Friday, September 25, 2015

Farm Girl Friday -25 September 2015

farm-girl-friday

It's the 'ultimate' Farm Girl Friday experience this week.  The Farmer and I and his Dad and Step-mother headed down to the International Plowing Match. This year it was in a little place called Finch.  So small they didn't even have a yarn shop  :(

I don't go to the IPM very often.  They can get rather boring.  Especially if they are held too close to home and Colin bumps into too many 'neighbours' and spends the entire time talking about local stuff.  This year he only met 1 person he knew!  There was lots to see:


So, who knows what this is?   It's a litter cart.  You use it for cleaning manure out of the barn.  You fill it full and then it runs along the track out to the pile.  Colin just remembers having it in our barns.  It was replaced by the barn cleaner (chain-type contraption built into the floor that drags all the 'stuff' out) in 1976.


Colin also remembers seeing these running up and down the railway tracks in front of our house.  Poor guys always looked so cold in the winter.  Now they have regular street trucks that have an attachment for running on the tracks.


There were no yarn displays (as I was promised) but I did find this fun display of sewing machine pedals.  I'm very happy to have an electric machine -especially since my foot barely reaches the 'gas' pedal.


How about these?  Any guesses?  They are the cast iron doors off grain wagons.  You open these and the grain pours out the side of your wagon and into the auger and into the bin.


Some half-scale tractors.  Ella would have so much fun ripping around the yard on one of these.  The red one on the right is a Cockshutt which I find kind of cool because that's the brand of combine Colin was using when we were married and you don't see too many of them around.

Speaking of combines:


Here's a precursor to the corn ones.  It's a corn picker unit that goes onto the front of your tractor.


This show was really making Colin feel old.  Look what we found in the 'antique' section.  This tractor is only 2 years older than the Hydro 100 that we still use.


Checking out the brand-spanking new tractor like a neighbour just bought.  Note Colin hiding his face?  Even though it's the right colour, it's the wrong brand (i.e., not an International).  Sigh, farmers and their tractor brands, I swear it's worse than guys and their cars.


This is an old model T.  Colin couldn't get over how minimal it was under the hood, basically spark plugs and a horn.  Nothing like our truck today.

There was a nice sized crowd.  Not crazy busy like back 'in the day'.  But I don't like it that busy any way.  When we got there we went our way and the 'folks' went their's.  We each had our cells but when it came time to find Dad and Lorraine, his phone wouldn't work.  We joked that we should go sit in the 'missing persons' tent.  I didn't know how we were ever going to find them.  Between Dad was wearing a plaid shirt and from the back Lorraine looks like all the other older ladies (why do they all get the same short hair cut??  I'm not doing that) I thought we'd never find them.  Luckily we had just started looking and I turned around and there they were.

We were there nearly 4 hours and were ready to head home (lots of walking on an uneven hay field).  Oh, just in case you wonder why I wear 80 spf sunscreen, this is what happens when I don't:

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