Spring Video from Through the Lens of a Farm Girl

I wanted to share this video with you from Erin Ehnle at Keeping It Real: Through the Lens of a Farm Girl as she recaps spring on her family farm.



You can visit her blog here.

The Flowering Wheat

The wheat is at the flowering stage right now where it actually produces small "flowers" on the head of the plant. This picture is blurry, but below I pointed where the flowers are:

The wheat and barley are being sprayed with fungicide because the crop is so susceptible at this time. The barley has been checked for thrips, which is an insect that infects the head of the barley before it emerges from the stem. We did not see any signs of that, but there is concern now about scab being a problem in the wheat with all of the rain and humidity we have been experiencing. Scab (technically known as fusarium head blight) is a fungal disease that can occur in small grain crops and cause reductions in quality and yield.

Here is a photo of wheat infected with scab:

Photo by Marcia McMullen, taken from www.ag.ndsu.edu


So fields will continue to be checked for this along with others diseases and insects.

Corn Progress

This corn was planted the first week of May:

Corn grows quite fast at this stage and this particular field should definitely be "knee-high by the 4th of July." There is potentially one night in the 10 day forecast where it might get below 50 degrees and the corn would stop growing, otherwise we are looking forward to some nice growing weather.

No-Till: Seeding Wheat into Corn Stalks

Ack, it's been so long since I've posted! I've had these pictures sitting on my computer for a while now and have been meaning to get them up.

In a spring like we had this year, we were able to practice more no-till (seeding directly into a field that was harvested the previous fall without first running tillage equipment across it) like in this field where Chad seeded wheat where corn grew last year. You can clearly see the remnants of the corn stalks:

The above picture was taken during seeding in mid-April. Here is a photo of the same wheat field a couple of weeks ago:

No-till is a practice that aids in preserving soil nutrients and moisture and this spring was not too wet, so we were able to no-till many fields. Last spring, we needed to utilize our tillage equipment to try to dry out some of the ground before seeding.

I will try to get out soon to take an updated pic of the corn from the previous post to see how it's coming along!