.)

So far my year was going pretty badly. I not only had a circle of corn planted two weeks late, but now also a circle of soybeans planted two weeks late. Here is the growth on June 1, and this is the stuff I got planted before the rain.
Anyhoo that morning I got a phone call which pretty much ruined my whole morning. In fact, it pretty much ruined my whole day. In fact, it pretty much ruined my whole week. In fact it pretty much ruined the whole month. In fact, it pretty much ruined the whole year.fact, it not only ruined 2010, but one could say it ruined 2009 as well.

Ruined might be too strong a strong word.
(Sigh.)

I went ahead and started planting milo.

The wind stopped blowing the next day, so I went ahead and put down the pre-emerge for the milo. Spraying would be a lot simpler if there were no such thing as telephone poles.


I spent the whole rest of the week planting milo.

Even while Betsy and Anna went to Dana's wedding.


The next week I got a phone call even worse than the first.


Pre-emerge herbicide doesn't do much good when you disk it up.

My plan to use the fertilizerer to side-dress worked out pretty good, though.

Luckily, the weather stayed nice and cool, which saved the irrigated wheat from disaster.
Even if there were some major issues.

One day Dad went to town to get an engine stand for the new well.
It might have ever so slightly exceeded the cargo capacity of Uncle Ben.

"They" were out setting the pump when we brought out the engine stand.


There were the inevitable tire issues.
If you look closely, you will see how the double seeded strips had started to turn.
Then we carried the cooler over so a different "they" could run the water and gas lines to the new well.


One day it rained Over East.

Which meant switching the sprinkler over to the corn for a few days.
Which seems a little crazy looking at the corn field, but watering two crops with one well gets pretty dicey this time of year. I should mention here the small blessing which it was to not have the corn "on schedule" at this point, or we would have had some real trouble keeping up with the watering.

Then it was time to clean out the bins for wheat harvest.
First the wheat...

Then some corn. It was nice to have a lackey to load trucks for me.

And it was awful nice of Heritage to squeeze in some of my corn before harvest.
And then it was time for wheat harvest.

But I took off the afternoon of the 17th. Family time gets pretty scarce this time of year, and the eighteenth was not only going to be the start of wheat harvest, but also the second anniversary of the absolute worst phone call we have ever received . And which makes those other two calls absolutely meaningless by comparison.