Autumn is my favourite season - you just can't beat the sights and sounds and smells of this season. I know, I know, it's not technically fall yet; people constantly remind me that the first day of fall doesn't happen until the third week in September, but they're only fooling themselves - summer is fading fast.
The crops are in all different stages of ripeness. We finished harvesting our fall rye yesterday and Glen spent today out cutting 80 acres of barley and then went on to start a field of oats. With the heat we had today it won't be long before we'll be combining the barley. Everything will be ready at the same time from then on.
Glen tried an experiment this spring. He's got about 200 acres that he sowed with two different kinds of seed. On about 120 acres he sowed fall rye with the cover crop of oats so that when the oats were harvested the rye, which would still be green, could provide fall grazing for the cattle. As he cuts the oats he is quite pleased with the successful growth of the rye underneath. It will need a good rain to really do well, but it's more to eat than the cows would have had with just the oats stubble. On the remaining 80 acres he planted perennial grass and alphalfa - next year's hay field. This, too, has done well. I can see this fall is going to involve a lot of stringing fence wire, and with the last of our kids leaving home in two weeks time, it also looks like I'm about to enter into an outdoor fitness program/ marriage compatibility test. We haven't really worked together since the kids were old enough to help - this could be interesting.
Or, maybe he's mellowed over the years - it was just him and me today, and it was kind fo nice. He hauled in the last truckloads of rye and went off to swath barley. I had planned to do house cleaning all day to get ready for company on the long weekend. My plans were modified a bit when I discovered that one of our deepfreezes in the basement had given up the ghost a day or two ago. Thank goodness I caught it when I did or we would have lost everything in it. As it was, a good portion of the meat was not thawed out yet and could be saved, but all the baking, vegetables, and stuff like frozen pizzas were off to the garbage before they started to stink.
My day was busy, but I still had time to go out to the field with lunch, and fresh cookies and coffee later in the day. We have neighbours going full bore; their trucks roaring past our place all day long - all night too, if the weather allows it. There was a time that we farmed like that too; with every year that goes by we're more glad we don't run in that rat race anymore.
My house smells like apple pie - made with fruit fresh from the tree. The seed pods on the carraganna are popping in the August heat. Suppers are daily feasts of corn-on-the-cob, new potatoes, and fresh garden cucumbers. And when the breeze is from the east, the scent of this year's hay crop fills the yard. I enjoy all the seasons, but I love autumn the best.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Summer winding down
This is the first day in ages that I've had time to even get near my computer. It's a busy time of year, and this year seems busier than most.
We travelled to Calgary last week to attend my brother's wedding. They had a wonderful day - the weather was perfect and lots of friends and family were able to share the day with them. There was a little bit of suspense for a while at the church as the bride was 20 minutes late getting there, but everything turned out fine. That city is growing so fast that I think it expands overnight. City planners just can't keep up with how to move the exploding growth in traffic numbers. It's a great place to visit, but Glen and I were more than glad to get back to the quiet backwaters of rural Saskatchewan. At least life's pace doesn't make a person dizzy out here.
Glen works part time as a Cat operator for a company that does oilfield maintenance in the area. This spring one company has opened up a whole new oilfield just a few miles east of here, just into Manitoba. It's amazing how many wells they've drilled over the past months, and they haven't been easy holes either. There has been so much rain that preparing well sites (scraping a level work area and building a dike around it to contain any spills that may occur) has been next to impossible at times. I'm sure that the work would have been put on hold till things dried up except that the price of oil is so high that they can afford the extra costs involved. As well, the crude coming from this field is premium stuff and much easier to refine. Glen and I own the mineral rights to three quarters only 10 miles west of the action, and we dream of them some day moving the action this way. We have two more kids to put through school - how those oil dollars would help with those bills!
A few days before we left for the wedding one of the drilling rigs southeast of here hit a pocket of gas and water on the way down. Once a hole had been poked into this formation, the pressure it was under forced the gas and water to the surface in a 20 foot geyser. No one was hurt, but they couldn't stop it either. There was another well blowout at Brooks, Alberta last week that erupted in fire and sour gas killing one worker - as far as blowouts go, this is more the norm, but the emergency crew that came from Alberta to seal this one off said this was dangerous enough too. At least when the escaping gas is on fire you know where it is and that it's being burnt off. With this well they had to rely on moniters to tell them what they were dealing with.
The crew that Glen works for weas there around the clock "squeezing" the lease (pushing up dirt and mud to build a wall that edged the water away from the work area so that the crew could stop the flow. The rig never did hit the ground, but with the instability of the ground around it, it developed a 15 degree lean. They had it tethered to a huge winch truck which was anchored to a Cat. Glen was super impressed with the professionalism of the crew from Alberta and was pretty disappointed that he had to leave for the wedding - he wanted to see the job through to the end. He says that if he were 30 years younger he'd be off to sign up for that kind of work in a flash. I think it's a testosterone thing myself.
Since we've returned he's been getting ready for harvest. The rye is almost ready to cut, and he's trying to decide whether to cut barley for green feed, or not. When he planted it he planned to combine it for feed grain, but it was so wet this summer it never got sprayed for weeds so it is a mess of all kinds of vegetation. It would make better bales than grain, but we already have enough feed up to last us two years, and from the amount of bales we saw on the trip out west, there won't be a market for hay sales either. He's still debating what to do.
And I'm two weeks behind in yard work: holidays do that to a person. Guess I'd better get back to work here.
We travelled to Calgary last week to attend my brother's wedding. They had a wonderful day - the weather was perfect and lots of friends and family were able to share the day with them. There was a little bit of suspense for a while at the church as the bride was 20 minutes late getting there, but everything turned out fine. That city is growing so fast that I think it expands overnight. City planners just can't keep up with how to move the exploding growth in traffic numbers. It's a great place to visit, but Glen and I were more than glad to get back to the quiet backwaters of rural Saskatchewan. At least life's pace doesn't make a person dizzy out here.
Glen works part time as a Cat operator for a company that does oilfield maintenance in the area. This spring one company has opened up a whole new oilfield just a few miles east of here, just into Manitoba. It's amazing how many wells they've drilled over the past months, and they haven't been easy holes either. There has been so much rain that preparing well sites (scraping a level work area and building a dike around it to contain any spills that may occur) has been next to impossible at times. I'm sure that the work would have been put on hold till things dried up except that the price of oil is so high that they can afford the extra costs involved. As well, the crude coming from this field is premium stuff and much easier to refine. Glen and I own the mineral rights to three quarters only 10 miles west of the action, and we dream of them some day moving the action this way. We have two more kids to put through school - how those oil dollars would help with those bills!
A few days before we left for the wedding one of the drilling rigs southeast of here hit a pocket of gas and water on the way down. Once a hole had been poked into this formation, the pressure it was under forced the gas and water to the surface in a 20 foot geyser. No one was hurt, but they couldn't stop it either. There was another well blowout at Brooks, Alberta last week that erupted in fire and sour gas killing one worker - as far as blowouts go, this is more the norm, but the emergency crew that came from Alberta to seal this one off said this was dangerous enough too. At least when the escaping gas is on fire you know where it is and that it's being burnt off. With this well they had to rely on moniters to tell them what they were dealing with.
The crew that Glen works for weas there around the clock "squeezing" the lease (pushing up dirt and mud to build a wall that edged the water away from the work area so that the crew could stop the flow. The rig never did hit the ground, but with the instability of the ground around it, it developed a 15 degree lean. They had it tethered to a huge winch truck which was anchored to a Cat. Glen was super impressed with the professionalism of the crew from Alberta and was pretty disappointed that he had to leave for the wedding - he wanted to see the job through to the end. He says that if he were 30 years younger he'd be off to sign up for that kind of work in a flash. I think it's a testosterone thing myself.
Since we've returned he's been getting ready for harvest. The rye is almost ready to cut, and he's trying to decide whether to cut barley for green feed, or not. When he planted it he planned to combine it for feed grain, but it was so wet this summer it never got sprayed for weeds so it is a mess of all kinds of vegetation. It would make better bales than grain, but we already have enough feed up to last us two years, and from the amount of bales we saw on the trip out west, there won't be a market for hay sales either. He's still debating what to do.
And I'm two weeks behind in yard work: holidays do that to a person. Guess I'd better get back to work here.
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