For a guy who grew up on a farm, I’m eminently clueless about actual farm work and technology. The farm sections of Troll Valley involved a lot of research on my part, even to the point of (horrors!) asking people questions. Still, I moved the family to town as soon as I decently could.
I was on the farm but not of it as a boy. I don’t mean that in a superior sense; I’m deeply ashamed of my ignorance and inexperience. Due to a deal my parents cut with each other, my brothers and I were mostly left with the housework, while Dad continued to care for the animals and till the fields as he had since boyhood. On top of that, farm work just never engaged my interest. Dad would be fixing up a planter or a rake, and I would be thinking about Vikings or Abraham Lincoln.
But I learned something this weekend. It was actually a thing that went obsolete before my time. But God insisted on bringing it forcefully to my attention, so I figure I’d better write about it.
On our way to the family reunion on Sunday, as we drove between the cornfields on Highway 60 between Faribault and Kenyon, my uncle from Maryland started reminiscing about something called “check-row planting.” It was a way of planting corn back in the days before chemical herbicides. This system made it possible (if done right) to run the cultivator in both directions (north-south and east-west), better removing weeds between the stalks. It involved stringing wires, with knots at set intervals, across the fields. When the check-row planters were in use, the wires ran through them, the knots would trip the mechanism, and seeds would be deposited at precise points. The result was that each plant stood in the center of an exact square, with four other plants at each corner. “Dad said the trick was to set the tension on the wires exactly the same for every row,” my uncle said.
OK. A few hours later we’re at the reunion, standing around the tent and talking. Along comes cousin John from Iowa (who’s actually a descendant, not of my great-grandfather, but of my great-grandfather’s brother), and he starts telling me about this method of corn planting they used to have, called “check-row planting.”
Make of it what you will. I never heard of the practice in eighteen years living on the farm, and I heard about it twice on Sunday.
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