Another long weekend is behind us. The days are getting noticeably shorter and I don’t want summer to end. Winter drags on forever but summer just passes us by in a heartbeat.
I often think about living someplace where summer is longer but everyone reminds me that those places will have more snakes. Yuck! I brought a bale of hay in for my bulls and two snakes crawled out of it. That was enough to make me have bad dreams and thoughts of selling the place. One didn’t make it but the other is liking looming some place to scare me. I was very cautious when I was doing my trimming today but tried to move quickly so if he was hanging around, I didn’t see him.
We survived our busy week of special guests and the running around with the Soil & Crop Tour and our Open House. As I predicted with a nice week weather wise our tour goers were down but we had a great group of people from out of town. Thank you to all the hosts: Micha and Tina Gerber, Cornell Farms, The Canada Food Grains Project, Purity Seeds / Carpe Diem Farms, Jeff, Kristina, Alex and Tori Pollard, Brielmann Ag / Timo and Staff, and Philip and Gardale Krahn. The tour was great and once again the Rainy River District is displaying some excellent crops and highly successful producers. We have so much to be proud of. Our Open House attendance was slightly down as well but it is always nice to see some new faces and show off the good and bad of our crop year. My students, Tori and Aynsley worked very hard to get things in tip-top shape. Though we were all very tired on Friday after the busy week, we pulled up our socks and managed to get our second cut of alfalfa finished. It was a very busy Friday but with a long weekend ahead we decided to get it out of the way. The weather might not be as great his week but if Tuesday holds up, we are hoping to harvest the winter wheat trial and get the bulk alfalfa baled up. This is the last week prior to the Emo Fair Week so we will be hitting it hard if the weather cooperates anyway.
Though the weather was good and we had hay to do, I took Saturday off and headed to Mine Centre to spend time with my Bliss Family and celebrate my Uncle Jimmy’s 70th Birthday. There were still a few family members missing but we had a pretty great turn-out and it was a very fun day. Naturally we had a fishing derby. Rules were laid out, entry fees paid and we were off! I would have won the prize for losing the most fish or using the most minnows but there were no prizes for that! Prizes were paid out for the biggest fish, and Shane and Uncle Jimmy tied! Then the first fish wish we had to take a picture of and prove the time stamp. Shane won that! The last prize was for the boat that caught the most fish and that was our boat (Shane, Debbie and myself). I only contributed one fish so I really didn’t deserve that! As always, more time would have been nice but….
Haying is coming along a bit better now. We have all our own fields cut and have started on the last field that is rented. Monday was a shocker as it sounded like it wouldn’t be much of a hay day but I was able to rake and get it baled up! This cut into my fair preparations but it’s pretty hard to stop making hay to get ready for the fair!
