Category: Updates

The start, the middle, or the end of harvest?

Harvest has been happening for awhile around here. It snuck right up on us after a long winter and the idea of you were following plant stage and growing degree days that we would start harvest late. I stupidly started making early July plans that seems so attainable with a mid July start. However I quickly started canceling things when we looked out the window one day and Matt said, “maybe we should look at the clover, it looks really brown!” And after a quick look at the field later that day, “Hey it’s Brenda, so that camping trip I said maybe we could do…..how does your November look for timing?”

We have finished up clover harvest. And my gosh what a surprise, after so much drama with that darn stuff it actually produced a very nice sized seed crop.

Grass seed harvest started near the end of June with swathing or cutting the grass.

Combining or separating the seed from the straw started quickly after our good old St. Paul rodeo on the 6th of July. We have about 4 or 5 more days until we finish up that crop.

Hoot also found out that he’s heavy enough to weigh down the seat of the John Deere by himself and got some good driving time in.

Our green beans are just about ready to be harvested, probably next week sometime.

And finally the filbert crop is looking great. The price not so much, but that’s probably a whole other blog post that we don’t have time for today.

So all in all we are at the just the start with some crops, right in the middle of others and at the very end of a long harvest season. Meanwhile we are of course taking soil samples, mowing old crop stubble and starting to work ground for fall planting.

Hoot is also our field chauffeur after learning to drive the four wheeler.

Life in the fields has become the norm around here for the past month and a half. Some of us are ready for a little less dust in our dinner, but I also know we will look forward to it all again next year.

Booker the Farm Dog; Plus one Year, Minus one Leg

Happy 1st birthday to our most favorite farm dog Booker!!!! This guy became a part of our family in the fall of last year. He’s learned a lot, riding in the Ute with dad is his favorite activity second only to playing in the water and playing ball with the kids.

As we celebrate his birthday today we are very grateful that he actually made it to his first birthday. Unfortunately last week Booker had a run in with a vehicle. He’s doing pretty good now, but we had to make the tough decision to amputate his front left leg.

While we thought we gave him a lot of love before, the care he’s getting from these kiddos is definitely next level. If you ask me how the kids are taking it, it’s all very different. Hoot is pretty sad still, there’s a lot of adjustment and fear but he is getting through and adjusting to Booker’s new dog life more each day. Auggie woke up the first day and told me he was….”thinking about it, and I’m so excited to have a three legged dog. I’ve only ever seen them on TV!” And Millie is doing well, but only after a very long explanation about how unfortunately “no sweetie, his leg will not grow back”. After accepting that she has quickly taken to over-mothering and while the car didn’t kill him Millie’s constant taking care of him just might!

We have heard from many folks about their own three legged dog stories and what a great wonderful life they can still have. My favorite words so far were from our vet, “that’s why God gave them four legs!”

Booker is doing a lot of resting most days right now but slowly getting back into walking, and trying to run to keep up with the kids. It’s an adjustment but we know it will be a short lived one as each day he get stronger and shows us he’s still our best farm dog!

We can just get it done later – Crimson Clover’s Story of 2023

This is one thing that I have to continually explain to folks. Farmers rarely have the opportunity when it comes to crop care to say, “we can just get it done later.” In a year like this when the weather isn’t cooperating to allow us to get out and care for our crops, windows are opening and closing every day.

Our crimson clover has a few of these issues going on this year. Weed control and size of the plant.

Unfortunately with our inability to access and get on the field with our sprayer (we don’t like getting stuck in the mud), we were unable to spray our usual weed control on the clover. So as the clover wakes up after being dormant so have the weeds. The window has closed to spray our normal weed control for broadleaves and we are now having to wait longer for the crop to get bigger before we apply our plan b for weed control. This isn’t ideal because the plan b herbicides aren’t as good as the ones we originally planned to use. They are also more expensive and while we wait the weeds are growing which means they will be harder to kill and control.

The clover is also really small for this time of year. It’s a crop that is usually gets planted and established in the fall and then by spring it shoots to life. Once we hit a certain amount of daylight the crop goes into reproductive mode shooting beautiful blooms up. These blooms mature after bee pollination and produce the seeds that we harvest.

We really don’t want those beautiful flowers to bloom while the stem is only a few inches high because that would mean basically little to no seed to harvest with it not having the root and stem structure to handle feeding the crop until harvest and maturity.

Crimson is a crop that actually puts nitrogen back into the soil so it’s a tough (and expensive) pill to swallow to put out more outputs (aka fertilizer) for a crop that you hadn’t planned on. But you don’t always have the perfect choice of what to do and a plan that can be followed 100% of the time. With a little fertilizer we are hoping to keep the plant growing and not blooming just a little longer to grow a better crop.

I wrote the beginning of this post quite awhile ago; today we are at a much different place in the crop cycle. The good news is that the crimson did grow taller and more lush with the fertilizer application. The bad news is that so did the weeds and we weren’t able to even use plan B for weed control. The plants are done blooming now, the bees have done all they can pollenating. and now we are just a few days from cutting it, letting it mature to the fullest in the windrow and combine it. Until it’s in the truck we won’t know what the decisions we made or were forced to make did or didn’t do for our yield.

That’s about the best way to sum up farming. Do all you can with what you’ve been given, and then pray the decisions made were the right ones to produce a good crop for the year. Then rinse and repeat year after year, always projecting as best you can, always pivoting when needed and Lord knows, always praying.