Harvest Time
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| Roger standing in the garden… get back to work! |
Did you know that dates grow on palm trees? I learned that today when I decided to walk the long way back from breakfast. The Embassy is a small compound and I’ve probably stepped on thousands of dates while running around it. When I first arrived and dates were available in the dining facility, I ate dates on Friday nights in an attempt to recognize “date-night Friday” (a far cry from my idea of a real date!). However, not until today (my 170th day in country) did I open my eyes to really see the dates lying on the ground.
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| Dates from the Baghdad Embassy Complex (BEC). |
Iraq is actually quite famous for dates and used to supply about three-quarters of the world’s supply. War and a focus on oil has reduced that number to about five percent, but a foundation in Iraq is planting thousands of date palms in order to get back in the date industry. I hope this and Iraq’s other agricultural endeavors (wheat, barley, etc.) are successful and increase the self-reliance of the Iraqi population.
https://www.reuters.com/article/iraq-farming/iraq-to-plant-70000-date-palms-to-revive-once-legendary-crop-idUSL8N1TS3RN
Today’s farm story is about growing food and our theme song is “I’m Farming and I Grow it” by the Peterson Farm Brothers. https://youtu.be/48H7zOQrX3U
One of the blessings of growing up on a farm is how clearly I could see the law of the harvest in action. Unlike the garden scene in the movie “Second-Hand Lions”, what you harvest is directly linked to what you planted. It is actually pretty amazing if you think about it that you can take a bag of wheat, stick all those little seeds in dirt, add some water and sunshine, and eventually you will have 50 bags of wheat!
Every spring we’d start by plowing the field (except for alfalfa, which goes dormant over the winter and grows back again the next year). Plowing the field helps get rid of the weeds and breaks up the hard soil, making it easier for the grain to grow. I remember waking up, grabbing a sack lunch and the milk jug I placed in the freezer the previous night (now a solid brick of ice) and going out to the field to start plowing before the sun had appeared in the east. I drove the tractor back and forth in the field, got out occasionally to throw any dislodged rocks into a rock pile, and drinking the water as it melted. All day long I pulled the plow through the field, breaking up the dirt, and preparing it to be planted. Then, as the sun went down over the mountains, I would drink the last swig of very-warm water that remained in my jug, and drive back home. Those were long days with lots of time to think.
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| Tractor with the drill attached. |
Then we had to plant the grain (we grew a lot of wheat and barley). The picture above shows the tractor connected to the drill we used to plant the grain. We would lift up the yellow lids to fill the green containers with grain. As we pulled the drill, it would prepare the ground with narrow trenches, drop the seeds in at designated intervals, and then brush dirt over the seeds. These were also long days driving back and forth across the field, making sure we didn’t miss any big spots (it would soon become obvious if we missed a spot in the field!).
Then, since we lived in Idaho where rain is not so plentiful, we would have to water the grain, that meant moving pipe. We had a creek that came from a spring at the base of the mountain on our property. This stream ran to a pond that had a big irrigation pump. During irrigation season, we would use the pump to push the water through the piping system out to the fields to water the growing plants. We would wake up early every morning to move pipe and then move pipe again in the to ensure that all areas of the field got enough water, but not too much. We always dreamed of the summer when it would rain so much that my dad would say we didn’t have to water our fields… it never happened… that seemed like a fantasy. But of course now that I’ve lived in Indiana I know that there actually are areas with enough rain to not need irrigation… amazing!!!
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| Eugene, Brian, and Eldon loading pipe onto the pipe wagon to take out to the field. In the background you can see our red combine harvester which we used to harvest the grain. |
All summer long we would water the crops (wheat, barley, and alfalfa), and watch them grow. My dad was famous for looking at and commenting on the crops as we’d drive to town- sometimes we worried that he wasn’t paying enough attention to the road, especially as harvest time approached!
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| Eldon in the tractor pulling a trailer with alfalfa (or maybe straw). |
We always had to work hard to harvest everything before winter came. And if you think about it, that would be a lot of wasted effort to plow, plant, and irrigate all spring and summer if we didn’t harvest! When I was younger we used the combine harvester shown in the picture to cut the grain. But in my teenage years I remember that my dad often hired neighbors with bigger, more efficient combines to cut our grain. The combine cuts the entire plant, separates the grain kernels from the chaff, stores the grain, and pushes the chaff/straw out the back. We would use the big truck to haul the grain to where we would store it in the silos, to eventually feed the cows. We would put the straw in bales and spread it in the stalls for the cows to sleep on.
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| Keith and Ron standing in front of some haystacks. |
We typically harvested two crops of alfalfa each year that we would feed to the cows. We would cut, rake, and then bale the alfalfa pulling a swather, rake, and baler behind the tractor. We had small bales (like those in the above picture) when I was little, and then got a big baler later on that formed bales of alfalfa like the bale you can see in the picture below. We had to use a tractor to move the big round bales, unlike the small ones, but it made harvest much faster.
One summer day I was cutting hay in the field shown in the below picture. I was pulling the swather back and forth in the 40-acre field, laying out nice straight rows of hay. What you can’t see in the picture is the one telephone pole in the field. Well, after I’d been swathing for hours on this beautiful day, I was at the end of the field, had turned the tractor and swather to cut another row, and was looking back to align the swather when suddenly the front wheels of the tractor began to rise. Tractors are awesome, but they don’t usually pop wheelies, so I quickly stomped on the clutch and the brake. I had driven the right, front tractor tire directly onto the one telephone pole in the field, the tire treads were digging into the wood, and it had climbed a couple feet up the pole. I was a bit shaky as I backed up and drove around the pole, which was now leaning slightly.
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| Part of our garden (bean, potato, and corn plants) with an alfalfa field behind it shortly after cutting. |
We also always had a big garden with potatoes, corn, peas, beans, carrots, lettuce, strawberries, and lots of other fruits and vegetables. I sometimes complained about all the weeding we had to do, but I did like going through the garden when peas or strawberries were ripe and eating a few as I went to/from the fields.
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| Sydney and April in front of our square-foot gardens in Ohio. |
- Dates come from palm trees
- Planting and harvesting are a lot of work, but food is important
- Don’t run into poles
- Dates that grow on trees aren’t as nice as your mom
Love you all!
Dad
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