Growing up on the farm one of the things I did in the summer was work the summer fallow. I started at a young age. I know I started driving tractor about a month before my eighth birthday. And I remember driving the tractor in from the field working summer fallow at lunch time one summer, walked into the house and found my Aunt Mardelle and family had arrived from California. She greeted me and asked where Dad was. I said he would be in soon. She was a bit confused and asked, “But I heard the tractor come in.” I told her that was correct, I had brought it in, and Dad was working a different field and would drive the pickup home for lunch. She was shocked, “But you’re just a kid! They let you drive a tractor.” I straighten her out with, “I’m ten years old.” That didn’t satisfy her, and she said, “Yes. I know!” When Dad came home there was a short discussion between Aunt Mardelle and Dad with him mostly convincing her that I could handle the tractor just fine.

I remember the tremendous amount of dirt and heat you had to endure. None of the tractors had cabs and the top layer of the field was dry and created a lot of dust. I remember the dust piling up so deep on my watch I would have to turn my wrist over to dump the dust off so I could read it. I remember blowing my nose and having mud come out for a day or so after finishing. You could not see the bottom of the wash basin after washing your head, hands, and arms. The water in the basin looked like a mud puddle.

Probably five or ten years after I left the farm, they stopped using summer fallow as a cycle in the crop rotation. There were new chemicals that could be used to control the weeds and by planting a crop every year the risk of an unusually heavy rain causing excessive erosion was eliminated.

I expected I would never work summer fallow again and my children would never see it or experience it either. That changed this summer.

Daughter Jaime purchased five acres of Idaho farmland to build a house on in a few years. Last year the weeds grew up and it was a mess. I discussed it with her. Ultimately, she wants grass and trees and certainly not weeds. So, this spring we rented a small tractor from Brother Doug with a rototiller on the three-point hitch and took turns driving it. The It was cold, damp, and it took us two days to grind up the weeds and hard soil. That was not the summer fallow I remembered.

It should have been done sooner, but due to our schedules we could not get out there to work it again until July 13^th. Jaime rented the tractor and rototiller again and worked for about 1.5 hours before she got a flat tire. She got it repaired but it was so old it went flat again within a very short time. Doug knew the tires were failing. They were over 25 years old and were no longer made. They had been patching them for years and now they were so rotten they wouldn’t hold a patch.

Jaime took it back to the farm and after some research by me, Doug, and others had a solution. There were tires that would fit but were slightly smaller than the original tires. As it is a four-wheel drive tractor there would be some “issues” if we didn’t take it out of four-wheel drive on hard surfaces, but it should be fine in the fields.

July 20^th it was more convenient for me to work the summer fallow. It was going to be hot. It was going to be dusty. There was no cab on the tractor. It was going to be like what I remembered. I was glad I was doing this rather than my daughter.

The next-door neighbor, a retired farmer, came out spoke with me briefly and even though I had a cooler full of water bottles, twice filled up my thermos with cold water for me. I chugged them.

Around 4:00 PM I noticed something I had not remembered. My arms sweated so profusely the dust on my arms turned to mud:

By 6:00 or so the dirt on my arms was dried out again. That was a bit odd, I thought.

It took 12 hours. I finished up just before dark and the neighbor came out again and chatted with me as I tied the tractor down on the trailer. He told me it got up to 103 degrees that day. He thought I didn’t need to know that as I was in the field. That explains the muddy arms. I don’t think I had ever worked summer fallow when it was that hot before.

By the time I got back to my little camping trailer it was nearly 10:00 PM and I was more than ready for a shower and bed. But first I had to send Barb a message and a picture.

I asked her, “Should I take a shower before coming home? Or do you love me just the way I am?”

She didn’t really answer the questions:

Oh my. I’m laughing so hard I have tears in my eyes.

Here is another picture of my arm back in the camping trailer:

August 11^th, Jaime did it all on her own. It was much cooler. I don’t think it got hotter than the mid 80’s. Good. I would rather she didn’t have to deal with some of the worst conditions I had ever experienced.

I arrived just after she had returned the tractor and rototiller:

This picture is after she changed out of her dirty clothes. She wore a long sleeve shirt that blocked the sun, a mask over her mouth and nose, and a large hat.

I never imagined any of my children would work summer fallow. She rented a trailer, loaded and tied down the tractor, drove with a trailer behind her car, drove the tractor, refueled it multiple times, and did a great job on the field work. I am very proud of her.

Rolf’s comment about the lava flows of Washington I posted about lead me to reading more. I then realized Barb and my visit to Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho last month was totally relevant. It was the same hotspot that created the lava flows from British Columbia through Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, and finally Wyoming where we it created the features of Yellowstone National Park

Here is the governments video of the Craters of the Moon National Monument:

Here are some of my pictures:

The picture on the sign was taken in the late 1950s. A core from the tree showed it was at least 1,350 years old. The lava flow the tree grew from is radioactively dated at about 2,000 years old.

U.S. astronauts spent time here studying the rocks and learning to identify rock types of interest to bring back from the moon.

I have wanted to visit Craters of the Moon since grade school. My cousin Janis told our class about visiting with her parents. I would occasionally mention to my parents I would like to visit it someday, but it was over 400 miles from home and not on the way to or from any other place we routinely went. I was eternally envious of Janis’s visit.

Early this year Barb asked if there was anything I wanted to do over the 4th of July. I told her not particularly. Someday, I would like to visit the Craters of the Moon but that didn’t have to be anytime soon…

Of course, Barb being who she is, couldn’t help but make it happen. We flew into Boise, rented a car, visited Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, Craters of the Moon, and the Shoshone Ice Caves.

On a recent trip to Idaho I saw this sign at a rest stop in central Washington:

Over 50 lava flows! Each of them from more that 100 miles to the east!

I knew Idaho was mostly covered by lava flows but I didn’t realize so much of Washington was too.

Barb and I were flying into the Seattle Tacoma airport yesterday and got a great view of Mount Rainier:

That mountain never fails to impress me.

Daughter Jaime frequently teases me about her being glad she didn’t inherit the packrat gene from me. It’s true that I keep a lot of stuff around that I haven’t used, especially books, since college or before. Barb also sometimes harasses (in a good natured way) about this. It could be environmental rather than a gene, but I know it is definitely something my family does. There are tools in my brother’s shop that belonged to our great-grandfather and haven’t been used since I can remember. As I have grand children those tools will be seen by original owner’s great-great-grandchildren.

In my brothers houses there other things too, canning jars, folding beds, and lots of books that belonged to my parents and grandparents. It’s just tough to throw so much of that stuff away. As my brother Doug and I say, almost in unison, “They MEAN something to me.

Around the barn and in the woods behind the house there are farm implements that haven’t been used in 50 years. I don’t think there is anything that belonged to my grandparents but there is stuff that my grandfather saw my father using.

Back to Jaime. Because this is my chance to get back at her for all those decades of her teasing me.

Jaime is a software developer for Microsoft and during COVID obtained permission to work from home “forever”. With the Antifa and BLM riots and others stuff going on she sold her condo in Bellevue, walking distance to the Microsoft main campus in Redmond and moved to Black Diamond about an hour south of her condo. In another few years she plans to move to Idaho. She bought five acres of land a couple years ago and will start building a house soon. It used to be farm land and without any attention the weeds are taking over. I told her I would help her get the weeds under control but she will have to take over. I told her we need to cultivate it about every two weeks all summer. The weed seeds will sprout, and then be easily killed by the cultivation before they very big. In the fall we will plant grass and in a couple of years the grass with dominate almost all the weeds.

But how to cultivate it? She needs a little tractor and a cultivator. We can get a rototiller for the first take at the ground this spring, but need something else to hit the weeds with every couple of weeks.

I couldn’t find or rent the type of cultivator that would be appropriate for the job. Talking to brother Doug about the problem I said, “I wish we had something like the old spring tooth I used to pull behind the D4 when I was in grade school.” Doug immediately told me, “It’s down in the woods, near the well. And that would be almost perfect.” We discussed it and as we remembered it, it probably was made of four, 4-foot sections. One of those sections could probably be pulled by a medium sized lawn tractor.

Today my brothers and I restored a two sections of that old spring tooth I spent hundreds of hours pulling behind the tractor when I was of grade school age.

Here are the pictures.

You can barely see it in the grass and brush, but brother Doug is attaching a chain and we pulled the four sections out with brother Gary’s pickup.

All four sections had some damage from a tree being fell on them by a logger a decade or so ago. We selected the best three, one to use for parts and the other two for restoration, and took them to the shop.

Some of the fittings for connecting the four sections together for a 16-foot implement had to be cut off with a cutting torch. The bolt were rusted solid. All the other repairs we had to do involved bolts which need less “persuasion” and we were able to reuse.

Here is the end result:

This is what is left of the section we used for parts.

I still need to attach a cable to it for a hitch. I cut the cable to the proper length and will get the clamps and stuff tomorrow. In two weeks Jaime will visit Idaho, we will attach the cable and after she admits having a packrat gene comes in handy sometimes, we will transport her spring tooth to her property.