The weather the last couple of days is both a blessing and burden. After five weeks of hitting harvest hard, the rain (and that s-word) is giving everybody a day or two to decompress, catch up on sleep, and just relax for more than five or ten minutes at a time.
It’s a burden because it is hard for Captain to have to stop when the end of harvest is in sight, though! He is down to the last 20 acres of his own corn to pick and then will pick a couple of fields for a neighbor before calling it done for the year.
He has someone running the chisel plow for him so he doesn’t have to think about doing that after finishing combining. That trip to Split Rock is still looming in our minds.
The end of harvest always brings a bucket of mixed emotions. Relief, satisfaction, and pride...those are all top of the list. However, Captain tells me there is also something very much like postpartum depression that sets in after the last bushel of corn is harvested. Sort of an anticlimatic letdown.
Part of that comes from not having a single, solitary focus where everything revolves around harvest. Part of it is that whole here-comes-winter-again thing. Captain won’t admit it, but I think part of it is that he won’t be able to see Sparky on a daily basis anymore, but that’s just a theory!
Like most years, Captain has a list of projects that need to be done in that very narrow window of time between end of harvest and freeze up. There is a waterer (that’s a livestock drinking fountain) that needs to be replaced because fixing it is no fun when you have to stick your hand in cold water when it’s 20 below and windy and probably dark. There’s a section of fence that needs repair before snow flies. He needs to check the water level in the in-floor heat pipes in the basement before we fire up the boiler for the first time. Lastly, he wants to finally get our garage wired for an overhead door opener and lights.
And, joy of joys, we have to move cattle around to get them all situated before Old Man Winter arrives for good. That job might not be so bad if Captain didn’t always think that just the two of us can handle it. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s a FUBAR. We’ll see how it goes this year.
This year he gets to add a new task in there...buying baby bull calves at the local sales barn. We have raised dairy steers for ten years now and have never had to buy them at the sales barn. We have often used the barter system with neighbors. Will Work For Bull Calves. It’s been a good system up until now.
After we sold our dairy cows, Captain sort of lucked into milking every other weekend for a neighbor. He liked it because he said it was enough for him to get his “cow fix” and enough to remind him he didn’t want to do it everyday anymore. He also got bull calves from his boss, so that worked out extremely well for all parties.
However, his boss recently decided to retire. We are happy for him, but it means finding a new source for calves. Hence, the new experience of a trip to the sales barn. Captain hasn’t had any baby calves to feed for a couple of weeks now, but there are 20 empty hutches out there to fill. That will keep him busy over the winter!
Unlike the rest of us, Captain enjoys winter in Minnesota. The cold doesn’t bother him, so he does outdoorsy stuff like ice fishing and snowmobiling. Me, not so much, but I try to go out on the ice with him once a year. We have snowshoed at Oxbow in the past, and that was actually fun.
I still think winter is for blanket, books, and burrowing. I go into complete hibernation mode when the time changes, which apparently is going to happen this weekend on Halloween, giving all the little spooks and extra hour for mischief!
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