<3 Please Keep Leontine in Your Prayers This Week <3
If you have been following me on Facebook, and I hope you have, you know I have been talking about our many days spent so far trying to pick "horizontal corn." I talked about it here a bit because it was the first crop we harvested this year. We just did one field, then jumped ship to beans to let this stuff dry out.
We finished beans about a week ago, and have been trying to get these two fields of corn picked for the last 5 or so days. This is what a field of corn should look like when it is ready to harvest, and you have removed the end rows:
This is what our field of horizontal corn looks like:
This first picture has picked corn in the front, then the horizontal corn, then some vertical corn.
There shouldn't be any empty space behind the first stalks; it should just be more stalks. Sigh.....
A closer look:
Remember, a storm at the end of July with both straight-line winds and some rotation came through this area and did this damage. I guess the good news is that the corn was pollinated and continued to grow.
On the right are the rows as you should see them when you are ready to combine, on the left is what you see from the combine instead of rows when you have downed corn. How would you like to find the rows to put your corn head down in that field?
Now I am not showing you end rows below here. This is the middle of the field we have been picking on for a few days.
Grandpa has to pick it one way. This is him coming back to unload and start again. The corn is laying the wrong way, and if he tried to come back up the field, he would just push the corn and run over it. Sigh.....
Here he comes.
The reel does help a great deal in guiding the corn into the head. The trick is to get the fingers underneath the corn stalks to pull them up.
We will be back to vertical corn soon. So Grandpa and Tall Guy go to sleep dreaming of seeing this:
That would make my Tall Guy very happy indeed!
Hope your harvest is going smoothly and safely. Slow and steady wins the race! At least that's what we are telling ourselves this week.
Down corn is a real headache hope you get through it.
ReplyDeleteI've never heard of horizontal corn but can see it would be a problem. I notice a name on the truck door in the photo of "Tall Guy". It's the same name (and spelling) of our farmer friend in Lowell. I don't know if he has any horizontal corn but will ask.
ReplyDeleteHope things get easier!!
Best,
Bonnie
Hope your horizontal corn gets picked soon and sweet dreams return.
ReplyDeleteIt's always something in farming, isn't it? This year we had many, many "somethings", but fortunately our corn is still vertical...
ReplyDeleteGood luck.
We noticed some corn that was blown over a little in Ohio this summer on our trip. I wondered what had happened and how they would go about harvesting it. Now I know...thank you for sharing. We don't have any corn fields down here. Everything is mostly pastureland full of cattle. Hope your horizontal corn saga ends soon for you guys!
ReplyDeleteI love learning farm stuff from you. You make it so fun!!!! But you put all the work in behind it and just let us come along for the ride. :o)
ReplyDelete