Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Spring Seeding Accomplished (well almost)

It's Tuesday evening as I'm writing this and we finished seeding the garbanzo beans last night around 7:00pm on Monday.  We are done seeding for the most part.  Whew.....

The weather forecast was showing rain for the rest of the week  so we really wanted to get finished.   The last few days around the Palouse have been very busy with seed trucks and tractors out in the fields racing against the weather.  I'm not sure about the neighbors, but we finished are are very thankful for the 1/2 " of rain received today.  This is perfect and we could not have ordered a better weather forecast.  We do have about 12 acres left to seed with sunflowers, but that is not critical.



One Monday, I was working around our home place, spraying Round-up for weed control, so I grabbed my camera to take a few pictures of brother-in-law Jay who was doing the seeding on the Genesee farm.  As I mentioned in the last blog about the "nurse truck" , well I was able to snap some pictures of this event. Here they are as shown above.  The nurse truck is equipped with  an auger that dumps the seed into the seed box.

Joe was at the Tammany farm spraying the garbs planted down there.  Garbs require some special attention in that you have one shot and one shot only to control weeds.  If weather conditions are not right, sometimes the weed application is not optimal and the end result is a weedy field (farmers don't like messy weedy fields - and Murphy's law seems that if you have something go wrong, it is ALWAYS by the highway and visible...   =)  I would compare it to having a nosy relative drop in unexpectedly and your house was really messy)  =(    A clean weed free field is a source of pride to those of us that farm, it means we try to carefully tend and take care of  our ground in the best manner we can.   So the process is like this: the farmer tries to time spraying a "pre-emergent" on the garb ground just before the garb plants are set to pop up out of the ground to control the known pesky weeds that will plague this plant.  Once the plants are out of the ground, there is not an  FDA approved product that can be sprayed to control the weeds, so it is a gamble on whether or not the farmer will have a nice clean, weed free field to harvest or a weed infested field which will yield lower and the farmer most likely will get docked for the less than optimum product. 
So that's all for now folks!  I'll also be photographing this crop on my "Diary of a Crop" as well.