Farmgirl 101

Today I didn't do a whole lot, but thought I would start with the basics of being a farmgirl.

#1.YOU MUST HAVE THE CORRECT TOOLS FOR THE JOB. I have figured out that pretty much every day I work on the farm I need to have the following items-Pocket knife (never know when you will have to cut twine), cap (essential to fight off the sun. Dad thinks my hat is dirty...I just think it is broken in ;-), leather gloves (helps keep the blisters away), sunglasses (these protect my eyes from the sun, but have also saved my eyes from many flying objects-including diesel-through the years).

#2. MUST KNOW HOW TO OPERATE A STICK-SHIFT. We started learning to drive a stick-shift at a pretty young age. Dad would put it in a low gear while feeding or loading pipe, and we would have to operate the clutch, brake and gas. We killed it a lot, but I have it down pretty well now.

#3. PHYSICAL FITNESS. I might not be the most fit person in the world, but I have to have a certain level of coordination and fitness to do most of the jobs on the farm. For instance, today I was running a pitch-fork. You have to figure out the most efficient way to do the job, especially when you know you are not as strong as a man. I figure out different ways to do things to compensate for the lack of strength (although, a lot of times, I just have to have dad do it because I simply can't...I'm never too thrilled when that happens).

#4. PATIENCE. Dad and I sometimes have different ideas about what a job entails. For instance, today he told me the amount of feed (from feed bales that had sort of fallen apart in the field) that I would have to pick up by hand was "not very much." This is the picture of his version of "not very much." Took me well over an hour and a half to get it done and I probably didn't get all of it.

#5. APPRECIATION FOR NATURE. I have lived around wild turkeys all my life, but seeing one of God's creatures out and about while I was out working today still put a smile on my face. This one kept me company for just a little bit while I was picking up my last bit of feed.

#6. FINISHING A JOB ALWAYS GIVES YOU A SENSE OF SATISFACTION. Today it was much easier to get the feed off the trailer than it was to put it on. I had a little bit of help.

#7. MUST KNOW HOW TO BACK UP A TRAILER. I had to learn to back up a trailer when I ran the grain cart during wheat harvest in high school. My uncle was a merciless teacher ;-) I still struggle with smaller spaces and I rarely get it right on the first try, but I was pretty darn proud of my job today.

#8. MUST KNOW BASICS OF OPERATING A TRAILER HITCH. I am proud to say that when I worked maintenance at a sports complex in college, I was the only one out of five of us (including two city boys) that was comfortable backing up the van to the car trailer and hooking it up. Pretty proud moment that day. On the farm, I like our car trailer the best. It is the newest trailer we have and the easiest to hook up. When I hook up other trailers there is frequent yelling complete with sometimes throwing things because they are rusty and not very easy to work with. Thank goodness none of that happened today ;-)

Hope you all had a great weekend and have a great Easter week ahead of you!

Busy, busy, busy....

I was gone until Tuesday this week seeing a good friend of mine, but once I got back, there was work waiting for me on the farm.

One big project my dad wants us to do this Spring and Summer is to take out an old fence line (which has been there for so long that dad isn't even sure how old it is), and put in new posts. So, our two high school workers took the fence off the old posts Monday and Tuesday and then one of them helped me pull the posts out with a tractor on Wednesday. I didn't get pictures from that day because I was pretty busy. We had a really steep hill I had to go down with the tractor. I didn't know until the next day that one of the tractor tires wasn't even on the ground while I was trying to keep it from going over the edge into the ditch and praying the brakes were going to hold!

Here is the ditch we were dealing with.

The night after we had pulled the posts out, we were blessed with 1/2 an inch of rain. Praise the Lord!!! It also made our job the next day much better. We put in a temporary electric fence line. This meant two of us were on foot hammering in over 60 of these posts. We would take 5 posts at a time and then pick up the Mule at the end of that distance and drive ahead to leave it for the other person before we started with another 5 posts. However, the beautiful scenery made it well worth it.

Friday and Saturday were spent cleaning out a fence line next to my house. Many of our elm trees are dying and that means a lot of dead branches everywhere when you have 50 mph gusts of wind on a regular basis. Again, the Mule was a key element in our work day. It looked like our own mini-fortress once we got it loaded ;-)

While we were burning the branches, we went ahead and had our lunch outside. We dug our own little fire pit and roasted some hotdogs. This is how a true farmer/rancher roasts his hot dogs and keeps his hands from getting too hot next to the fire ;-)

These are just some fun pictures to end things. Mom and dad's dog has somehow learned to smile for the camera. My dog always looks mad or scared when I take pictures, so it baffles me that he sought me out when he saw the camera and then sat like this for me to take the picture.

And these two are pictures that have me really excited. I've had a peach tree for three years and this is the first time I've ever seen flowers on it....woohoo!!! Also, I have asparagus coming up and this will be the first year I'll be able to harvest it after I've allowed for the two years to establish its root system. I'm not very patient...especially when it comes to waiting for delicious food, so I'm really excited!

Now, I need to go back outside to my chair to check on the fire from burning the branches. It's a rough life ;-)

Spring Cleaning

I'm finally on Spring Break...woohoo!!!

That will mean a lot of quality time working on farm-related stuff. We started it off this morning with cleaning the seed wheat out of our truck that Dad needed to take to get oat seed today. Seed wheat is the wheat seed we have had cleaned that is used to plant the next crop of wheat. We transferred it to a small bin. In order to do that, I was inside the truck as dad watched the auger.

The hard part was that the truck bed was at a pretty steep angle. Footing was a bit tricky.

After we finally got all of the wheat out of the truck and into the bin, there was one little bit of wheat we had to put in the buckets. I was trying to keep it as a souvenir, but it was a little uncomfortable when I was walking ;-)

Hopefully I'll be able to post more this week because I'm sure it will be busy. Have a great Spring Break!

Windy Weekend

I know it seems like all I have talked about lately is the wind, but we literally only had one day this past week where the wind didn't blow like crazy. Dad had to miss church today (which is an extremely rare event) because he had to go chisel a field again. At least we can get a break from the wind by going inside, but the cattle just have to tough it out.

The calves tend to find any protection they can and then hunker down in it or stay out of the wind. The little black calf on the left wasn't too thrilled with it Saturday.

On our ranch, we have a system we use for our ear tags. Not everyone does that, but we find that it really helps us keep track of our cattle and their age. If it is a heifer (female) calf, we tag it in its left ear with a big tag. Its number is a combination of the last digit of the year (so this year it would be 2) and the last two digits are the order in which it was born. For instance, if it was the 17th heifer calf born in the year 2012, it's ear tag number would be 217. Underneath that, we write the ear tag number of the mother.

If it is a bull, the tag is smaller and goes in the right ear. The number is the same number as its mother. So, we can look at their tag and know which cow is its mother and how old she is. We don't have to worry about keeping them more than a year, so we won't ever have bulls (or steers later on) with the same number. Now, can you tell which calves are bulls and heifers in the picture below? The orange tags belong to us and the green tags belong to my uncle.

Now that we have all the education done, here are some more wind pictures. Good news: The tumbleweeds are out of our pasture fence. Bad news: They are now all in the fence around my house.

And I am the first person to admit that my housekeeping skills aren't always the greatest. However, contrary to what this picture shows, I have dusted in the last month. This is all of the dirt that has collected on my bookcase inside my front door because of the wind we have had the past two weeks. I moved the notebook that was sitting on it.

Sidenote: I dusted today...right after I took a picture of it ;-)

Here's to praying for a nice, wind-free week!