Let it Grow; Let it Grow

It is the Fourth of July; with bright blue skies, sunshine and warm temperatures today.  I am very glad to see some nice growing weather.  Saturday, we sprayed the soybeans with the second pass of Round-Up to control weeds.  Round-Up is environmentally quite benign and does an excellent job of controlling weeds and lets me grow soybeans with no-till technology.  I like no-till for my rolling hills in southern Iowa.  Leaving a lot of residue like corn stalks on the ground helps control erosion.


The crops are off to a good start, but June has been wet and a bit cool.  We had nearly 10 inches of rain in June, nearly 200% of normal.  And we are about 100 growing degree days behind.  The corn and soybeans do not need 95+ temps, but a string of mid to upper 80s would be nearly ideal.  I think you can actually hear the corn growing on a day like today.  It is stretching upward.  The old saying for a good corn crop was "knee-high by the 4th of July."  But now, I like to see the corn "head-high by the 4th of July."  Most of my corn is just a bit over waist high.  The color is a good dark green, but too much rain could leach out the nitrogen fertilizer and turn the corn yellowish.  I like it when the corn is a dark green.  That is evidence that the crop is using the nutrients that we put on the field.

Brent and I worked on the bulldozer on Saturday.  We put the main mud shield on the bottom of the dozer.  It is a steel "pan" that weighs about 500 pounds and protects the transmission and clutch assemblies from mud and other debris that could get shoved up from underneath when pushing dirt and other things.  After we got the dozer running, we did some clean up at the farmstead.  There was an old chassis from a mobile home that had been setting in the yard for several years.  We moved it to the junk pile and then did some re-shaping of the yard behind the grain bins so that it would be easier to mow.  We also swept out the machine shed and did a few other clean-up chores.  It seems there is always maintenance work to do.  but it feels good to do some hard work and then see the results of one's labors. 

The water has gone down in the bottom fields.  I don't know how much damage the water did, but I am sure that as high as it got, it had to do some silting in the east field and probably killed out some of the new grass seeding that we did in early June.  Hopefully with some hot, dry weather, the grass will come on and I will be able to see whether the $125 per acre of grass seed will take or whether it was all for nothing.  It is hard to do a wetlands restoration when it keeps flooding, but it is just more evidence that putting the bottom fields into the CRP is the right thing for that ground.