First Day of "School" Jitters: Harvest 2019

Remember that anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach before the school year started each August? There was excitement, but there was also an undercurrent of nervous energy and uncertainty. Would you understand the concepts of Geometry? (Not without sitting at Mr. Bisel's desk for a little one-on-one time.) Would friendship triumph over the girl drama?

There's been a little of that feeling going on at The County Line this June. We finally got started with Harvest 2019 late yesterday afternoon, June 26.  It started better than last year when we sent a raccoon through the combine before ever cutting a swath.

This year, the anxiety was mainly about when we would finally begin. Rain has delayed harvest and caused a later start than we've ever experienced in our 38 years of farming together. I have a record of the start dates since I've been blogging:

2010:  June 18
2011:  June 10
2012:  May 26 (an anomaly and the earliest harvest, by far, we've ever had)
2013:  June 21
2014:  June 17
2015:  June 20
2016:  June 15
2017:  June 12
2018: June 12
2019: June 26

 

Randy thought the ground would be hard to maneuver because of the repeated rains. And while he did go around a lot of mud holes, he didn't have to call for a pullout. Fingers crossed. However, we do have the chain on the big tractor ... just in case.

There's a pond on the ground where we were harvesting last evening. I sent a photo to the landlord, and she didn't recognize it. Her dad had constructed the pond about the time he retired. And she said she'd never seen it look so full. With the old cottonwoods' leaves glistening in the evening sun and the bright blue against the golden wheat, it was undeniably pretty.

(This photo was taken through the window as I was riding with Randy, so it's kind of blurry)

In the background of the photo above, you can also see the water still standing in the field across the road from where we were harvesting. That's not a pond, but it has a lot of water - just like most fields around here.

"Dessert" after bringing dinner to the field last evening was my first combine ride of Harvest 2019 with my favorite farmer. There will be opportunities for plenty more evening "dates." However, we don't have quite as much wheat to harvest as usual, since last October's deluge of rain prevented us from planting nearly 400 planned wheat acres.

Sunset - October 25, 2018

 
Still, my farmer was happy to get the machine rolling. I'm sure there will be more (and better) photos to come! Let's just hope the stories aren't as "exciting" as raccoons and hiring oilfield machinery to pull us out of mud and mire. We could use a happy ending to this saga that began last fall.