Heat

Whoever wrote the lines to the song that goes,"summertime and the living is easy" never lived in south Georgia. Cader IV and I just got back from spending an hour or two in the sweet corn field. In addition to ingesting about a billion gnats, the temperature/humidity index was hovering at a pleasant 112 degrees. It got so hot that the sweet corn started popping, and the harvesting crews thought it was snowing and they froze to death in the field. Well, maybe I am exaggerating a bit, but I think that you can get the gist of the picture. The good news is that harvest is going smoothly, and prices are decent,especially compared to last year.
 We did face a dilemma last night. We had a very small but powerful thunderstorm blow up about sunset. It knocked down a couple of trees across the power lines and splintered a utility pole. It just so happened that I found the spot where this occurred on the lodge road, and called our local EMC. Almost this entire area was out of power including our sweet corn plant that was in the process of chilling and loading about $200,000 worth of sweet corn yesterday. Since I keep the EMC head man's cell phone in my contacts on my cell phone, I gave him a quick call to inform him of the emergency and where the down lines were. He said, " Cader, I can isolate your house and Cader IV's house, and back feed your corn operation. I can have it running in 20 minutes, but this will cause y'all to be out of power for three to four hours". Martha was standing right beside me and asked me what he said. I replied, "hold on, honey, we have a bad connection. Let me walk out in the yard". Once out of her hearing, I said, "OJ, get my corn operation going as fast as you can". Did I mention that Martha and I were both hot and sweaty when the power went out? Oh well, sometimes you have to take one for the home team.
 On the hunting front, the feed patches are coming up nicely with the abundant moisture, and our natural cover looks great! We have also eradicated a bunch of briars with some concentrated spraying of Garlon on many of our hunting courses. Finally, we continue to be very excited about our training program with our English Cockers for flushing and retrieving.We will not have one on each jeep by fall, but we should have them ready to go on at least 60% of our jeeps by fall.