Sowing Wheat

The last few weeks has been another busy time on the farm. It was time to plant next year's wheat crop. This year the job was made a lot easier by our new seed cart.

In the past, we have used our little, old grain truck. This is much safer than lifting the bed of the truck and it works better for this set of drills since you can raise the spout on this cart. The cart will also hold more than the truck did.
Rodney and I drilled most of the wheat while Leon and the girls cleaned and treated the wheat and kept our drills filled. The whole cleaning, treating operation reminds me of the game Mousetrap with all of its round-about contraptions.

The wheat comes out of the grain bin via the auger and into the silver cart. Katie was in charge of keeping the cart filled. Notice the auger coming out of the cart. It carries it to the cleaner.

The red, round machine is the actual seed cleaner. The drum rotates as the wheat travels down and it is sorted. The clean wheat comes out the end while the chaff, straw, smaller kernels, etc. exit into a different tub.

The cleaned wheat travels into the truck. This truck is what we used to use to fill the drills. Emily was in charge of scooping the wheat to the back so it would run out of the door to be treated.

The wheat runs out of the back of the truck into another auger that is used to treat the wheat. We treat the seed to prevent diseases that can live in the soil and affect the wheat. It then runs into the auger that takes it into the seed cart.

After this process, the wheat is brought to the drills to be planted. We finished planting all of the wheat Monday. We have done all that we can. Now it is up to God whether we have anything to harvest next summer.

This is the tractor that I drive and I called it the Little Red Hen during wheat sowing. The drills are folded up for the last time and parked. Notice the wheat that was planted earlier is up! We will clean them out soon and put them in the shed for the winter.