The Weird Week That Was - Part One

OK, so last week was weird.  Not just your run of the mill week where something happens and you say, “Hunh, that was weird.”  It was a full blown week with one weird thing after another.  Hence, my lack of frequent posting last week.  Now, weirdness usually isn’t enough to keep me away from you, but this compounded weirdness made it impossible for me to post.  I’ll explain as we get further in the story.

I fully intend on taking the next few days to completely inundate you with stories from the Weird Week that Was.  Don’t worry, there are some nice book reviews and scarf updates to pepper my postings, but I really must recount the bizarreness.

Let’s start the zany stories right now with a bit of background.

First, let me start off by saying that 2011 was not a bumper year for farming in our area.  We had a blizzard last winter (winter of 2009-2010) that flooded out our winter crops.  I think that most parts of the country saw some of this blizzard, and there were certainly parts of the country that got it much worse. I’m not complaining.

We then had a three month drought that prevented us from seeing green over the summer. 

For those of you who aren’t farmers, “seeing green” means having live, productive plants.  We call it “seeing green” because drought often causes the plant to turn brown early, thereby decreasing, or in this case completely preventing, crop yield.  Sometimes, when non-farmers hear it, they think that it means “making no money.”  To be frank, in that context, while not seeing green will keep us from seeing any green, the colloquialism actually comes from brown plants rather than a lack of greenbacks.

Fortunately, during the blizzard (not that the blizzard was fortunate, mind you), we lost power.  We were part of the hundreds of thousands in our area that did.  And, no, losing power was not really the fortunate part.  What was fortunate about it was that we had time, without any work to do on the farm (couldn’t really do farmwork, as the ground was covered) besides using the bobcat (a type of front end loader) to clear our driveway and all of those in our neighborhood. 

Clearing driveways turned into clearing the streets in our area.  The state and county roads were overwhelmed by the blizzard (not surprising, we got more snow over a few days than we had ever had on the ground in recorded history).  That meant that local farmers brought out their heavy equipment and cleared roads for their neighbors.  My husband spent a full day doing just that. 

I spent the full day following him around on our Gator (sort of a gas-powered golf cart for farm use) monitoring his safety and checking on our elderly neighbors (of which we have many, we‘re the youngest people in our neighborhood), to ensure that they were all keeping warm and were uninjured.

**Note - as I write about last winter, suddenly the Weird Week that Was is starting to seem less weird by comparison**

So, back to the point.  There was little that we could do around the farm, besides “pushing snow”, which is the country way of saying “plowing snow”.  In the evening, we huddled around the woodstove for warmth, and snuggled by candle light.  This may sound a bit more romantic than it was. 

Our house is a large farm house, and the woodstove was only designed to heat one room (out of 15), although it does warm up the rest of the house somewhat, it doesn’t really make the rest of the house fully liveable.  We had no electricity, and the only warm room in the house was the living room.  We curled up on the couch and slept there.  And, yes, we cooked on the woodstove as well.

Without electricity, there was little to do but talk.  So, Dobby and I talked about our future.  We made plans and thought about implementing them.  That’s right, folks, we’ve finally gotten to the “fortunate” part.

One of the things that we decided was to add irrigation.  I don’t really remember how the decision was made.  We’d talked about it on and off for years.  For some reason, sitting on the couch in the dark, curled up with the dog under our blanket, we finally made the decision.

Once power was restored and life started returning to normal in our area, Dobby called about irrigation.  He researched it and set the plan in motion.  He did it well.  And we picked the right time to do it.  Luck?  Karma?  Providence?  All I can say is we were blessed.  And lucky.  And we’re grateful.

Because, as I mentioned, this year we had a huge drought.  It was bad.  Really bad.  I have a fairly extensive vocabulary, and I can’t really come up with a word to really convey just how bad.  Epic doesn’t even get close.

But we had irrigation.  So, we were blessed.

Irrigation did NOT make us rich this year.  What it did was help us to break even.

Wait, what?

That’s right.  Irrigation helped us to break even.  We don’t have it on all of our land (yet – it’s very expensive) but the fields that we had it on produced high yields which in a normal year might have been profit.  This year, it turned out to be enough to offset the losses on the non-irrigated fields (some of our fields that routinely produce 150 bushel per acre came in at about 4 bushels per acre last year).

Usually, a farmer who just breaks even will say it with disdain, or remorse, or anger.  I can say it this year with joy.  Because there were many farmers in our area (irrigation is not particularly widespread here) who really struggled to keep their farms this year.  There were a few who lost them.  Others were selling off equipment just to pay the bills.

So, when I say that we broke even, I am overjoyed.

(How does this relate to the weird week that was?  I’ll tell you more about it in Part Two.)

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Christy Parker is the author of two blogs:  Ruminations from and Unkempt Mind and  Learn to Crochet - In Minutes a Day.

Mrs. Parker is also the author of an eBook of patterns entitled Seven Special Scarves, as well as the eBook Learn to Crochet in Minutes a Day:  The First Twelve Lessons

For comments, questions, notes, or suggestions; Mrs. Parker can be reached in the blog specific forums on the product information pages listed above or via email at unkemptruminations@comcast.net.