Corn and beans and beans and corn

What bean harvest will look like when they are actually combined.

Ah fall, the changeable season.  Yesterday friends lent us a car and Pete and I went to Salem UCC in Magley, IN for Harvest Sunday.  You could be forgiven if you've not heard of Magley. It's small.  Actually it is probably beyond small.  Wikipedia just gives it two lines.  But what Magley does have in abundance is farm land.  The rich farm land that makes Indiana famous for it corn and beans and beans and corn.  For the past nine years the church I attend, Plymouth Congregational, UCC and Salem-Magley UCC have had a partnership through Foods Resource Bank.  A crop is grown, harvested and sold.  The proceeds go to two projects the churches have designated in Uganda and the Domincan Republic.  Every October during the harvest season Salem invites Plymouth to join them for worship, dinner and a trip to the field for the harvesting.  The crop has always been corn, until this year, when soy beans were planted.  A couple of years ago I got to ride in the combine as it made a pass down the length of the cornfield.  Simply amazing!

This year there had been too much rain in the past week to harvest the beans yesterday.  The moisture content can't be over 13% for the beans to be sold to the local elevator.  The beans were at about 20% moisture yesterday.  They will be harvested when they are drier in the field.  Pete got lots of pictures, which I'm looking forward to seeing once he downloads them all.  I'll add some to a future blog entry.

I Googled a route to see if I could find something other than the usual highway route I've taken before.  Google showed using county roads and it would cut two sides off the triangle of going from Fort Wayne to Decatur and then coming back west.  Southern Allen and northern Adams counties were well settled by German farmers back in the day.  Every couple of miles is another solid, big brick church.  Most are Lutheran, Salem was from the E and R side of the UCC merger.  But like skyscrapers dominate the city skyline, these church steeples dominate the countryside down there. 

Pete and I came home down some different county roads so we could go past the field where the beans are growing.  There was quite a bit of fall color and the sky yesterday afternoon was bright and blue. It was quite a wonderful way to spend the afternoon.  We actually got home at a good time, because once we dropped our friends' car back off and rode our bikes home, the clouds had moved in and the wind had picked up.  After all it is fall and all weather is possible (even in the course of one day!)