Sometimes we farmers astonish ourselves.
For example, we’ve been putting our horse-drawn machinery away in the barn for the winter for twenty-plus years. It’s always a chore, partly because we have to clear out all the junk that has filled up the barn floor during the gardening season first.
This year, we had our regular junk, plus a large collection of political signs that my fellow farmer had kindly volunteered to store for the next election.
“Don’t these politicians have offices? We don’t need any more junk around here,” I grumbled, as we hauled the signs up to the barn rafters.
Wisely, my fellow said nothing, only smiling encouragingly, hopefully, don’t-you-love-me-even-though-I-am-adding-more-junk, until my fit passed.
Then we started the real work of pushing and pulling and jiggling and coaxing the machinery into the barn.
Every implement has its own idiosyncrasy. One is really heavy. One pinches our fingers if we’re not careful. One refuses to go in the direction we steer it. The worst are the two hay loaders, which are too tall for the barn door.
We maneuver a hay loader as close as possible, then heave the bottom up until the hay loader reaches its balance point. One farmer holds the bottom edge, keeping the balance, and the other farmer pushes one wheel ahead, chucks it, hurries to the other wheel, pushes that ahead, chucks it, and repeat.
Once we are through the doorway, things don’t get much better, because the rafters are also too low. So we wobble and push and chuck our way along, and then rest the edge of the hay loader on two stumps stacked up.
Then we do it all over again, with the second hay loader.
But the hardest part of putting machinery away is leaving a narrow alley on one side so that we can get through to feed hay to the horses all winter.
Some years we have to hold our breath to get through our alley. Some years we bark our shins daily on the hub of the wheel that sticks out at just the wrong place. One year we had to clamber over the plow, the disc, and the cultivator, because we had no alley at all. That gets a little wearying, considering that hay-feeding happens three times a day.
Plus there is always at least one pole, if not two, that sticks out under the barn door, because we can’t jam the implement in far enough. Then we trip over the pole, as we lug our forkfuls of hay out to the mangers.
But this year! This year we astonished ourselves, entirely by accident! Normally the machinery is lined up on the barnyard side, ready to be put away. But this year my fellow lined them all up on the other side of the barn, and voila! it turned out that putting the machinery away in reverse was the perfect solution. Not only do we have a nice clear alley, but there are no poles sticking out to trip us up.
“Why didn’t we try this years ago?” I said to my fellow farmer.
“Because you don’t like to do anything new?” he ventured.
“Hardy har har,” I answered, feeling mightily pleased with our project. Even after twenty-plus years, new good things can happen!
“If only we could fit the spreader in the barn, too,” my fellow said wistfully. “Especially since we just had the spreader rebuilt. How about we build a nice machinery shed, and then we could line everything up, and it would be so easy and roomy?”
“How about if we take a nice tarp,” I answer, “And put it over the spreader? Or hey, how about covering it with all those political signs? It would be perfect! You know, manure, compost, political signs.”
“Hardy har har,’” said my fellow, as I grinned at him.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 11- Jan 17, 2023