We are finishing up our last crop for summer harvest. I was able to drive a few days and then yesterday Hoot and I went and visited Matt for Hoot’s first combine ride! Today we’re thinking of letting him take the wheel (haha)!!
Enjoy the photos!
Happy Friday!!
Sorry I never realized that my post on Friday never actually was sent out….so here is this (or last) week’s photo Friday.
One of the biggest reasons we plant spring wheat is because usually it will grow faster than the slugs will eat it this time of year. So here are a few photos to show you just how fast this stuff that we just planted has been growing like crazy! This wheat was planted on the 13th of March.
To see photos of the wheat being planted check out my post, “Spring Wheat Planting”.
As I put up last week, we planted a fair amount of our spring wheat with the nice weather. We didn’t just plant into open fields however, we also planted in between where we put our new baby hazelnut trees this past fall.
Hazelnuts take about 4 years to get large enough and have enough crop on the trees to make them worth harvesting. So instead of letting our ground sit with no crop on it for 4 years, loosing income, we inter-plant. In years past we have done a rotation of wheat, followed by crimson clover, then followed by one more crimson clover crop. After that the trees are a little too big to get into the field with the larger equipment necessary to harvest the inter-crop.
It does get a bit tricky at times, with ways that you can manage the trees alongside another crop. But we have found that these two crop types, wheat and crimson, do a very nice job. Beyond the economics that you can get a little income off your ground for a few years, an added benefit is that you don’t have to spray for weeds on the bare ground for 3 years, with a crop on the ground it will help shade out unwanted weeds.
This is a photo of our first wheat crop in between hazelnut trees 5 years ago. The major change was that we had to swath (cut down) the wheat instead of harvesting it while it was standing. This was because our wheat header was too big to fit down the rows. At our farm even with 1000 acres to work with, just loosing 27 acres to a crop that won’t be harvest-able for another 4 years puts us in a pinch. So we do what we can to make sure we are utilizing the land that we have.
NuttyGrass 