Category: Weather

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!!

The Start of Spring

We have hit the “it’s a good day to go get a tractor stuck” weather! Woo hoo!!! For those of you who don’t farm that means the sun has come out and every farmer is rushing around thinking now is the time to get all the things done. Meanwhile Mother Nature has dumped quite a bit of moisture which is sitting in the soil just waiting for you to give her a go so she can laugh.

I would bet we could queue up a few buried or at least stuck-in-the-mud tractor pictures this coming weekend. I’m hoping we aren’t one of them because we’ve all been there. We do have some radish we would love to get planted in this beautiful window of weather; but like I said, sometimes we get a little excited and things don’t go our way and it’s just not time and the soil isn’t ready.

So until then we can still get lots done in this sunshine. This week we took the kids out to pull wheat out of some grass seed fields. I told them it would take 5 minutes…and an hour later we were back home. So they are slowly getting the language of all farmers engrained in their young minds. Always bring a lunch folks.

I’m sure if you’re in any sort of farming area here in the Willamette Valley you’ll see a lot of activity in the coming days. Keep an eye out on the roads for SMV’s (slow moving vehicles) and please be patient, we are as excited as the rest of you for this spring sunshine to hit; our vehicles just drive a little slower.

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.