I really suggest that you get the PDF for free because the next section has a lot of pictures and they will not be in the Steemit file. Just send me your email address so that I can send them to you. Send it to [email protected].
INTRODUCTION
This book is not one of my traditional books. It reflects my religious preferences and a decidedly Christian outlook. Again I ask you to use the grocery store method. If you can use the information or it is entertaining to you take it with you. Don’t condemn the whole book just because you disagree with one idea. This project started with a revelation form the Lord and continues today as he has his hand upon it. My perspective is from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. This book is about a modern day miracle.
I can testify to you personally about most of the happenings in this book. Those that I did not personally experience will be so noted. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints commonly known as the Mormons. We believe in personal revelation and answers to personal prayers. This book is a testimony that these things do happen today, yesterday and they will happen tomorrow
INSPIRATION
In the middle of May 2012 I was walking around my vacant and weed ridden field near Benton City, Washington wondering what I should do with the property. We had a real di-lemma on our hands as the Benton Irrigation District was assessing us over $250 per acre for the new pressurized water system. The cost of this irrigation water whether we wanted it or not was added on to our taxes. The challenge was what to do to pay the cost of the water and how could we make it pay its own way?
A small voice came into my mind saying, “Why don’t you plant some corn?” My response was immediate, “I don’t have the equipment, seed and besides that is a lot of work”. This problem continued to plight me as the days wore on. About the first of June that little voice was back again saying, “You could plant corn.” My answer was the same and I ignored those promptings. About the middle of June that voice got a little more pervasive and said, “When are you going to plant your corn?” At this time I remembered a story that a friend of mine had told me.
He was from Salt Lake and had decided not to serve a mission for the Church. They were at a family outing and his uncle put his arm around him and said, “When are you going on a mission?” He thought no more about it as he was not going to serve a mission. Later that summer they were at a family outing on a lake in the area and his uncle again asked him when he was going on a mission. He blew this suggestion off again. A short time later at an-other family gathering his uncle asked, “When will we see your mission papers? “ This time he got the message and turned in his mission application. He by his own witness stated that he had a very successful mission. When he returned from his mission he went to Uncle Tom’s office in the Church Office Building to tell his Uncle about his mission. His Uncle lis-tened with great interest and when this you man finished he said, “Don’t make the Lord ask you three times again to do his work.” I had heard from the Lord three times to plant corn. It was time for action no matter what the cost.
PLANTING CORN
That afternoon I was out on my little John Deere tractor with a spring tooth harrow breaking up that field to plant corn. I tore up just a little over an acre. At this time our fi-nances were in the toilet. I did not have money to buy seed, pipe for the irrigation, or even a way to get the fertilizer that had been given to me on to the corn. This was when the mira-cles started to happen.
I have a neighbor that is the manager of a fertilizer and seed business. I told him that I needed corn seed. He said, “Well I have some seed that we can’t sell as it is 103 day to har-vest corn seed and for most farms it is to late in the year to plant it. We can’t hold it over to next year. I can bring up a sack of that seed for you.” I got that sack of seed and it was pre-mium hybrid corn seed. It would have cost me a couple of hundred dollars to buy seed and the Lord provided it. Now I had this ground torn up and the weeds pulled off and piled up. Another friend and neighbor asked what we were doing and I told him I was going to plant corn. He said, “You can borrow my tractor and big disk to finish plowing the ground. That is just what I did. I borrowed his tractor and disk. Of course the disk broke while I was using it but Bud is known as the master tinker and fixed the disk much better than it was before it broke. My neighbors comment was, “You did a really good job fixing my disk, what do I owe you.” My answer was, “Nothing.” The way things worked where I grew up was that if you borrowed something you returned it as good or better condition than when you got it. This shocked my neighbor and he said, “Boy I wish everyone felt that way.” Then he proceeded to tell me of all the stuff that people had borrowed and returned broken. I am really glad that I did my best to fix that disk better than it was before. That was miracle number two.
After the ground was disked it was harrowed again with the old spring tooth harrow and I had gotten all of the rubble left from the disking removed it was time to seed. We do not have a seeder to use to seed corn with the tractor, but I knew that the corn had to be seed-ed. Here was my solution. I made straight rows running north and south across the ground. This provided a furrow to use to plant the corn. Please realize that an acre of corn hand planted with rows about 38 inches apart is a lot of seed to plant.
A neighbor had loaned me a Earthway Garden Seeder to use on my garden this year. It has a seed metering disk for corn. I set that seeder up and planted the corn. That seeder is a great tool and I will add one to my gardening tools for next year.
Earthway Garden Seeder
You can see from this picture that it is a lot of work to seed an acre in this manner. It took me over a day to seed this ground pushing this seeder across the patch. This was an-other miracle that the Lord made available to me.
IRRIGATION OF THE CORN
Corn is a sub topical plant that originated on the American continent. Our current corn is a descendent of the plant called maze that the ancient Aztec grew. It requires lots of warm weather and lots of water as well as rich soil. We have planted the corn and it is about July 1st. The corn requires about 107 days to maturity for this hybrid. This means that the corn will be mature about the 15th of October if all goes well. The current problem is that it does not have any water.
Somehow we managed to come up with enough cash to buy the sprinkler heads and riser pipes but no money to buy the irrigation lines. I have an old pile of pvc pipe that probably is not good. My buckets of pipe fittings are always an assortment of many different pipe fit-tings and will provide what we need. As I go to this old pipe pile, what I need is always there. My irrigation plumbing may not be the prettiest but it works. I have named this the magic pipe pile. It supplied what I needed. When the job was complete there was little pipe left in the pile. This pile of pipe supplied more than I ever put in it. This was one of the Lord’s mira-cles to get this corn planted.
It is into the month of July and I don’t have water on the corn. If it is going to produce a crop that seed needs water now. As I am working on the irrigation lines one afternoon I look to the sky and say Lord this corn really needs water if it is to grow this year. Then I go back to work.
Either the next day or two days later, I don’t remember the exact day and I did not write it my journal an unusual event occurs. We are blessed with an unprecedented summer cloud burst over the Tri-City area. This just does not happen here. This rain thoroughly soaked the corn patch. I expected help from the Lord but I did not expect him to dump a bucket of wa-ter on my corn patch. By the time that the ground was dry again I had the water system op-erating. The irony of this system is that I started out with 5 foot risers and by August I had to add another foot to the risers as the corn was over 8 feet tall.
The only problem with the irrigation now is that Benton Irrigation District is assessing us over $4000.00 for the water for 14.3 acres next year. That is more than the taxes; perhaps the Lord can fix this situation too.
IRRIGATION. FERTILIZER AND WEED SPRAY
In our area weeds are a real problem. We have high winds occasionally and the horse breeders haul in hay from all over the United States and it is not weed free. For these rea-sons we have an abundance of non-native weeds and hard to control weeds here.
I asked around about weed spray for the corn but did not come up with a good spray. Many folks suggested using 2-4-D which is a well recognized general purpose weed killer use in grains. Somehow this did not seem right and I asked a neighbor that is a professional weed control expert about using this chemical. His answer was “I don’t know what its effect is on corn but I will find out.” In the mean time I bought 2-4-D but did not apply it. My friend got back to me with the answer that this chemical would stunt the growth and seriously re-tard the corn’s production. Again it was inspiration that saved me from a costly mistake.
You asked, “What did you do to control the weeds?” Simple I tilled and hoed the weeds until the corn was high enough to fend for itself. This again was a lot of work but it was suc-cessful.
It was now time to fertilize the corn. I had a couple of large tanks of fertilizer that had been given to me, but no effective way to apply it other than a hand sprayer. I looked into buying a fertilizer injector for the irrigation system but these units were expensive. Then I got my thinking cap on and asked for a little help. I was inspired to build a fertilizer injector for the irrigation system. This is what I used to build a fertilizer injector.
I started with an old discarded well pressure tank. Took the bottom plate off and turned the tank upside down. I was able to put a piece of pipe to the bottom of the tank and then fill the tank with fertilizer. The tank was pressurized with air pressure to force the fertilizer out of the tank. I constructed an orifice into the irrigation line. The flow of the fertilizer was controlled by valves and as long as the air pressure in the tank was greater than the pressure of the irrigation system the injector worked just fine. This is how the corn was fertilized.
