Category: Challenges

Things I’m glad I’m not in charge of…..

****I wrote this post about 5 days ago….woke up to some beautiful sunshine this morning, but the intent stands true; I’m still glad I’m not in charge of the weather!****

Maybe you wouldn’t know it by the title but this is a weather post. Because you see the the weather is by and large the one thing that I’m most happy to not be in charge of. I mean sure there’s other things like, I’m glad I’m not the sole person in charge of making sure my kids don’t grow up to be crazy & absolutely wild but that’s a blog for another day.

Windshield raindrops

It’s raining today here in the Willamette Valley. We have needed this rain so much. The days leading up to this weather system were hectic at best. Lots of triage of what to spray, what to fertilize, what to mow, scrape, plant, fix, put away….you get the point here. We had a lot to do.

And if I’m being honest there’s always more that could have been done, but today I woke up and heard the rain and felt grateful. I know there are plenty of folks out there who woke up not loving the raindrops, maybe a farmer or two who had a lot left on their list of things to get done (I’ve been this farmer also).

But at the end of the day that’s why I’m grateful that I’m not in charge of the weather; too much to consider, too many decisions to make, and I’ll leave all that up to the big guy upstairs.

But also….I mean….it has been a few days and it could probably go ahead and be sunny again…we do have beans to plant next week….just a thought to the guy who is in charge….but still I’m glad I’m not in charge….anyway moving right along….happy farming out there no matter the weather!!

Walking Fields

It was a chilly field walking morning, but this is an important job for our farm!

This time of year as things start to really grow and plants start to set the crop for the upcoming summer harvest, we have to take time to walk all our fields and look for issues.

“Issues” right now in this growing stage usually means weeds. We are currently spraying our final (hopefully) application of weed spray. We use chemicals that are selective so they only target weeds that we see out in the field. It’s a great way to save money for us and save on putting more chemical where it’s not needed. For example we have a few fields that have a lot of groundsel, we will add an additional weed herbicide in to manage that so it doesn’t show up as a weed in our seed tests at the final stages of getting clean crops to sell. Also hoping that it doesn’t show up again next year as a continual problem.

Our weed spray is mixed with a carrier of fertilizer and water; which in turn saves us an application across the field to get our final amount of nitrogen to feed the crop. This efficiency increase saves us time, money, and fuel. But in order to makes this all happen we do have to walk around every single field to see what is out there.

This is a nice clean area of a tall fescue field.

Our farm works alongside field men who work for companies where we buy our fertilizer and chemicals. More boots on the ground means that we have a very good chance of not missing something. And if we do our jobs well; setting ourselves up to have clean seed fields that create a valuable product for us to sell.

In Between the Last Crop & the Next

Fall is always busy, we are at the beginning of what looks a lot like triage everyday of what needs to be done. We have one more crop to harvest, filberts, and then we will be done with the 2023 crop and be able to fully focus on the 2024 crop. Planting, cultivating, spraying, fertilizing, working ground, etc.

Which means that while we aren’t harvesting at this very moment we have time (especially with 2023 seed harvest being so early) to go out and get some projects done. Mine earlier in the week (after dropping ALL THREE of my kids off at school! Woo hoo!!!) was spot spraying thistle patches that had come up in ground that we had already worked a few weeks ago.

These patches are easy to see this way without any other crop growing currently. They also allow us to spot treat instead of spraying the whole field to get control of these nasty weeds. Our plan for this field specifically is to plant tall fescue this spring. This will allow for a lot of weeds to sprout between now and then giving us a great opportunity to clean this soil up of weeds before planting.

Because we grow so many seed crops on our farm, keeping weeds controlled is of very large importance to what we do. This may seem like a small insignificant job, but in the long run, it’s important to stay on top of weeds at each opportunity.

I mentioned before that I dropped off our three of our kids at school for the first time ever, don’t worry about me being lonely though, I have another sidekick that was right with me the whole time.