Category: Updates

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.

Porch Bale Project; The Kids have Bales for Sale!

Our kids have always wanted to be on the farming side of life. They constantly ask where they can work ground, plant their own fields, work on their own projects, etc. Last year the project that they took on was handmade straw bales. Together we made hundreds of hand-tied straw bales that were sold at markets, alongside the road, and by word of mouth. This year the kids wanted to add to their idea and thought “what about Indian corn?” Not sure how this venture will end….but it’s been a fun project so far with their papa.

Then one day they came to us to ask what we had planned to do with the wheat straw from the field across the road. They thought that maybe they could use a small baler, maybe they could ask the neighbor to help us out and make small bales for a porch size to sell this fall? Well being only 5, 7, and 9 years old, I wasn’t sure how much “help” they would be. I sort of figured it would look a lot like Matt and I doing all the work for “their project”. But we agreed to try it out this year, and lo and behold I was wrong.

In the span of time at the start of summer when the idea was pitched to when the baler showed up in the field for their first lesson from our very kind neighbor, Hoot and Auggie had learned how to drive quite a few things around the farm; a 4-wheeler, a combine, a tractor. So, they jumped right in on the chance to do the baling and they both did great. If one was in the tractor the other, along with Millie of course, was out with me making sales to other local businesses for wholesale and thinking of other ways we could sell to local customers.

When it was time to pick up all those bales from the field, we worked as a whole family. Matt and I loaded them on to the trailer edge, the boys stacked them up and Millie along with Booker kept the tractor down the center of the rows. It didn’t take long and we had all the bales in the barn for this year for the last step of this project…selling all these bales!

It’s great to have a business that we can share so closely with our kids. I love to see how their minds find ideas and ways to do things that I never would have ventured to do myself had it not been for them asking and also their willingness to work hard to get the job done. It’s satisfying as a parent to see that in your kids at such a young age and know that we had a hand in giving them that start. They have already learned some valuable business lessons as well; which I have no doubt will serve them in their years ahead.

If you’re interested in buying any of these small porch bales (about 18” cube size) from these young entrepreneurs feel free to contact me for more information!

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.