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The farmhouse framing project is coming along. We finished the sheathing of first-story walls and built the interior walls. We set floor joists and subflooring for the second story and plan to have all the walls up by Monday afternoon. And then we will start on the garage. The trusses are ordered and will be ready to go in a couple weeks.
Extremely dry field conditions with temperatures in the upper 80s with high humidity left it feeling more like 90 in the shade. Crops appear to be a bit thirsty as rapid changes in soybean leaves were more noticeable. Those with irrigation units were sprinkling daily all week as the heat kept drying things back out. All of the corn is dented, and ears are starting to hang down as they mature.
Thursday as I drove to Brent and Ashley Reed’s farm in Nappanee, the clouds grew dark and the winds picked up. A small dark red cell on radar hovered over a small area south of U.S. 6, leaving properties with wind and large hail damages. Fortunately, this storm stayed northeast of us and didn’t interfere with the customer appreciation dinner and tour of the Axis field plots. Next week on Sept. 25, we will have information regarding the state corn husking competition, and we will have a wood husking wagon on display at Davenport Precision Planting and Seed open house and customer appreciation dinner.
Friday after work, I decided to take advantage of the low humidity and high winds. After double-checking a couple weather forecasts, it was all clear for next four days. Six hours later as I finished cutting hay at 2 a.m., the stars were out and air was cold and crisp. By Saturday, AccuWeather forecasted less than a tenth of an inch of rain for Sunday morning. Saturday provided excellent drying conditions. The windrows were so thin I raked five on one. It reminded me of 1988, where we raked 17 windrows on one, but that was with a bar rake.
I started raking five on one at 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon, and Simon Monhaut baled all of the fourth cutting into 3’x4’x5’ square bales. Dad and I lined the bales up for the bale wrapper Saturday night, but a heavy line of storms popped up over Illinois at 3 a.m. Sunday, so we decided to load bales back onto a wagon and put them in a shed to keep them dry until they would be wrapped by Jackson Jones on Sunday afternoon. We received an inch of rain Sunday.