Vine Maple Farm

We had a good rain today and yesterday. My renter’s field corn is doing well– it’s at least eight inches tall now. I planted my sweet corn later– dad always said sweet corn does better if it is planted after the soil is good and warm. Now that I am trying to grow a crop of sweet corn, I realize that I don’t know what “good and warm” means, but I waited two weeks after the field corn was planted to plant my sweet corn. We’ll see. The rain has brought on growth. I’ll be cultivating this weekend. It will be the third time already. I suspect I am over cultivating, but I don’t intend to use any herbicide and I don’t want to do any more hand hoeing than absolutely necessary.

I am not an organic farmer, but I avoid herbicides, pesticides, and cormmercial fertilizer. I am not an organic farmer because I reject reductionism. I do not make decisions based on slogans or rules of thumb. Some day, when I have a good reason, I may decide to use a pesticide. If I decide that, it will be because I have considered all the evidence and the consequences. On the whole, I think using pesticides and herbicides is a risky proposition, but there may be situations when not using them is even riskier. Rejecting those possibilities out-of-hand is irresponsible sloth, at least as bad as blindly accepting the self-serving claims of the chemical salesmen.

We have not filled the silo since the early 80s when my dad was lifting a cow with a block and tackle. The cow was down with milk fever. The old block and tackle broke and cow collapsed on my dad, his knee shattered. That convinced him it was time to retire. I helped him sell the herd the next week. The silo was almost full and the silage was left to settle and dry out for the next twenty years.

Usually, the first step in filling silo is to to hoist the blower pipe that conducts the silage from the blower at the bottom of the outside of the silo to the top of the silo. The heavy eight inch pipe was hoisted to the top of the silo with a cable attached to the pipe and run through a pulley at the top of the silo. The cable was pulled by a tractor on the ground. This was a tense job that could turn into a disaster at any moment. At our place, with its uniquely designed concrete silo, my dad always took the most dangerous job: he would climb to the top of the silo, crawl on his hands and knees on a shaky two by ten plank from the silo ladder to the opposite point on the other side of the silo where the blower pipe would enter. That plank and his sense of balance was the only thing between him and a forty foot drop to the bottom of the empty silo.

When the other farmers who dad filled silo with were all dead or retired, dad no longer had to take the shared pipe down each year, and so it stayed right there, until yesterday.

That pipe had been nagging at me. It was chained to the silo roof sill, but never secured at the bottom and it has been blowing back and forth in the wind more and more the last few years. The plank dad used has been up in the top of the silo, exposed to the weather and insects. It can not be trusted to cross the chasm like dad used to.

My wife and I moved in with dad to take care of him and the farm for his last few years. It has been four years since he died and we took over. We have curious, lively, and fearless seven year old twin grandsons who are around the place all the time. I fret about what might happen if the blower pipe let loose and fell when they happened to venture to the base of the silo.

Yesterday, I decided to do something about the pipe.  I had open heart surgery last fall and I am in no condition to climb up to the top of the silo, attach a cable and pulley and lower the pipe the proper way. The roof of the silo is already in bad shape from age and weather, so I decided a little more damage would be a small price for the peace of mind I would gain from having that old pipe on the ground. So I decided to attach a cable to the pipe and pull it down with my tractor.

It took two pulls and met with only moderate success.  The first pull separated the pipe at the expansion joint. The second pull got the rest of the pipe but it separated at the connection to the distributor hood, leaving the distributor hood, the part that directed the silage blown upward by the blower back down into the silo, danging from the sill and hooked over the side of the silo.

Not ideal, but much better. Most of the weight has been removed from the chain suspending the pipe from the sill and the hood is firmly hooked over the side of the silo so even if the chain and sill were to let go, the hood would still be held up.

An improvement, although I must continue to scheme about getting the last bit down.

I had a busy day today, attending an on-line class that that started at 5:30a Pacific time, which is the time zone of the farm. And I had an evening community college class that I am taking that ended at 9:30p. That’s a down side of working at home for an east coast company– it is hard to avoid working both east and west coast hours. Starting early is OK. I am up before dawn most days, but I find it hard to stop working until Pacific quitting time rolls around. That often amounts to a twelve hour day, which is not bad in the winter, but in the summer when the corn has to be cultivated and the blackberries beaten back, it gets difficult.  Especially because I am not a morning person. I rise early, but I also like to stay up late. This was fine when I was younger, but now, it’s a challenge.

Well, this is enough whining about things that will not change.