lazy Sunday afternoon

Greetings everyone. We are at a new chapter in our lives this afternoon. All of our kids are now able to get out of their cribs on their own. What a fast Sunday afternoon we've had.

Much of our farming time this past week has been focused on keeping the animals fed and watered. A cold snap shuffled in two times this past week. Last Sunday evening, we had a great big cold front blow through and then last Wednesday another one came roaring in. We had two nights with temps down into the single digits. Wow. What a shock to the system. This afternoon however its a balmy and windy 67 degrees. Not bad for a Sunday in December.

Here lately, we've been starting to feed our cattle liquid molasses.

This stuff helps them to have more energy and boy does it ever make them eat everything in sight. We'll keep hauling the stuff to them. However, please let us come live with you when they eat of out of house and home. The talk is that if you feed your cattle molasses, they'll eat just about any thing. Well, it sure does make them eat up that wheat straw that they would never eat before. And now, they even have better hair quality. Maybe that is going a bit too far.

Below is a pic of them licking the molasses off of a wheel that rolls down into a tank full of the sticky stuff.

time to take account

Hello farmers at heart. This is it. This is your season to take account of what has been done this past year. The grain is in the silos and the calves are out on the wheat and the cows.....well, who knows where they are. And we farmers are approaching that time when we all become a little more reflective no matter what type of day we've had or how busy we've been. This is a precious time of year. The little children at home looking with hopeful anticipation of dad getting in from the cold and holding them on his knee. Each one reflecting sweetness in their little faces as their time of anticipation draws near. Wouldn't trade that for anything with anyone. And to think, it must be like that with our Heavenly Father and us. Well, on that lingering thought, I'll share a few pics with you and let you be on your way:

Mollie, my faithful companion in her seat on the patio behind the house.

height of the Endurance wheat we fertilized and sprayed for weeds and cheat back on 11-20-09 was about 3" high and looks thick as hair.

#196 (heifer born at Sheldon Payne's place) now she's here in the field by our house waiting to have her first calf. Hopefully sometime in December about Christmas time.

growing

Hello there. We've had a over a weeklong rain delay for our wheat planting. We mulch treaded and packed the Lapel place on Saturday, so we'll be off to the races with drilling there at tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock sharp. A special thanks goes out to Rodney Wheritt for spaying the volunteer wheat with roundup so we can try to get a perfect stand. We'll plant Doans variety that came from Joe Peeper up near Enid. This is a fairly new variety for wheat country as it was only introduced to growers in 2007 and this is the first year for it to be used by farmers other than seed growers.

Yesterday, we bot a new camera to replace the one that got dropped one too many times. Jenn is working out the kinks as I write this.

To encourage your responses, I have a special prize for the person who guesses closest to the correct number of grains of wheat per pound of the Doans Certified wheat seed I mentioned.

Gradually expecting a change.....

FARM UPDATE: Autumn is settling onto the Oklahoma praire where the wheat planting is winding down. Wheat spikelets are popping out of the ground all over. Calves are being weened from their mama's with anticipation of getting a taste of early wheat pasture. I can hear a pen of them bawling just outside the window down at TC & Christy's (our neighbor to the south).

We are getting a little bit of rain today. Maybe we'll finish drilling the wheat this week. Part of the reward is in this effort of planting alone.

Sowing the Seed

Hello farmers at heart. We've been busy planting our wheat. So far, we have finished over half of the farm and used up all of our Endurance Seed Wheat. Now we're starting to use our Duster variety. On Thursday morning early, Daddy and I took our annual trek to see how the first field we sowed was looking. You should have seen it. Beautiful.....Each little spikelet of seedling wheat had its very own diamond dewdrop on top of it. Pop would have been very proud (even if this was on our no-til upland river patches). Every time I think of No-Til Farming, I remember him saying "Don't neglect the seedbed!"

Update: Well, Dallas Crowdis came through. He found us an 8-volt battery for the 1951 Chevy Wheat Truck. Way to go Dallas and everyone at DNA Auto. Truck runs very smooth and we were all happy to see it driving down the road.

Wheat's growing
Cow's lowing
Moon's up
Lights out.

rants from the backyard overlooking my life

Would you think that an 8-volt battery for a 1951 Chevy truck would be too hard to find? Well, apparently they are. I was trying to get one this week for Pop's pride & joy but to no avail. Tried NAPA Auto Parts - they said convert it to a 12-volt system. Called John Deere and the 8-volt battery in their computer was listed as "unavailable". Is nothing important just simply for the sake of that's the way it used to be? Are we too busy to appreciate anything besides something that is NEW? Maybe my heart is a relic of the not so distant past. I think I shall take up cigar smoking ..... perhaps.

Into everyone's life a little rain must fall

Hello everyone. Sorry we've taken so long off from the blog. For the past month, we have had some very sick kids. It all started a month ago this past week. We thought our kids one by one were coming down with the flu. Well, after the "flu" had pretty much run its course, the first kiddo to get sick was sick again. Turns out that all 4 quads had e-coli. For Preston, Claire and Griffin, they in turn got sick again with HUS. Its sort of like blood poisoning that resulted in a week and half hospital stay for Preston, a week for Claire and just over two weeks for Griffin. As of Friday, however we were all back home from Children's Hospital in OKC. Everyone is doing very good now. Just a few carryover problems from high blood pressure for 3 of the kids. We are staying on top of this.

As for the farm, many thanks to Daddy, Mike and Kendrick for holding down the fort. They were able to work on the fence a lot, work the ground at least once over with the springtooth and even keep the minerals put out for the cows. Doesn't even seem like they needed me at all. But Jenn and I missed this place. Its certainly good to be back home.

Today, it is raining. Official Weather Observer Maxton Slagell has been eying the rain guage. So far as of 7:00 a.m. this morning we had 1.85" of rainfall. We've had some more that has been falling here since the report this morning too.

We plan on starting to drill wheat next week on or about the 21st of September. This past week, Mike and I made our annual trip to Alva to Joe Shirley's farm for seed wheat. Take a look at Joe's website www.shirleyfarms.com. There his wife Ann and son Biron loaded us with a load of Certified Duster and a load of Certified Endurance. We'll probably plant the Endurance on the home place here because it makes such good pasture during the winter for the mama cows. Maybe some of the Endurance will also go on the Kaiser and Miller places in order to make hay there and help clean up some pesky rye that tries to come up and grow with the wheat. Endurance variety is known for the great amount of forage it produces.

As for the Duster, it was our best yielding wheat for this past summer. It will probably be grown on the Pickens place as well as Huiatt and Long 1/4.

On Thursday, Mike went to the Enid area to Joe Peepers farm. There he picked up a small load of Certified Doans seed wheat. As he was coming back home, he stopped in Lahoma at Byron Hobson's farm to pickup a small load of Cerfied Santa Fe seed. He was able to do this because our trailer has two separate compartments that can hold about 500 bushels of wheat each. Pretty handy for such a trip.

We have almost completed the two wire electric fence on the Woods and Pickens places. Its going to allow us to keep the 2nd calf cows/heifers out of the trees, creeks and ponds on those places this winter. It'll make them much easier to check come calving time. Special thanks to Kendrick and Max"well" for this effort since I've been gone so much.

My Granny taught us a poem with this portion "look this way see nobody, look that way see nobody, hoe corn, dig tater." Perhaps this is one of those endearing things about life on the farm, that we just have to keep on going no matter what.

God Bless, thanks for your prayers. P.S. don't turn the cows into the garden just yet, I think the tomaters are coming on strong!