Planting Time

The grain drill

Planting time is when we make a deal with the land and say, “ I care for you, you care for me”.  We plow, we plant, and we hope for a bountiful harvest. Some years that deal turns out better than others.

Our planting has always been done at the slower pace of yesteryear. We plod behind the team and the grain drill each year, and Pa takes a turn on the two row corn planter. Pa only plants with horses, never with a tractor, even nowadays. Bill was and old timer, long since past, who, like Pa, always planted with horses. Folks speculated it was either because he really liked horses and others thought it was because he’s too cheap to buy a new planter. I think it might be a bit of both for old Bill, and for my folks too. At a similar pace Mama walks the careful rows of the garden, making good on all those notes she makes from her arm chair with a teacup in hand. Sometimes things are more enjoyable at a slower pace.

Grain goes in first. Pa has always planted barley as far back as my memory goes. When we had enough and last years crop was good, we planted our own seed. Other years when things needed a little freshening up, we bought seed.  Pa plants barley because 9 out of 10 chickens prefer barley to any other grain. Okay, that might not be a documented fact, but generally speaking it tastes better than oats. Our animals have always gobbled it up and left the oats sit in the feed trough if they have a choice. Barley holds a better energy value than oats, and a higher protein content than corn according to my Pa - and the University of South Dakota for that matter. Still despite this, there doesn’t seem to be many farmers around our neighborhood that plant barley. We’ve always gravitated towards barley over corn as well. Mostly to do with the length of the days in the summer. There is more time to tend to the farm on the long mid-summer days when the barley is ripe than in the late fall when the corn is ready for harvest. 

There are several things about planting that never cease to amaze me. First, how a farmer knows it is time. Pa goes to the field and takes a handful of dirt, and he just knows. When I was little I’d bounce along beside him. I never saw any fairies pop out of the field and tell him it was a good day to plant, but maybe it is something only the farmer sees. I’d pick up some dirt too. Nothing. No magic voice telling me it was a good day to plant. But Pa always knew. The grain drill would be pulled out of the shed if it wasn’t already, greased, its seed bins filled, the evener attached to the pole, and we’d go fetch the team. 

Me planting with my bookworm bag, Pa, and Dude & Rusty

Then came the second amazing thing. How to layout a field.. In a perfect world, the field would look like a stack of books tied together with a book strap; the rows as the books, and the book strap going all the way around as the headlands tiring it all together. However, no field is a perfect rectangle. How on earth do you know where the headlands should be, how big they should be, and how to properly fill in any odd areas?! I’ve watched Pa plant those fields thirty times and I still haven’t figured it out. Once when I was a kid, I walked the whole field behind the grain drill with my bookworm bag filled with seed, attempting to cast it in the perfect fashion like Almanzo’s father in “Farmer Boy.” I don’t remember the outcome though. Was I too chicken to actually cast the seed or did I make the field extra interesting for Pa that year? I can’t remember. But I did walk the whole field just like Pa. Grain drills here in the midwest don’t have seats. I’m not sure if there is a specific reason for this. I’ve heard Pa say many times, that one of these years he is going to put a seat on it, but it has worked fine as it is for the last hundred years so I’m not sure that is necessary. He also says that his Pa, my Grandpa, told him “what would you do that for? Them horses have enough to haul around without you too” or something along those lines. I don’t remember him much myself. He diedwhen I was pretty young, but he has always seemed very wise and matter a fact. Something I wish I was a little more of.  Either way, despite walking behind a grain drill every year with no seat, I still couldn’t tell you how to lay out a field. 

Planting stories are usually about crooked rows and barespots, and relatable to the time of year. Ours are too. The earliest Pa ever planted was the sunniest, warmest day that you would have thought it was June. The sort of day when you get that first sun burn of the year because you forgot that the sun can do that. The sort of day when sleeves are rolled up, top buttons are loosened, and long-johns discarded. It was the 6th of April. That is tightly early for planting here in Wisconsin. Just a last year it was still snowing in April. Even this year it was still rather cold come April.

Pa’s neighbor growing up had a father who had done a lot of planting out west with horses years and years ago. He always said it cost him a dollar for a skipper, which they called a buck. A skipper is when the horses zig or zag instead of diving straight down the row resulting in a gap left in the planting. It is glaringly obvious when the crop comes up and there are holes in the field. Bucks are not only embarrassing to a practiced farmer, they loose money when the harvested crop goes to market. Pa takes note from year to year how much a particular field  had “cost” him. There was a year once the drive on the under seeding attachment stopped working for a time before he noticed, which led to a large bare spot when the new hay field came up. 

The teams we had from the time I was little each had their own quirks. Pa says to avoid skippers you need a team that is up in the lines a bit and even fast. It is easier to keep the rows straight. Dude and Rusty were good for this. The mares are good for this. Ivan and Rueben, well, they were slower than molasses in January and the rows usually skipped along a bit. That’s how it is with horses. Each field has a personality to match the team that works it.

Our field rotation went two years in barley. On the second year it would be under seeded with hay; a mixture of alfalfa, clover, Timothy, and other forage. I know Pa planted corn in the early years on the farm. There were old home videos Grandma took of him driving the two-row John Deere corn planter with Dude and Rusty. Then there was no corn for some time. When I was in middle school or maybe high school we had corn again. The corn field is never a whole field. Pa carves out a section somewheres and plants a bit of corn. Often this is where a long row of potatoes is put in the ground as well. It was enough to get us through a good share of the winter.

Planting corn with Beauty and Roy

When we had corn again, the new corn variety was an old-time, open pollinated variety. Just like with the barley, we planted our own seed that we grew the year before. Pa saved the best ears with the straightest rows, kernels all the way to the tip, and the plumpest all round confirmation for seed. Mama insists that a few red cobs be saved each year so there would always be red cobs. Tradition says shucking a red cob earns you a kiss from the person of your choice. There aren’t many red cobs in the modern field, but with open pollinated varieties, your chances of getting to kiss someone at a corn husking bee are actually pretty good!

An early corn planter is a feat of ingenuity. The wheels are specially shaped to neatly cover the seed after little shoe-shaped hoes open the soil for the seed to be drop in. The farmer sits between the two seed canisters where he can monitor everything closely. Two arms fold up and down with a rope to mark the rows of where has been planted and where to go next. Many modern planters still have these arms. Some technology just isn’t very easily replaced.

One of our horses, Valerie, always hated the corn planter. When you buy a horse, you never know exactly what all their experiences are. Even if the seller is a good honest person, there is no journal on every single thing that ever happened to that horse - a carfax for equines so to speak. We figure somewhere along the line, poor old Valerie had a bad experience with a corn planter or something similar. A runaway maybe, an injury, who knows.  She is an angel on everything else she pulls, but she just falls apart on the corn planter. Pa tried a few years in a row. Some dogs are just too old to learn new tricks and some memories just don’t disappear when circumstances have changed. Roy took over her job on the planter when he was just broke. He has done an excellent job each year since then.

The garden is Mama’s department. Stacks of seed catalogs sit by the armchair as she plans out the year. Pa helps her build some of the things she needs - a garden fence, a gate, a cold frame, etc. But mostly it's just Mama. Mama orders her seeds. Those seed catalogs arriving in the mail are a glimmer of spring. The miserable days when winter seems to have lasted about six months too long are made sunnier by each glorious page. The seeds are ordered; tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, spinach, beans, peas, carrots, cabbage, squash, and sometimes other things like turnips, parsnips, beets, and sweet potatoes. It all depends on the year. Bare root plants and packages of seeds arrive in when spring is only a glimmer of hope we are daydreaming about. The dining room table becomes a clutter of seed packs, as the new arrivals are sorted out. Mama organizes them neatly into groups; like packages together, what will be started in the house, what seeds will be planted when it warms up, and of course there is always the lettuce set aside to be planted in the cold frame each St. Patrick’s day. Mama always plants something green on St. Paddy’s. 

Mama most often works the garden over with a fork.  There is manure and compost to be worked into the soil. It’s easier to pull out root systems as you go working along fork by fork full. A tiller will just chop those roots to bits and often multiply the weeds. Once worked over, seeds and tiny plants are planted the garden with hopes of a bountiful harvest. It is tended between all the other things around the farm that need her attention. Sawdust from the mill helps to keep the weeds down some years, other years its is just good, old fashioned weeding. It all depends on Mama’s tea cup vision.

Year after year, we plant. We put our trust in the land to make good on that promise- we take care of you and you can take care of us. The farm family always looks forward to grain in the bin, hay in the mow, and mason jars in the cellar, but all this is a story for another time. This planting time; It is just the beginning.