Bean Harvest 2015

Bean harvest is mostly done. There is the replants left that were too wet to cut when we were there. Just a few acres left! 

Lots to celebrate this week! We have are done with harvest, mostly anyway. My Forever and I have made it 2 years! Two years!!! 

So what did we do on our anniversary? Well, we picked beans of course. I knew how romantic our anniversary would be when I wanted to get married in the middle of harvest. I got to ride with him for all of two minutes. Enough to get our anniversary photo and move on. At least he's kind of smiling :) 

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I got to be a trucker with bean harvest! YEAH!! The elevator keeps everything moving so quickly that it's hard to get photos. I got a few, well one to be specific. This photo shows waiting to dump the grain. The first thing when getting to the elevator is to untarp the truck. Some trucks have automatic tarp unrollers! Can you believe it? Drivers can sit in the truck and unroll the tarp! I can remember growing up when we didn't even have roll over tarps, we had roll up tarps as Dad is fond of saying. They had to crawl up on top of the truck and pull it off and fold it up. The trucks we have now are roll over tarps. There's a bar at the back of the truck that you roll the tarp to the other side of the truck. All standing on the ground. 

After you get the tarp unrolled, they probe the trucks and you send your card to the office. The card has all the information they need on it. Who's grain it is, what the shares of the grain are, what they are to do with the grain (sell, store, on a contract, etc), who the trucker is and what commodity is on the truck. When they probe the truck the official, licensed grain inspector, inspects the grain. They weigh it and check for dockage and splits and all sorts of stuff. 

Next comes weighing the loaded truck. I always thought it was unfair that they got to probe the truck and pull some grain out before they weigh the truck. It's not a lot of grain they use, but still! Anyway, after weighing, the printer prints out the card with a bar code that tells you which dump to go to. 

That's where the photo comes in. Normally, there isn't a line to dump. For some reason something slowed down progress and there was a line which enabled me to get a picture! 

After dumping the grain there is another scale. With the card that you got the first time of weighing that has the bar code on it. You insert it, the machine reads the bar code and prints off your receipt. Then you head back to the field and hope the combine isn't waiting on the truck. Again, the goal is to never have the combine stopped! 

That's about all the time I have. Just a few more quick photos of dumping grain at night and a sunset. I love both of these. I love the lights on the combine and truck and grain cart, it's such a beautiful sight. And who can resist a Kansas sunset!

Have a great week! Enjoy everyday-you only get one chance to make each day the greatest that it can be! 

Blog Name Change

So no pictures this week :( Sorry! That means that my Forever is going to stop reading right now. We had a relative from Washington that came back to visit us and I didn't take ANY pictures!!! I'm terrible! I really enjoyed Steve being here and involving him in our day to day activities!

You may or may not have noticed...I tweaked the name of the blog. The last name was much too long. I wanted to keep the blessed part because I am absolutely blessed in my life. There is no huge or little, for that matter, health problems in Matt or I's life, we have our own house and land and awesome family surrounding us. I wanted to have a location in the name and wanted to involve agriculture, of course. Hence the name, Blessed Kansas Farmer. I would love to hear any comments about it.

Bean harvest will probably start this weak. Busy times, of course. That's all I have for this week. I'll post next week! Have a great week!

Harvest 2015

HI! I'm so sorry it's been so long since I've got a blog written. It's been a busy busy month. I know no excuses, I should have made time. I've got lots of pictures to share with you! Harvest 2015 is well underway. We have all the corn done and are going to get a good start on beans tomorrow. We had a couple days of "rest" in between corn and beans. What that really means is that Matt was really busy getting everything ready and serviced for beans. 

This is actually before we started corn even. Not a great photo, but I was impressed that he let me take one! 

Dumping onto the truck. 

Chasing the sunset and combine. 

Love how beautiful it is right after dark with the lights on on the equipment. Such a beautiful sight. 

Dumping onto the grain cart which is dumping onto the truck. 

A VERY rare time I got to ride in the combine with my Forever. VERY rare! I told him I was going to take it so apparently he decided he was going to do serious face instead of smiling with me.

The grain cart is normally where I spend most of harvest. The job of the grain cart driver is to make sure the combine keeps picking. We can fit two combine bins onto the grain cart. It takes 3 to fill the truck. We unload on the move quite a bit so that the combine can continue picking. We don't like having down time and we don't get done with the combine stopped. 

Changing topics a little bit to our four legged kid. I was home briefly one morning throwing in a load of laundry and doing dishes when I heard Abilene start barking and going crazy. I went outside to see what was wrong and she had a raccoon "treed" right on our deck! That means like right outside the back door! I made her come inside so she didn't get hurt and called Matt. While this was happening the raccoon made its way around our deck to our front door and sat right outside staring at us while Abilene was barking like crazy at it from the inside. My dear Forever finally got home and I let Abilene out to see where it went. She put her nose down and took off on a exact straight line to the raccoon's home. Maybe she would be a good tracking dog. We found out she is scared of guns though.

So proud of herself.

We boostered our weaned calves with another shot so that they don't get sick. This calf apparently decided he really wanted to get to the wheat mids in the middle of the truck bed. He just crawled right on up. 

Changing gears again...conservation is important to most farmers. We've been taking out some trees to clear up ground for grass to grow. This particular pasture was getting very brushy. It takes a lot of water out of the ground for those trees to grow and also takes ground where grass could be growing. We spent a couple days and will spend some more clearing brush and cutting posts out of the trees that we take down. My job was to run the skid loader and make sure Henry was able to get to the trees to cut the posts out. We will use the posts to build new fence. 

Matt ran the hoe to make sure that the trees wouldn't fall on the guy cutting the trees down. 

Matt wanted to get the hoe serviced today. I got bored waiting for him so I started taking "felfies" with the cows. A little wheat mids for persuasion. They all gathered around the pickup and were watching what was going on. 

Again another rare opportunity. He hardly ever takes pictures with me. His hoe is in the background and the service pickup/feed truck for the cows. The cows enjoyed getting a special treat today.

Well, that's about all I've got for this week. I'm really hoping to be more regular with my blogs. Bean harvest pictures coming soon :)