The Harvest Begins

Harvest is the most exciting and the most stressful time of the farmer's year.  Certainly there is that reap what you sow part -- where you can be rewarded for choosing the right crop on the right land, planting at the right time, with the right aids, and having it become ready, in high quality and high yield with enough time to harvest it before the frost, snow, and winter come.  And of course, it is also the time of year where you can feel punished by nature due to no fault of your own...insect damage, hail damage in summer storms, loss of quality, yield, and dollars due to weeds, late rains, early frosts, etc.  It's a time of watching the skies and hoping for just the right weather and amount of time to get done what needs to be done.

 

It is a bit of a cheat to post a blog on the beginning of harvest in October.  Most people are done already, or wishing they were.  But I am shamefully at least 6 weeks behind in pictures and stories, so will have to slip this in and try to catch up later.

 

So, for you city people, this little unit below, is a grain truck, which my mom loves to drive.  Farms have gotten bigger, so this is used in conjunction with semi's now...but when I was growing up this was the big truck.  We call it "The Root Beer" around our place due to it's A & W colors.

 



The first crop we were harvesting this year were the Meadow Peas.

And this unit below (again for city kids who have never made it out to the wilds of the prairies) is a combine, which cuts the stalks, picks up the grain part, and separates the grains (or in this case peas) from the rest of the plant and collects them in the hopper.  The rest of the plant gets spit back out the back.

As the grin shows, combining makes farmers happy (when all is going well).

I just liked this picture because it shows how large and tall the machinery is when standing by the operator's cab.

In addition to farms, hawks love combining too.  Cutting down the thick crops exposes all sorts of little rodents, and the dinner is made much easier.  I counted 13 hawks scouring the freshly combined area of one field at one time.  They allow the combine to get pretty close, which is amazing since it is big, noisy, and dusty.



Combining days are long days.  The work rarely stops at sunset, but rather is dictated by either weariness, weather, or moisture content of the crop which can rise to undesirable or impossible levels as the cool damp night air of fall sets in.



The end of another pretty Saskatchewan day....for me at least.  The combine kept going after
I left.

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