Fun on the Farm

So this blog is suppose to be about the trials of working this farm. Instead all I have recently posted is trips escaping from the farm. Well there have been trials back here on the home front. Let me explain a few.

TIRES!! Recently I counted the number of black round air filled things I have on this farm. There are 61 to be exact. No wonder there is almost always one going flat and needing air. Dead batteries rank a distant but powerful second in problem areas.

So the wife goes off one day with the swather to cut hay. A few hours later she comes back with stories. This irrigation pipe just happened to jump in front of the swather and gained a big hole. And then this small tree decided to commit suicide in front of the swather, but not before breaking out a few cutting teeth. Amazing how these things happen.

My new pump/sprinkler system seems to be working out. We got sections of the field watered that we have never had before. It isn’t too hard to move around. The only thing you have to be careful is that your water source (a big puddle in the field) will suddenly go dry because some neighbor misread the water schedule and takes the water out of turn.

The other day I was leaving for a meeting and I glanced over into the field and the two horses were grazing peacefully. How nice they look. Wait a minute – they are not suppose to be in THAT field. How did they get there? Well yours truly accidentally left a gate open and the horses can sense that from a long way away. Seriously, they can be way across the field and they some how “sense” that a gate is left open and bee-line right for it. When they get out they dance about like little kids. They know they are not suppose to be out but if the silly humans are dumb enough to leave a gate open, then what the heck, its adventure time.

Cows LOVE to eat the top of Russian Olive trees. Now a cow isn’t normally tall enough to reach the top of the tree and this probably flustrates them, but when that tree is knocked over, they are like moths to a bright light. They just swarm around the fallen tree and get into trouble. Recently I was cleaning a ditch line by digging out the trees with the back hoe and the cows were constantly in the way trying to eat the tops. I think there is still one or two of them shoved deep into the debris pile I was making because they would not move. Silly cows.