June 17, 2010

View of the day-Another change of colors…this Gleaner was working across the road from us at Carmen.

The sun was shining and the wind was blowing, it was going to be a good day for combining…at some point. We grabbed an early breakfast at Miss Dotties, then headed for Carmen…to do a test and see how close we were to starting.

After driving out to the cart through some wet spots, we did a test and tried not to get stuck doing it. We took the sample into Carmen…13.5% and with the cart full of dry wheat we had from before the rain, we were good to go. We stopped to get the General from town then got organized to finish the field. It was quite a task cutting in the soft fields…there weren’t too many places where the combine wasn’t sinking and leaving ruts. At least there was no standing water…and Marilyn didn’t get stuck.

We finished up the field then Al went to the elevator to dump the last load, Marilyn picked up some fuel for the tractor and combine, then it was back out to the field to get things ready to move. We unhooked the header from the combine then moved it out to the road with the pickup through the narrow entrance to the yard. After a few attempts at unsuccessfully backing the header up straight…something about those front wheels…we were able to get it far enough over to get the combine out and hooked up to it.

Marilyn left for Cherokee with the combine and header and after getting the header trailer hooked up to the pickup, Al drove the tractor and cart and Ron brought up the rear with the pickup and header trailer. We got to the next field, got the header back on the combine then started cutting. It was a small field and once we got finished we unhooked the header again and moved through town to the next field. We got the header back on the combine and called it a day. Lots of moving and some interesting combining conditions…but at least we were cutting. We took the header trailer into town and parked it with the other trailers, then Al picked up fuel for tomorrow.

Main Street was pretty quiet as Marilyn went to upload the blog, until someone started knocking on the back of the pickup as she was parked in front of the library. Lee Petersen was on his way back to Pratt with a header, so she got to have a good gab and check out the fancy European New Holland header he was going to try out. A 35 ft auger head with adjustable cutter bar…

No camera, so no pics…looked interesting though...