October 2010, Part II

In October, Anna, completely on her own, thought to organize her very own food drive for The Emmaus House. 'Cause she's cool like that.

And we got back into corn harvest.


Chris was able to come help, which is always nice.

We put most of the south half in the bins.


We went out for a few hours on Sunday to get all finished up.





It felt good to get that done.

But there wasn't any time to lose, so we turned right around to start planting wheat.
We ended up disking a very small patch so that AgriPro could put a plot in.
And I got to finally use the coulter rig for its originally intended purpose: to get Phosphorous under the corn stalks prior to planting the wheat. Hopefully we can fight some of the no-till-wheat-after-corn yield drag we've been dealing with...

Dad ran the drill while I finished up the fertilizing.
And I stayed out pretty late the next day. Thanks to Chris and Dad's help, we were able to clean out and switch varieties twice in the same day, which meant I got all but about ten acres in the ground by the final "acceptable" plant date of October 20th.
The next morning I went out to finish planting...
...and to get the wheat watered up.

I even had to close up a bin for the first time in a long time. Could this be the end of all our "dusting it in" worries?

No.
We got .25", which quite frankly is worse than no rain at all for dusted in wheat. It is just enough to get the seed to sprout, but not enough to get it out of the ground.
It was enough for the irrigation engine over east to decide to quit running. And apparently the pressure switch on the sprinkler had quit working. It wasn't hard to figure out where we stopped applying water:
Meanwhile we had sprung an underground leak over by the motor.
It was a good time for a break.

Monday morning dawned quite nicely:

And I found a few wheat plants poking out of the ground:
(sigh)

But then it was off to the Gray Havens to cut the very last field.

The milo was not to shabby.
I had a nice long day.
The next morning there were more irrigation problems to deal with:

And some long lines at Reeve's. Luckily, I came prepared:

Chris came out to help, apparently.


And it was another late night.

But we got all finished up! I even had the satisfaction of seeing Frodo make it safe and sound all the way to Rivendell. It was October 27th.

The next day I went hunting for wheat:
And here is a little guy who had enough water to start, but not to get very far. Now, the big question, will this plant survive until there is more rain? How long?
The word on the street is that wheat plants can and do sprout, run out of moisture, and then continue sprouting once more moisture shows up. And they say that it can do this multiple times. But can they survive the winter like this? It probably depends on the winter. How much will yield be effected if they do survive the winter? Depends on the spring. Of course none of this matters if we don't receive more moisture this winter. Right now the dryland wheat is a big question mark.


On the 29th I finally got some Anna time. Anna was excited that we could "eat wherever we want, since Mama's not here." She decided we should get some burger king and eat it at the park.


We had a pretty good time.
And then we stopped by Linda's for some exercisin'.


The next day we carved pumpkins after the game.


Our pumpkins and our WCs:

Punkinheads:

This was my pumpkin:

The next day Linda and Abby and I took Anna the apple trick or treating since Betsy was not feeling well.

We had a good time. We even had two new houses to visit this year:

And that was October.