May 2010, Part I.

May started out pretty nice.
I got to size up the new trailer.

But not for long-- time to apply some pre-emerge herbicide.
It took a while to get going, however, due to a air leak in the Lumax shuttle which lead, through a series of unfortunate events, to a call to poison control and flushing my eyes with water for thirty minutes straight.

It was real pretty spraying weather,though.


I kept at it pretty late.
So did the guy from CPS:

No-till anhydrous applicators were the new cool thing this spring.

It felt pretty good to get the sprinkler going on the corn. A nice quick round to activate the herbicide and ensure everything sprouts alright; a good start to the year.

Linda showed off her new found skill. A Pilates miracle!
And I had some time to scout the wheat.
It looked pretty darn good. A nice spotless flag leaf.
And a nice big head.
Just traces here and there of some (maybe) early stripe rust infection. Nothing that couldn't (and shouldn't) wait to be treated. It is good to hold of application of fungicides a little bit if you can in order to assure that the plant is protected through grain fill.
There was also some sprayer blight on the south edge of this field :/
Much more concerning to me was the nice crop of joint grass this ditch had north of the house.


The Gray Havens continued to look overgrown. Check out my strip of spilled grain now:
Its the yellow strip up the center of the photo. Just a preview of what may be coming for the rest of the field. Too many plants using too much water means drought stress where there is no drought.

Finally the irrigated, which continued to look pitiful.
Just pitiful.

Then it was time to fix drops...
...and fix the kinks in the coulter rig...
...and put my fertilizer down for the soybeans. I was pretty eager to see what I could do in corn stalks.



And it really worked pretty good. I should point out, of course that the original plan had been to have wheat on this circle as well, but since we didn't get this corn off until the 13th of November...

April 2010 Part II.

Anna was pretty excited about getting this album in her Easter basket. Because nothing says "Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, conquering sin and death," quite like voodoo witchdoctors turning people into frogs.

Jonathan came all the way from Oregon to help everyone plant the potatoes.

Joela helped Betsy celebrate her birthday at the farm.

And Dad and I got ready to plant corn.

The best part of April was getting to meet my niece Erica.

Rod had me plant some dryland corn for him.

It was OK, but not as much fun as hanging out with Erica.


I'm not sure why I decided to get out of the tractor to take this picture, but turned out to be a bad choice.

But I didn't realize why until I wanted to take a picture of Jonathan and had to use my phone because I no longer had a camera with me.

They came out and drilled a(nother) test hole, and this time the news was good.

It even rained a little, but not enough to keep me from finishing up as soon as the sun came out.

I even had a buddy surplus at one point.

Then I had the time to spend some quality time with Eric trying to fix things on the new truck that weren't broken. Then it was time to christen the new truck:
Cephas, meet Aggie.

Then I decided to get my camera back. With a crack team assembled, and searching in specific scientifically determined areas, it really didn't take too long.
Spencer with his find:

Hmmm... The LED screen had seen better days...

But other than that, the camera worked perfectly, as you can see in this photo of my crack search team:

Erica and Jonathan decided to go back to Oregon, but not before Anna and I accompanied them to Texas. We like Anna to get plenty of cousin time.

And Mark showed me around town:

I even got to go to Luke's batting practice.

The irrigated wheat decided to look worse before it would look better. (And I apparently have trouble taking level shots without a screen on the camera.)
And then it was time to plant my corn.

I was pretty happy about planting into all this beautiful stubble.
And pretty proud of myself.

I lost a li'l bushing on one of the fertilizer arms on the planter, so I went ahead and caught up on some fallow spraying.

The next day, while Dad got a new bushing made, I took Aggie in to get his trailer.

We put the planter back together...

And got some more plantin' done.

The next morning I had to stop and take a picture of the pretty new power lines.

And was able to finish up.

Not without admiring my own handiwork again, of course.


With the corn in the ground, I decided to go ahead and get a camera with a working LED screen.

And put some more water on the wheat. Look at the difference in the canopy where I went back over the field to run the rest of the seed out of the drill. It would have been nice to have more seed to put in the ground, but registered seed gets pretty scarce in September, let alone November.
The dryland looked good, though.

Finally, we topped off April by attending Anna's Preschool graduation.

We were awfully proud of our little graduate.

She liked the cupcakes.

Papa Marion even came in for the big ceremony.

And that was April.