One thing is certain with harvest – nothing is certain!
I had an idea when we left home we may be sitting for a little while before we did any cutting. That appears to be the story. Our farmer has a combine. To make the situation a little easier to understand, our farmer also has a Shelbourne Stripper Head (to see what I’m talking about, click here to view a Shelbourne Head) and uses it to cover his dry land wheat. The stripper head removes only the head of wheat and leaves the straw. It does exactly what it sounds like it does…it strips the head from the plant. These headers are very popular in this part of Kansas because the straw that’s left will help catch any snow that may happen to fall. And in this “desert”, any moisture received is precious. He has us cut the wheat under the irrigation pivots because it reduces the amount of straw. Typically, irrigated wheat will grow much better than dry land – due to the amount of water that can be applied to the wheat as it’s growing. Too much straw affects planting next year’s crop.
Ok…with that as background knowledge, I can continue with my story. This year – because of the drought – our farmer may or may not have us help with the dry land wheat. The determining factor will be what he finds once he gets in the field. If he can cover the ground easily with his combine, due to the yields, he’ll probably cut it all himself. If it’s doing better than he expected, we will jump in and help. IF we don’t get to help with the dry land, we’ll be waiting for AT LEAST 10 days for the irrigated wheat to dry down enough to cut. If this is the case…COME ON HEAT! This happened to us a couple of years ago. There’s nothing worse than seeing combines running all over the countryside and the Yellow Beast is sitting.
We’re ready to go as soon as we get the word.
In the meantime, we tinker. Frank’s air conditioner was worked on this spring. I was hoping this was the year. This would be the year I would get to sit in the luxury of coolness as we travel. It started out that way. However, by the time we made it to Garden, the ‘ole girl was struggling. So, this has become Jim’s challenge while we’re not in the field. He’s bound and determined to figure out what’s not working and make it work (bless his heart). We had to make a trip into Garden late yesterday afternoon for air conditioning parts, a trip to Sam’s Club and the final stop – Wal Mart. Funny thing…when I texted Callie to see what she was doing (since the College World Series in Omaha was rained out), she was in Wal Mart. When I called Jenna to see how her day went, she was just headed to Wal Mart. I guess this family does their fair share of supporting Wal Mart!
On our way into town, we spotted this HUGE load sitting at the truck stop outside of Garden City:
And this is the load the rig had been hauling. It had to be detached and worked on due to heigth restrictions in Colorado. When we pulled up, they were in the process of cutting down the size of the cradle it’s resting in. While we were sitting there watching, a gentleman pulled up and offered more information. It’s purpose is to hold chemicals and is heading to Canada. It was built in India and shipped to the U.S. He said it weighed way more than it was intended to weigh and cost millions of dollars to build. It’s not often that you see a load that dwarfs the size of a semi!
When we went past the truck stop later last night, they had flood lights on their project – still working. Jim’s comment as we drove by – “this would be the BEST time to work on that”. It’s supposed to be close to 100 degrees today. That should help dry down that wheat! In the meantime, we will continue to tinker.