Planting

I find now that I have gotten ahead of the farm seasons and failed to mention the planting seasons. The first crop to be seeded was the oat crop, but before the endgate seeder mounted on a two-wheel cart was used, the oat seed was prepared by use of a fanning mill. This was used to take out unwanted weed seed, foreign material, and light kernels of grain. It was one of our duties to crank the mechanism of the fanning mill. This was a long and tedious job that was eventually taken over by an electric motor. Then, Uncle Carl with the unmatched team of Birdie and Barney, would seed the oats. It was then the duty of one of us boys to disk in the oats with the tractor and old tandem disk with cutaway blades. The tractor duty was a step up from pulling the binder and was quite thrilling on a cool spring day.

The next step was to roll the ground with a cultipacker. The main thing to remember when doing this was not to turn too short so as to tip over the wing sections of this implement. The admonition from Uncle Carl in this regard, was not always heeded and led to a struggle to get it back in alignment again.

Through the years, Uncle Carl had various corn planting ideas. The first years on the farm, he planted two rows at a time with a Moline planter pulled by Birdie and Barney using a check wire. He made a bog jump to a four-row mounted planter sometime in the late ’30s. It was not a blazing success, since the runners kept getting clogged. I spent hours planting in corn by hand where there were vacancies in the planted rows.

The year that I was discharged from the army and before I started back to college, Uncle Carl had rigged up a corn planted underslung under his F-20 Farmall, with the cultivator mounted on the tractor also. The contraption took so much time to invent that it was the last of May before we started planting. We took turns planting and cultivating at the same time, driving from dawn to dusk. I can’t recall what the crop was like, but the apparatus was a forerunner of present day minimum tillage practices.