Search This Blog

Friday 30 August 2013

Nearly there

If we don't have another fire on the combine (gulp!), no punctures and can get the storage at the farm we contract farm for sorted out, we should finish combining today.  That is not the end of harvest though.

We are about a fifth of the way through drilling the crops for next year and all the land needs to ploughed or cultivated, drilled and rolled and sprayed and (hopefully) rained on, to get the crops going for next year.

It is that twixt and tween time.  The harvested grain is leaving the grain store in lorries and going to the docks at Ipswich.  The money should be coming in in the next 28 days.  Meanwhile, I am faced with huge bills for diesel, seed, spray and overtime and juggling them, according to urgency.

Non-farming folk always think that "harvest" is over, once the combines have stopped rolling.  I suppose it is.  However, it is about a third of the way through the autumn work.  Combines can eat up the acres with their huge wide headers and chew their way through lots of fields in a day, if the weather is right and the corn is ripe.  They spit out ten tons of grain into the trailers, whilst on the move and forge their dusty way in an impressive show of strength.

The tractors pulling the ploughs and power harrows and drills are much smaller and the machines they are attached to take a lot more time to plod up and down the field, cultivating and planting.  Reaping takes a couple of months.  Sewing and nurturing takes 10 months.

I just can't help drawing the analogy between refeeding an eating disorder patient (reaping) and actually getting them back, mentally and physically, to a place where they are truly recovered.

I also can't help visualising parents starting off as a combine, surging through the fields, cutting down the eating disorder and then transforming into chugging tractors, turning the soil, planting new seeds and getting a different crop next year.

(Picture - me in combine wheel years ago....)





No comments:

Post a Comment