Making Progress. (September 2012.)

September!

Katie helped me move the combine back to the airport.

There was more picture takin'.

One of my top 5 goals for the city of Garden City was realized.

There were continued troubles with corn head row number three. The big problem with buying a relatively old piece of equipment (like this corn header,) is that there is usually a reason why the person broke down and traded it in on what amounts to a more expensive way to accomplish the same task.  I still didn't know the root cause (and neither did the good folks at the dealership, who by this point had run this header through the shop twice looking for problems) but there was something very wrong with row number 3.

I hauled some corn for THE MOST EVIL CORPORATION IN THE WHOLE WIDE HISTORY OF THE WORLD EVER. Awfully nice folks.

And the mystery problem with the corn header finally got bad enough that I was able to figure it out.  So the deck of the header was cracked just enough so that when the header got under a heavy load it would flex and hit the stalk knife.  It wasn't until it was bad enough that this would happen under any kind of load at all that the cracks became visible enough to see.  Even then they were hard to make out. The dealership sent Vern out to fix it right away. He did a bang-up job and that was the end of that headache.

Katie spent a lot of time with me in the combine.

And I had the pleasure of working with the huge airport fence in all its glory.  I had to only make left hand turns at this end of the field and swing the auger out in order to avoid an incident.

And here is a conundrum. To spray or not to spray true summer fallow.  I had a horrible time killing weeds last summer (drought, resistance, timing, etc.) which meant I spent a ton of money on chemicals and my fields looked like this:

Meanwhile, across the road, the neighbors had spent a ton of money on fuel working the ground all summer to end up with a field that looked like this:

I will stick to spraying for now.


I made one significant upgrade to the new combine. Just for mapping, not for steering.

And we were able to cut a little wet corn before the feedlot shut down.

Then it was back to chillin' with Katie.

An' Jimmy.

And we got a little rain.

And then it was time to cut some soybeans for the neighbors. Time for this new combine to earn its keep!

Katie insisted on coming along every time I left the house.

And Uncle Ben had an incident with Mom and Dad's well.

There were a lot of soybeans to cut.

Anna took her very first turn behind the wheel of the tractor!

She did so well with the tractor that I let her take the combine across the field.

There were other signs of fall, like preparing to pick up wheat seed.

And certain birthdays to celebrate.

And wheat ground to fertilize.

But mostly a lot of soybeans.