Summer Blazes On

I haven’t been to visit them lately, but most likely the Prairie Blazing Stars are finished with their purple “blazing” by now.  These photos were taken a couple weeks ago.  The butterfly in this first one is a Sulphur. 

 

Here on our dairy farm, crickets chirp and cicadas serenade as the summer season plods ever onward towards fall.  Rows of tall, tassel-topped cornstalks stretch in all directions and soybeans have reached their zenith of waist-high.  Our oat field has been transformed into a “new crop” hayfield for next year.  (Every spring, alfalfa and grass seed are sown along with the oats.)  The oats were mature by mid-July and were harvested then.  That was accomplished with a combine (named as such because it can multi-task, “combining” the cutting of the oats with the hulling of the grain), which roars back and forth across the field, dustily churning out oats to be stored in the bin for cattle feed and leaving windrows of straw for us to bale.  Baling takes place immediately after the combining is done, meaning that oat harvesting day is a VERY busy one! 

We just finished gathering in another hay crop, too.  For the muscle-building job of bale-slinging, it is very advantageous to have a college son and daughter home for the summer and a teenage nephew on call.  What do I do at such times, you may or may not ask….well, I drive the tractor that pulls the baler and hay basket, and make sure there is enough food and drink available.  (It isn’t very hard work, really, so don’t think that it is.  One must simply make brownies and sandwiches in advance, and then drive a tractor for several hours.)