Author: Nuttygrass

I'm a nut and grass farmer, EMT, Firefighter, and world traveler. I love a good laugh and a great adventure!

Feeding the Grass Plants

Just like when you wake up in the morning…breakfast is the more important meal of the day!  Well for grass seed plants, when the weather starts to warm up and they come out of their winter dormancy, we need to get nutrients to them to get them up and growing!

We use a specific blend of fertilizer and apply it three times during the spring, about every two weeks once you get started.  This our first application of fertilizer this year.

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Above is a baby (first year) field.  Can you believe that this little plant will produce more seed per acre than the plants in this three year old field (below)????

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We spread the first and their application using dry fertilizer.  This is our buggy, a lot less technical than our sprayer, but it sure does the job!

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We use GPS, as you can see the computer screen in my “cab” area.  But we also use foam dropped on the ground to show where you have been.  I love how the foamers looks when you re-fill it!

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Top 8 Winter Jobs on Our Farm

I have always said that farming is a pretty seasonal way of life.  After being back on the farm for seven years now, I think that I might need to re-phrase that a bit.  Yes it’s seasonal in the sense that you work 14 hour days, 7 days a week usually just during harvest in the summer, but it’s never to the point where nothing is going on.  To tell you the truth, sometimes I feel like a nice day in January can be more stressful and crazy that a harvest day in July!

So here are just a few of things that we’ve been up to this winter that has been keeping us at Kirsch Family Farms nice and busy!

1. Spraying – We spray most of our crops in the winter with pre-emergent herbicides to help us get a head start on weeds once the soil starts to warm up.

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2. Meetings – Whether it’s learning about safety, new pesticide options, new regulations for employees, research information from the college, farmers in the winter can probably attend a meeting a day for a 3 month period.  Lots of good information, but also makes you ready to get out in the fields instead of sitting in a room listening.

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3. Fixing – There are many times that equipment will break during the busy season and we just don’t have time to fix it right then and there.  Many times you use a patch to get you through the season (aka duct tape at times haha) and then you make sure to bring it in the shop over the winter to fix it right.

4. Blight Pruning – We have to prune out the blight that hits our hazelnut orchards every year.  We use a pruning tower and cut it out, stack the brush and then push it out of the orchard in the spring time.

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5. Paperwork – The not so fun side of farming, but a reality for any business.  From end of the year payroll reporting, to budgets for all the crops for the coming year, it’s not fun but it is a nice way to stay out of the rain.

6. Planting – We plant spring wheat this time of year, we have a large window of time, usually until later in the spring.  We just did a few acres last week, as you can see we also planted it with slug bait in the row.

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7. Slug Killing – It’s been an awful year for slugs, seems like we just can’t get ahead of them, so this year I have done a lot of not so glamorous slug hunting.  Turns out I can always find them, killing them is another issue.  Hopefully next year they will slow down a bit!

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8. Never Ending Project List – I think every farm has this list, full of all the things that you never quite have time for but usually tackle one or two a winter.  This year we are doing two, first we took apart an old D2 cat and are putting it back together.  And secondly we are remodeling my old house into an official farm office!

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National FFA Week!

It’s National FFA week right now, so I would like to share a bit about what FFA is all about, and what it meant and still means for me today…

396362_335600149816030_8373019_nThank you “Keeping it Real: From the Lens of a Farmgirl” for your tribute this week to FFA!

This is the start of the FFA creed.  A creed that for many of us FFA Alumni, will forever ring in our ears the moment someone says, “I believe in the Future of Agriculture…”  As freshman coming into FFA, it was I’m pretty sure the first competition that we had.  How can you take the creed, memorize it, and then repeat it for judges in a way that truly makes them believe in what you’re saying.  As a freshman in High School, I was probably more worried about my hair do or outfits than the future of agriculture.  But now, after coming back to the farm, seeing how threatened our industry is, I feel that the FFA creed has so much meaning!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with FFA (yes it USED to be called the Future Farmers of America, but now just goes by the three simple letters.) it is an organization that was founded in 1928.  It’s goal was to bring together students, teachers and those involved in agriculture to ensure that agricultural education would not be left behind.  It all began with 33 young farm boys, today millions of students have donned the blue corduroy jackets that many of us fondly remember.

2013-02-21_14-46-21_800One of the MANY times we wore those blue & gold corduroy jackets!

In a small town like St. Paul, where 75% of the students grew up on farms and worked on them all summer, something like FFA was a great fit.  We learned practical farming skills, like welding and tractor driving, although the shop skills section wasn’t my strong suit.  I actually managed to weld my piece of metal to the welding table during a shop skills competition…oops!  We also received a lot of leadership training (skills that I still call on today to use while in leadership roles).  And made a lot of friends from across the state, even across the country.

2013-02-21_14-45-10_807National FFA Convention in Louisville Kentucky

Being a member of FFA during high school (like I said I wasn’t too worried about farming back then) wasn’t just about how to farm or drive a tractor.  It was about learning to speak in public, taking responsibility, learning sales techniques, guiding people to get something accomplished, how to think on your feet.  So much of what we did as FFA students wasn’t about farming at all, it’s about life and being successful in any industry!

2013-02-21_13-46-39_885Senior Year, our St. Paul High School FFA Officer Team

I’ll leave you with one of my most memorable moments from FFA.  It was my sophomore year and I decided to raise a pig for the county fair!  Now for all of you livestock farmers and ranchers out there, in my own defense, I grew up on a CROP farm!  I pretty intensely underestimated not only the work that was going to go into this pig, but also how smart the darn thing was.  When I got to fair I was off hanging out with friends, probably the main reason I wanted to take a pig to fair anyway if I was to be honest.  When all the sudden I see a pig running up and down the aisles at full tilt!!  This thing was going nuts, with about 10 FFA students running behind trying to get a hold of the thing before it lost control out on the sidewalk.  We laughed and watched as the pink animal took laps around the show pen, snorting and squealing.  I was very thankful my good little piggy was back in her pen, probably sleeping the hot day away.

It was an hour later when I returned to my pig’s pen to check on her for the night before going home.  There she was, laying down but looking a bit pooped out, almost as if she had been running up and down the aisles all afternoon perhaps?  Well if the 3 peices of wire through her gate latch wasn’t a clue, then maybe the duct tape that was wrapped around the 3 wire chunks would have given it away.  But the real obvious sign that this little piggy was causing trouble all afternoon was the FFA advisor standing just a few feet away, arms crossed, saying, “So this is YOUR pig!”  So it turns out pigs can open simple pen latches, nope they don’t even need opposable thumbs to do such a crazy thing, that’s just how smart they are!  To this daughter of a crop farmer it was a tough and embarrassing lesson!  But those are just the crazy random things that FFA can teach a kid, pigs are brilliant and being responsible is a big job!

Happy FFA Week!

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