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!!

Walking Fields

It was a chilly field walking morning, but this is an important job for our farm!

This time of year as things start to really grow and plants start to set the crop for the upcoming summer harvest, we have to take time to walk all our fields and look for issues.

“Issues” right now in this growing stage usually means weeds. We are currently spraying our final (hopefully) application of weed spray. We use chemicals that are selective so they only target weeds that we see out in the field. It’s a great way to save money for us and save on putting more chemical where it’s not needed. For example we have a few fields that have a lot of groundsel, we will add an additional weed herbicide in to manage that so it doesn’t show up as a weed in our seed tests at the final stages of getting clean crops to sell. Also hoping that it doesn’t show up again next year as a continual problem.

Our weed spray is mixed with a carrier of fertilizer and water; which in turn saves us an application across the field to get our final amount of nitrogen to feed the crop. This efficiency increase saves us time, money, and fuel. But in order to makes this all happen we do have to walk around every single field to see what is out there.

This is a nice clean area of a tall fescue field.

Our farm works alongside field men who work for companies where we buy our fertilizer and chemicals. More boots on the ground means that we have a very good chance of not missing something. And if we do our jobs well; setting ourselves up to have clean seed fields that create a valuable product for us to sell.

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.