For your Memorial Day, you may enjoy reading a post from a fabulous Nebraska extension agent about having her husband deployed in Afghanistan.
Memorial Day
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May Accomplishments
If you’ve felt like I was blogging but not really present during May, it was because we were busy accomplishing lots and my brain was not in write mode. I’ve made a list of our major accomplishments this month for you in order of their occurance.
1. Ran The Lincoln Half Marathon – If you’ve never done it, you should put it on your to do list. It’s a fabulous time and you’ll want to do it again after you do it once. Just run it slow the first time so you can easily beat your time the next time. It’s annoying to barely beat your time.
Yes that’s the same shirt I’ve worn in every half marathon! I really like it.
My sister amidst the throngs of runners before the race – she blew her first time out of the water.
2. Donated Blood – I didn’t have this in my original list, but then I saw it in the county paper. “Julie was a first time donor.” I had no idea that was newspaper worthy news; but if it’s newspaper worthy, it must be blog worthy.
3. Celebrated 10 Years of Wedded Bliss – Brad actually said he thinks I look better now than when we met. What a nice guy.
The wonderful man I married
4. Participated in the Community Garage Sale – We don’t have neighborhood sales in this country. Entire towns have sales. It was a great time! I always like it when people give me money.
5. Celebrated Wyatt’s Birthday – I’ll tell you where we went another day.
6. Finished the School Year!!!!!!!!!!!
8. Harvested Something From Our Garden – Those radishes are fast growers.
Doesn’t everyone have a random piece of cardboard in their garden?
Any of those you’d like to hear more about?
I thank God for the ability to run and give blood, for my husband and children, for having so much I need to sell some of it, for helping me survive a school year working with elementary students, and for soil to grow corn and a garden.
Now for getting ready to accomplish many things this summer. I see a lot of drive time in my future with trips to at least Kansas City, Sioux Falls, Lincoln and Denver! I’m looking forward to all of it!
Farming on the 5′s
Brad’s electrifying things today, but I’ll tell you something farming related from earlier this week.
Just when we were rejoicing that planting was over, he finds out he has to replant part of the field with the pivot on it (a.k.a. the pivot). Picture this – three farmers and the seed representative standing in the field discussing the stand (how many plants were up). I wasn’t there, but I’m sure they may have stood there for at least an hour talking about the field and anything else they found to discuss.
I told you earlier two reasons why they thought some of the corn didn’t come up, but it turns out it was neither of those reasons. The current theory is that the ground was too wet when Brad planted and the dirt didn’t fall around the seed like it needed. In the third and last pictures in this post about planters you can see what the weather looked like the day it was planted. Brad actually had to stop for a few hours that day because of rain.
The result (all figures are approximate):
17,000 plants per acre instead of 33,000
That translates into 110 bushel corn instead of 210 bushel corn,
which means $500 less per acre if he gets $5 for each bushel of corn.
So Tuesday Brad and his brother replanted the worst 50 acres.
You work and learn and know you won’t make the same mistake next year and now we can finally say planting is finished – a fabulous accomplishment! I’ll tell you more of our recent accomplishments in my next post. They are many.
May Wheat
Before I tell you about all the other interesting things I have to say, I have to show you what the wheat looks like now. If I don’t show you now, it will change and be old news.
Watching it on windy days is mesmerizing.
Before long it will be all brown and ready for harvest, but now it’s green.
If you don’t remember what it looked like just a few weeks ago, you can see how the wheat looked in early April here.
Rabbits!
We went out our back door to watch the coming storm after supper tonight. Two rabbits were just sitting in the grass looking at us. Elliana thinks it’s her personal mission to scare away rabbits so they don’t eat the garden, but she told Brad to scare them away since she was too scared to go out when it was thundering.
One rabbit scurried away when it saw Brad and the hoe coming after it, but the other just sat there until the hoe got much closer. When it finally moved, guess what we saw.
Right in the middle of the lawn! Right where the fire pit action needs to take place very soon!
From the time I saw them to the time I got back out with the camera, Brad saw the parents under our snowball bush looking like they were working on making more babies. Lovely.
Good thing Elliana insisted we plant one of our flowers that “keeps rabbits away” in the middle of the garden. I can only figure that I must have poorly explained what “rabbit resistant” meant to her when we were at the nursery. Whether it keeps rabbits away or is rabbit resistant, it appears to be the type of plant we’ll need around here.
Planting Issues
We went on another country drive. This time to check out how the corn was coming up. I think every field Brad planted had some issue.
On his irrigated pivot some of the corn wasn’t coming up. It’s not bad enough to have to replant it, and the reason for the problem is left to speculation. From what I gather it’s either because it rained right after it was planted, so the ground was crusted and too hard for the corn to push through or when the corn was almost up, it got so warm that the corn was getting enough heat to think it was already up and started leafing just a little too early. Either way they’ve been running the pivot to help encourage it to come up, and I’ve been praying for it.
Another field we checked had some spots where corn wasn’t coming up, but Brad checked and the seed was there. It could be that the seed to soil contact wasn’t very good.
As for Brad’s brother’s field in my last post, while Brad was planting it the mechanism that makes only one seed drop every so many inches quite working for one of the eight planter spots. Do you notice how two rows look greener than the others? They’re greener because Brad planted a solid row of seed in them. Thankfully the monitor informed him he was planting way too much corn so he stopped and fixed it before too long.
For a perfect planting, there would be a seed every so many inches, it would be in not too deep and not too shallow, the ground would not be too crusty on top and would stay just the right temperature, and the dirt would fall perfectly around the seed. Considering all the different things that can go wrong, it’s amazing that the amount of corn comes up that does.
What’s Wrong With This Field?
