I’ve been traveling all weekend for a wonderful, incredible, amazing wedding of a great friend! So I’m being a bit “blog lazy” and putting more pictures up for today…Enjoy!
Grass Seed Heads are coming out…
The Wheat is also proving to have a good looking crop….
And the peas are finally blooming!
This is looking to be another beautiful week here in the Pacific Northwest. Possibly showers today, but then some more great calm spraying weather ahead! This time of year is usually when we start to look at spraying some Plant Growth Regulator. Which may sound strange, because don’t you want plants to grow more and more so you get more and more yields? The answer would be yes, except for this incredible technology that actually helps your plants yield more and stay shorter.
We use this spray on our perennial ryegrass fields for seed. These are seeds that are sold all over the world for lawns, golf courses, soccer fields, the White House lawns, etc. So at this point the grass is growing and the flag leaf is out, when we spray this chemical it stops the stem from growing and takes all that energy instead and puts it towards developing the seeds!
This isn’t just a way to get a yield increase, it is also a very good way to help us out down the road at harvest time. Once the grass is ripe, we use a machine called a swather to cut the grass into rows. When the grass is shorter, because of this application, it doesn’t lay down so much on the ground. So when we go through with the cutting machine, it cuts more evenly and smoothly. We don’t get plugged up nearly as much as we used to. I might also add that we swath grass in the middle of the night, so getting plugged up is about the more frustrating thing when you’re exhausted and just wishing you were in your bed!
When we go across fields we try, if we can, to bundle applications. This helps to reduce crop damage, save fuel and time. So this time we will also put in some fungicide to help combat any early signs of rust that are on the fields. Rust is a fungus that grows on the plants and can be extremely detrimental to your yield if you let it get out of control. The crazy thing is that it literally looks like rust on the plants, even comes off on your hands with a sort of reddish color, just like true rust would.
So that is my big project this week, enjoy the nice weather and go put on some sprays that are going to help the plant stay strong and fight off diseases as they come their way in the next few months! Hope you all have a good week!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
NuttyGrass 