Tag: Agriculture

Harvest harvest harvest

We have been rolling along over here in St. Paul. We started harvest early this year, we didn’t get much to any rain since early April so that really sped up the maturing of our crops.

We are on a pretty good stride of the middle of harvest right now. Most days are the same, combine, fill trucks with seed, feed the people, try to stay cool, haul the trucks to the cleaner, rinse and repeat.

The beginning of harvest was a little insane I’ll be honest. We started combining crimson clover at the same time that we started cutting our tall fescue which happened to be at the same time as the good old St. Paul rodeo.

So our days started at 2am with cutting grass, moving on to 11am combining, 7:30pm rodeo volunteering or watching and finishing off that long day around 11pm.

With of course the inevitable crying family member because there weren’t enough games played (Auggie), not enough carnival rides ridden (Millie), too much food eaten (Hoot), ready to be home (Matt) or just plain damn tired (me!). Don’t get me wrong though, we do a good job of having a lot of fun too!

Not sure when we slept that first week but I know I am not the only one to be happy to be in the middle stride of harvest!!

We will finish tall fescue this week and then get the combines all cleaned out for perennial ryegrass. A week or so of that will finish our grass seed harvest for this year. Next up green beans, wheat, radish & filberts!

Feels Like Spring Fertilizing Weather

Sometimes when I walk outside in the morning I can feel in my bones it’s time for a specific task to happen on the farm. It may be the smell of fresh cut grass because it finally dried up enough to get out there on the mower, or the dew, or settled dust, or the temperature of the air. But all those things come together on certain days to just say the season is changing and it’s time to “blank”. Maybe I’m the only that experiences this, but I doubt it. Whether it’s time to harvest, time to feed the crops, time to kill some weeds or prune some trees, that seasonality becomes a part of what you feel when that first morning air hits you.

And of course there are growing degree days to pay attention to, fields to walk, work orders sent from our field men, and of course neighbor farms to watch. But there’s also a rhythm to the seasons that gets ingrained in you when it hits year after year.

This is our fertilizer buggy, it may look fairly Mad Max but she gets the job done!

So this morning as I loaded the kids onto the bus to head to school, all I could think was, “Goodness it feels like spring fertilizing weather out here!” My intuition may be helped by the fact that we have planned to start fertilizing, and also that we had some amazing warm days last week that helped dry out the fields from some pretty deep puddles. But either way, today is a great day to get out there on some finally dry dirt and start feeding our plants so they can get to their job of growing a healthy crop!

Summer Workers

School is out for the summer, and while we have camps and a few fun outings planned, most of our summer is full of work on the farm.

This week was a juggle of childcare so I got to take the boys out for a few hours to work with me. We checked a few (very tall) tall fescue fields and headed out to a newly planted orchard to count trees. We planted a number of new baby hazelnut trees this past winter, and most are looking great, but there are a few dead ones that will need to be replanted.

So Hoot, Auggie and I headed out to do some tallying. A skill Auggie was very proud to have learned this year in kindergarten.

This spring and moving now into summer has been a struggle with the weather and rising costs. It’s a very uneasy time to be a farmer with all that has hit us this year that is out of our control. But it’s also just really amazing to get to be outside, teaching your kids all about what you love to do and seeing how much they love it also!

Someday these summer workers will be full time around here….probably (as I’m told often) before I know it!