No blog!

I fell off the blagon there for a couple of weeks, peeps, but I’m back.  I’ll try to spend the next few days catching you up on what’s been happening here at our farm.  Starting with where we left off:

Wheat harvest 2010 is over and the children were sad to see it go.  They certainly did have a great time!  We thought they would be begging to get out of the field (to spend some time at Grandma’s, who was also busy helping but often at home for periods of time where the kids could play so long as we kept a truck full of car seats nearby), but instead they were begging to stay.  I must say we were all generally happy with how much fun our days in the field were.

The view from where I sat.

I drive the grain cart.  For those of you who are not as familiar with production agriculture, that means I drive a tractor pulling a big box on wheels behind it.  When the combine gets full of grain, I drive alongside it while it is still cutting where, using an auger sticking out from its side, it pours the grain into my big box on wheels.  Then I drive out to the semi trucks (tractor trailers, depending on your local lingo), pull up alongside their grain trailers and use my own auger (looks like a bendy-straw; I have this on good authority as farmer boy has bendy-straw-augers all over his toy farm) and pour the grain into the trailer.  The truck then hauls the grain to a local grain elevator (those tall, white, cylindrical-looking buildings on the edge of farm towns beside the railroad tracks) or to a farmer’s grain bin (tall, silver,cone-topped cylinders near farm houses). 

This is how I spent my birthday - it was terrific!

It is not a particularly difficult job and depending on the crop it can, at times, be slow, but it really helps cut down the time of your harvest since the combine never has to stop cutting.  And I’ve been doing it since before I had a driver’s license (thank you, Mom and Dad, for being the farmers who let their daughters work as well as their sons) so I know what to bring with me for the five- or ten-minute stints I am just waiting.  It used to be a paperback, my diary, stationary for writing letters, and bubble gum.  Now I take my cell phone and camera, a crochet project and sunflower seeds.  And a pen and notebook but it’s for playing hangman with my crew.

The best harvest workers around.