Spraying Corn

Now that the fields have dried out enough for us to get back to farming, it’s time to spray the corn I wrote about last week.

Remember the water truck?

 

Well, that’s used to fill up this tank

 

Which will contain the water and pesticides (ooh - dirty word!) for killing the weeds in this field

Watch out little girls!!!

Uh oh. Too late.

She’s a quick one too - CH must have been moving faster though.

 

Ok, back to the farming stuff…

The water and pesticide (dirty word!) mixture comes out of these nozzles

 

That are all lined up like this

 

on the back of the sprayer, which is attached to the tractor.

 

Can you see that very fine mist coming out of the sprayers? That’s the magic stuff that will kill all those weeds in between the corn rows and allow the corn to grow and thrive properly. Otherwise, the weeds will compete with the corn for water and nutrients and that ain’t a good thang.

 

The Chicago Board of Trade isn’t listing weeds at $6.00 a bushel these days, ya know?

Looky How Much Better!

As you get to know me, you’ll discover that I’m a big cheapskate frugal. I hated the linoleum in my guest bathroom, so I painted it… negative hardware store lady be damned. I wanted one of those wooden playsets for the girls so I hunted down a neighbor with grown children and got a playset for free (as long as we picked it up). And of course, I’m a Target girl but really who isn’t?

I was very intrigued by the idea of Photoshop, but again I’m cheap frugal. So I did what anyone would do. I found a FauxtoShop. Did I just invent a word? I hope so, but I’m scared to Google it. I just want to keep pretending I invented it. It’s called Photoscape, it was free and I think I’m in love.

Here’s the barn photo without FauxtoShop:

 

And with:

 

Check that out.

I’m going to leave the tutorials to The Pioneer Woman because I can’t even begin to tell you what I did. Oh, okay - here’s what I did step by step.

1. Click

2. Clickey

3. Clickety-click

4. ::Gasp:: “Oh my Gosh! Look what I did!!”

I’m also very specific and detail-oriented. (That sound you hear is my husband laughing his butt off)

If you don’t have Photoshop, check out Photoscape. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.

 

As Promised… Cute Boys on the Farm!!

Last year, we had irrigation installed on our farm. The really nice folks at Benchmark Irrigation came out and put together all of these spindly looking things called center pivots. The girls think of them as their own personal water sprinklers. I mean, I only had a tiny Willie Water Bug when I was a kid, but hey - they’re lucky enough to live on a working farm, right?

Yesterday, I mentioned that

1. Cotton Husband’s uncle bought a farm close to us

and

2. I’d post cute pictures

Guess who is out again this year installing irrigation equipment on Uncle Melvin’s farm??

If there are any single girls out there in North Carolina, you might want to start hanging out near Murfreesboro. I’m just saying.

Not only are they cute as buttons, but they were very tolerant of a camera-clutching, 7 months pregnant woman babbling on about her website. (Psst. I think that last guy might have thought I was a little crazy.)

Coming Up Tomorrow…

pictures of cute, hardworking boys!!

Stay tuned…

 

Getting Rid of An Eyesore

 

Sometimes on an older farm, you find that things have accumulated. For instance, I think that we still have every truck every used by the Cotton Husband, his dad and his grandfather. We also still have the hog houses even though we no longer raise hogs. Then there’s that refrigerator that was in the barn.

CH’s uncle recently bought a farm close to us and a few houses came with it. One is a gorgeous white farmhouse complete with outbuildings and a smokehouse for hams and bacon. The other is a smaller house in good condition. The third… ah, the third house. This house is what I was referring to when I was talking about things accumulating and being forgotten. If I started listing all of the things wrong or unsafe about this house, y’all would stop reading about 1,000 things into the list. But just for the sake of passing along information, I’ll tell you that the house had no septic system - yet up until about two years ago someone lived there. There was indeed a toilet in the house… sitting on top of a hole cut in the floor. You can’t even begin to imagine the piles of junk strewed around the house or the filth. Just trust me when I tell you it was awful. Really awful. I wouldn’t let my girls go into the house at all. Heck, I didn’t want to go in there myself.

There was only one thing to do - call the local volunteer fire department and ask them if they want to use it for practice. And they surely did. In fact, they came out the evening after several tornadoes had struck our area. They worked in the rain, in fact. I don’t know about you guys but I don’t do anything in the rain except maybe play in mud puddles.

So now all that’s left of this house is ashes and some cinder blocks that need to be hauled away.

What about y’all? What kind of junk has accumulated in your garages or on your property? Let me hear from you!

 

Being Artsy-Fartsy

I snapped this shot the other day while taking pics for “At the End of the Day”. I like it but I don’t know why. I just can’t quite find it in my hick-self to articulate the reasons. So far the reactions I’ve gotten have been “Solemn.” and “Striking”. Hey, I’ll take that. Both of those make sense to me.

What do y’all think? I have to ask because even though I enjoy taking pictures, I’ve never had any training past one semester in high school and psst… don’t tell Mr. Perry but I screwed up a LOT. This was back in the dark ages when we still had to develop the pictures and I swear - half my paper ended up ruined and stuffed behind random boxes in the darkroom so that my ineptitude remained unknown. Until now. And while I’m at it, I should probably fess up that when we were permitted by the school to walk around town and take pictures I usually just snapped a couple shots on my way home to get a snack. It’s almost always all about the snacks. Sometimes I shot pool at the local gas station. While getting a snack.

::waves at Mr. Perry::

I’m in big trouble.

So. How would you describe this photo? You can give it a name, comment on it, caption it, etc. I’m not real picky. Have at it!

Congratulations NotaFarmGirl!!

NotaFarmGirl is the proud new owner of a quart of homemade sorghum molasses! I’m so, so happy to learn that I’m not the only person who can identify weird, one-time Saturday Night Live sketches.

Here’s the explanation for that sketch (courtesy of Wikepedia):

“Mr. Short-Term Memory

Tom Hanks played Mr. Short-Term Memory on occasion when he would host SNL. Due to getting hit on the head by a pear which had fallen from a tree, San Bernardino advertising man Jeffrey Morrow (Hanks) had no short-term memory. Thus, he constantly forgot about things which had just occurred…and even things which had occurred long ago. The most famous of these sketches found Jeff appearing on “Game Beaters” (a fictional game show)–continuously forgetting the question asked him. (Actually, he didn’t remember being asked a question at all, or even where he was or why!) Moreover, Jeff was continuously amazed to find Tony Randall–his celebrity partner–sitting next to him. He kept begging for Randall’s autograph, which the Odd Couple star gave him, but to no great effect: ‘What, do you just hand these out to people you bump into on the street? That’s kind of sad…TONY RANDALL! I am a big fan of yours!! Can I have your autograph please-please-please…’”

 

These are the most delicious molasses ever. They’re made by Ken’s Old Red Mill in Conway, North Carolina. Ken is the dad of our irrigation equipment rep, Brian.

Personally, I recommend making lots and lots of molasses cookies!

Planting Peanuts

Not exactly delicious looking are they?

These are the seed peanuts, ready for planting. They’re pink because they’re treated with… stuff. Eating these in this state would be a really, really bad idea. These containers are typically full.

Here are all of these containers on the planter - these are called “hoppers”

CottonHusband fills up each of these hoppers with seed peanuts and then let’s ‘er rip as he drives up and down the field.

By the way, I did NOT pick out any of these wonderfully coordinated outfits. But I will be washing all of that dirt out of them. Sometimes I think he’d have just as much luck planting seeds on himself .

Speaking of dirt…

You know they’re going to find dirt anywhere they can - and they’re smart enough to find the available shade.

After two straight days of planting, CH finished up with the peanuts today. While he was at it, he went ahead and emptied out all the hoppers and re-filled them with sunflower seeds.

This is one of those moments where you might think we’re really wonderful nature lovers. We’re really not in this case. By Labor Day all of the sunflowers will be dried out and lots and lots of doves will be flying overhead - this is when about forty of our friends come to the house to eat and be merry and … you can guess the rest. But the sunflowers are gorgeous allllll summer - we try to have at least one party when they’re all in full bloom. It’s the most perfect backdrop for a party.

These sunflowers should be blooming by next month. Check back for pictures!

 

At the End of the Day

During this time of the year, work ends pretty late. There’s always something to prepare for the next day or something to check out or something to fill up - you get the idea.

Remember seeing the guys loading the peanuts into the barn (of course you do - unless you’re like that short term memory guy played on the old SNL skit “Oh my God! It’s Tony Randall!!”. Anyone else remember that? I hope I’m not the only weirdo who does. Let me know. And hey - I’ll send a quart of homemade sorghum molasses to anyone who can tell me which Oscar winner played the short term memory guy.) ?

So after all those seed peanuts are unloaded off the dealer’s truck they have to be loaded onto our truck to be poured into the planter (pics of that to come).

Man, this truck has seen a LOT of seasons.

Can you tell it’s the end of the day? Someone is not amused that I’m taking pictures of him right now. Eeek.

And um… I did mention that we’re conventional farmers right? This means that we use the tools of the devil (supposedly) like the pesticides that come in these boxes. Y’all still love me, right? Right? I reuse and recycle!!!

Here’s the same field I told you about yesterday - the one that was too muddy to drive a tractor into. The Cotton Husband is testing the worst areas to see if they’ve dried.

Look at all that gorgeous, rosy light. This is such a beautiful time of day.

And tractors may not be able to get into this field but deer sure can.

Some farmers obtain permits to shoot the deer in their crops. We don’t do that. We’re tenderhearted animal lovers. We wait until deer season in November.

Don’t forget - pics of peanuts being planted to come later today (if I can catch Cotton Husband at the right time)!!

 

 

 

Housekeeping Stuff

Just a couple changes I wanted y’all to know about. First I’ve changed my profile pic to this chick:

Miss Bitty is our ancient beagle. She deserves some fame, don’t ya think?

Secondly… our cotton is getting ready to be PLOWED UNDER to make way for the new crops. Better git it while the gittin’ is good!