One finalized chair

 

Here is the first finished chair. Might take me a while to find the time to finish the other side now.

Where's the Beef...no seriously

It isn't often that we have the problem we had today. We had to sort the bulls out from the cattle and....well, sometimes it was a little hard to find the cattle.

 

We got it done, and I only almost ran over two gigantic tire feeders...almost.

My art project

I've been working on an outdoor love-seat glider we got from my cousin. My husband requested a camo design. Here is what I have so far.

Major Wind Damage

I've lived on our farm for the majority of my 34 years of life. There have been many wind storms during those years, but I don't remember any comparing to this one.

Dad called me early Saturday morning while we were away. It woke me up, but I knew it was probably something important. He called to tell me about the wind storm that had gone through the night before. We won't complain about the inch of rain we got, but the wind created some work for us.

Pretty crazy, but all animals and humans were good. The only damage to our houses was some roof damage...and our shingles need replaced anyway. Just didn't expect the wind to help them out!

Oh my how it can change

Last week we had the type of weather that I love the most. Rainy, drizzly, cool. For several days it didn't even make it out of the 70s, if it even reached that warm!

 So in a week we went from this (above) to this (below). 

If you can't figure out what the bottom photo is...well, it is what it looks like at lunch time on a 100 degree day. Everyone is fighting for a spot to park in the shade.

In other news, our garden is finally starting to really produce. I picked the first yellow squash over the weekend, along with a couple of tomatoes. And these are my husband's pride and joy...beets. We pickled about 20 pints and a quart or two. There are a lot more here than it looks like. 

Farmgirl Productions

Since I have started doing more video work for other people, I thought I had better come up with an opening screen to "brand" some of my videos. I have two options at the moment that use a logo I designed and I would like some help deciding which one to go with for now. I just need to start making things look a bit more professional and this is a start.

This one has no background.

And this one does.

Which one do you guys think would work best for the beginning (or end) of videos such as wedding videos, etc.?

Gorgeous view

For years we (and our cattle) have waited for our pastures to look like again. Praise the Lord!

I know it isn't the best picture, but it is hard to take a photo when your husband makes the pickup swerve every time you try to take one :-)

Bales finally unloaded

Yesterday we made this....

Turn into this... 

When unloading this many bales, it takes a lot of man power. But we also have a handy-dandy item that helps a little bit. 

Say hello to our bale elevator.

This machine helps save us a little energy. It works as a conveyor belt of sorts. The people on the truck bed carry the bales over to it, lay them on the chain and it carries them into the barn. Then they are stacked by whoever is working inside (I don't have enough upper body strength, so I am never inside the barn).  The chain has hooks on it that grab onto the bale and carry it along.

We don't always use this (mostly because sometimes we can't get it to work). But it does save your back a little bit when you don't have to physically throw the bales off of the trailer. And they land exactly where they are supposed to every time. 

Moving hundreds of these 60-70 pound bales can do a number on your body. My back isn't what it used to be, so I mostly employed this method (below) that dad is doing. It is the "dragging" technique." Yep, you grab onto the bale with a hay hook and drag it where it needs to go. 

The hay hook we used yesterday is a long one, so we didn't have to bend over near as much. I was trying to show how large it was and still didn't manage to get the whole thing in the photo.

The end result is a very, very full barn. Which is reassuring to see!

Thank goodness that we don't have to pay much for our supervisor...she doesn't do much ;-) But she does supervise very well!

Unloading bales

We are super blessed with cool weather this week so far. Since we knew the cooler weather was coming, we delayed unloading the square bales into the barn until this week. It was a very wise decision.

This is just a short video for those of you that might not have really seen much of this before. Plus, it gave me an excuse to not have to help for a little bit ;-)

When my high school basketball coach told us that we needed to get stronger during the summer, he knew that many of us worked on the farm and couldn't be expected to drive nearly 40 miles every morning just to lift. But he also understood that we were doing something like this and it more than made up for it.

I was probably in my early teens when I first started moving the bales. At that time I don't think I even weighed 100 pounds yet. And if I did, it wasn't much over 100. So, lifting 50-70 lb bales over and over and over...well, it built some muscle eventually, but I relied a lot on learning the correct technique to make things easier.

The kid that you see stacking the bales in the barn started working for us when he had just finished 8th grade. He weighed MAYBE 85 pounds that summer. Some of our bales were so heavy that I literally had to lift one end and he would lift the other. I'm sure several of them outweighed him.This year he will be a senior in high school and has definitely gotten the hang of moving bales.

Meet Zandie...the unmotivated

So, I talk about my dog a lot. I love my dog. She is pretty much my child and my parents grandkid. Just last week she lost her buddy, Rusty. He was mom and dad's loving golden retriever. She had known him pretty much her whole life and they were pals out here on the farm.

Well, she isn't exactly all that motivated, but she did get to expend energy when she and Rusty would run around and play. Now that he is gone, I am her play partner. This morning she had a rare burst of energy and was playing fetch with me really well while we finished unloading some bales. So after we were done, I thought I would prove to my sister that my dog does act happy at times.

The following is what I got on camera. Less than stellar footage of my dog.

Fueling Up

There are so many things that I don't realize I have learned through the years, until I take a picture and then realize that might not be something that people do on an everyday basis.

Saturday I was going to go run combine for a bit, but I got up there and made one round before the fuel light came on. Since I was the only one around, I had to fuel it up by myself.

It is important to make sure a diesel implement does not run out of fuel completely. I've been reminded of this over and over through the years. It isn't like a gas vehicle. Instead, you have to prime the pump before it will start and it is a time-consuming process.

So instead of opting for that, I went ahead and did a fuel run with the farm pickup.

First things first, you have to fill the fuel tank on the back of the pickup.

Once you get to the field, you need to hook the pump for the tank up to the battery on the pickup. These battery cables have caused me problems in the past. It isn't always very easy to figure out which cable is positive and which is negative. One time I hooked them up backwards and the pump did run. But I couldn't figure out why no diesel was coming out of the nozzle. For some reason I decided to take the cap off of the fuel tank...and diesel exploded back in my face! It had been pumping air into the tank instead of pumping the diesel out of it. Lesson learned.

Then you get to finally start the process of putting the diesel in the combine. Gotta make sure the pickup is close enough for the hose to reach.

These aren't exactly the small little fuel tanks you have on your highway vehicle...so it takes a while to fill them up. How long? Definitely long enough to take ridiculous selfies while waiting ;-)

Hay!

This is just for my younger cousin who thought it was so hilarious to yell this while loading square bales, "Hay! Hay!"

There is always plenty to look at in the sky when we load bales.

Loading the oat square bales took two different days this year. This is how far we got the first day before the tractor broke down. 

This is the tractor and "scoop" that we use to load the bales onto the trailer. After that, the bales are stacked by hand in a manner to interlock them. This is important because they need to stay in place when the truck is traveling across very bumpy fields and roads. If they aren't interlocked correctly, then a huge portion will fall off. Trust me, I've see it.

However, when the front wheel and bearing on that tractor looks like this...well, it isn't advisable to continue the task at hand.  

So, we continued a couple of days later. Which was fine by me. We had more help. This little one was very helpful ;-) You know you're a farm kid when you are perfectly content with coloring on the back of a pick-up in an oat field. 

Very talented bird

I noticed this today while driving our farm pick-up. We almost always leave the windows down, so it wasn't surprising to see bird poop. However, I still can't really figure out how it got it right there. 

See that white speck on the lower left-hand side of the dash by the steering column? Yeah, that's bird poop. I have no idea what sort of an angle they had to be at to get it to land on a vertical surface like that.

Wheat Harvest 2014

As you already know, this wheat harvest isn't exactly one for the record books. However, we are extremely grateful that we have a harvest at all. Any little bit of income certainly helps. Here are some more pictures of harvest this year.

 This is never a good sight during harvest...but it usually happens at least once every year for us. This time it was any easy fix. It seems as though dirt doesn't go through the header very well ;-)

I had fun while driving combine one evening. My camera apparently didn't like taking vertical photos of the header and this is what it made it look like. I think it is kind of cool! And no, our equipment isn't that bent out of shape. 

This is what happens when you try to take a picture while unloading...and quit paying attention to what you should be doing. See how big the previous piles of grain are? See how big mine is? Oops.

Always love the sight of this place during harvest. When I was in grade school, it was pretty much the only business in Wallace and it was open all year. Now harvest is the only time it is open, so to see it being used and busy makes me happy.

Gotta weigh the truck before we go dump. 

Ok, so I missed the actual dumping part. I'm still not used to semis being able to dump from the bottom of the truck. I'm  accustomed to the old-school days of having to raise up the truck bed to dump all of the wheat out of the back.

I know it is blurry. But, this ticket shows that even though we don't have much, we still have good quality. For moisture you usually don't want to be at 14 or above. Dockage is according to how much "trash" you have in your wheat (weeds, cheat grass, etc.) and 0.6 isn't too bad. The test weight is right about where we want it at 62.1 and protein is looking pretty good as well at 13.7.

Too tired to title

I was being a little lazy this time and couldn't figure out how to title this Scoop. Here is a brief glimpse of why I was tired yesterday.

This  is our first wheat field. Impressive, right? 

Not so much. It did look better towards the middle of the field, but the drought did a doozy on our wheat harvest. 

Older generation and younger generation working together to get things started and going on the combine. 

Our equipment isn't the newest and greatest, so we don't have a built-in moisture monitor on our combine (actually, I think we might, but it doesn't work). This is how dad tests the moisture of our wheat. You put a sample of wheat in it, screw the lid on as tight as necessary and then it gives you a moisture reading. If the moisture is too high, the elevator doesn't like to accept it and it isn't very safe to put in a grain bin. So it is always necessary to test it before sending a load to town.

That was only part of the day. While I was mowing, dad came and got me and we had to go move our cattle back to where they were supposed to be. They have a tendency to wander...although is is much better now that they have some green grass.

When not helping others, this has been my view for the week. Mowing, mowing and more mowing. I'm not complaining at all. But it is a battle to keep those obnoxious pig weeds away. 

Ahhh...that's a much better view.

As a farm kid, you have to learn to drive a wide array of vehicles. These are just two more of the vehicles I drove...all in the same day! I might not have driven them for long amounts of time, but it was necessary for me to help shuffle them around for the day's tasks.  

We've been doing a bit of square baling when we can fit it in. No, I didn't do any baling, but I did have to back it into the shed with this tractor and then help unhook the tractor to take it over and hook it up to our unloading auger for wheat.

This is the view that makes my mom REALLLYYY nervous (and me a little bit, too.) Neither one of us are fond of heights and we don't exactly love it when dad has to climb up to open the top of the bin during harvest. But it is necessary and he has done it hundreds of times. At least we would rather have him do it during this type of weather than in the middle of a thunderstorm...which he has been known to do. He has to keep his crop dry, which sometimes requires climbing up in the middle of bad weather to close the top.

So, there ya have it. We are a multi-tasking family around here. But at least it keeps you on your toes and gives ya a lot of marketable skills ;-)