I can’t believe the weather we have been having! I’m beginning to think we won’t have winter this year! We were 20 degrees above normal several days last week.

For the most part we worked outside doing general farm clean up. We replaced that rotted H frame on the irrigation service I talked about before.

We finished plumbing the new fertilizer tank and are ready to receive product. The guys building the pole barn (replacing the Quonset we took down last fall) ran into a bit of a snag matching the siding color. Since the building is right here next to the house and shop, there will be a delay while we wait for the correct product to come in.

Our biggest project of the week reminded us to ‘go big or go home’ when renting equipment. We needed to install about 800 feet of control wire for the irrigation well put in last fall. After spending several hours marking existing wires and pipelines, the actual installation should have been about a half-day job. However, it ended up a full day.

We rented a walk behind trencher. The first 50 feet went at a snail’s pace (about 2 feet per minute) – then the chain broke.

We ended up digging the wire in with the excavator. A 2-foot-wide trench was a bit overkill for a wire the size of my pinky finger, but we had the wire laid out and rain was in the forecast for the following day. It rained about an inch, so I’m glad we got it done!

Teaching a strong work ethic

Spring break started yesterday, so if I schedule around school softball practice, things the kids want to do, and a short vacation, we should have some extra workers for a few days. One of the projects I’ve held back for the kids is swapping the grain leg buckets from the old belt to a new one. They started working on this yesterday afternoon. Apparently, it’s a pretty good job compared to jobs they’ve been assigned in the past. There were no complaints and they will be back at it this morning.