The Hand Must Ache

We finished harvest earlier this week, as so poignantly documented here.

But just because harvest is over, it doesn’t mean we can sit back and get fat and lazy[1]. There is still much to do before it winters up, we have fertilizer to spread. And we have a field where we cleared some fencerows, it’s rough and we need to smooth it off and seed it to cover crops to start restoring the soil that was traumatized by the heavy equipment we used to clear the fencerows.

We borrowed our neighbor’s disk to smooth out the cleared fencerows. Being passionate no-tillers, we no longer own a single piece of tillage equipment. Their disk needed a bit of work, so we offered to do the maintenance since we were borrowing it.

As Tom was pounding frozen mud out from between the disk blades [2], he said, “you know, farming sounded a lot more romantic in that poem you posted“. I replied, “well, this is the ‘hand must ache’ part of that poem.” Tom muttered something, I think it was, “I love you Uncle Chuck.”

We were also spreading lime this week.

I neglected to warn our lime applicator about the wet spot in this field. We had to shovel 10 tons of lime off that spreader to get it out, and I refrained from telling them that “the hand must ache to fill the barn.” I expect one of the shovels would have been employed for other purposes if I had.

But it all turned out well, the ground is leveled, the lime is spread, and I have stories to tell.

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1. That happens in January.

2. I was helping by watching and offering encouraging comments, like “hit it harder!”