Summer seems to be flying by! As August approaches, it feels more and more strange to not be having a county fair this year, but it’s reassuring that some annual events like harvest will still be taking place this fall. Here’s a quick mid-season update:
July 24, 2020 Update
(Yes, I know this is posted on July 25. 🙂 )
Soybeans (93 days)
The soybeans are coming along nicely! The ruler doesn’t really show it, but they’re actually growing a lot week to week. It’s getting more and more difficult to move through the field as the rows canopy over and the plants get taller (all of the above is a good thing production-wise).
See? Just a big mass of soybean leaves.
Lots and lots of soybeans.
The light green leaves towards the top of the photo are more leaves that the plant is adding. And with each new set of leaves comes potential for more flowers and more soybean pods and more soybeans to harvest this fall.
Like I showed last week, soybeans don’t uniformly reproduce and fill pods. The plant begins flowering from the bottom up, adding more flowers through the summer. So the pods on the bottom will be bigger and more formed than the ones towards the top (which you can kind of see in the above photo).
Here’s one of the biggest pods I could find in the field. You can see the small beans beginning to form in each pocket of the pod. So far, all we’re seeing is mostly three-bean pods. We’d love to see four or even five-bean pods, but two to four are the most common.
Corn (72 days)
There’s no point in me bringing a ruler to the cornfield anymore. The corn is at least seven to eight feet tall in most spots (the measuring stick in the photo is four feet tall). But there’s many more changes in the corn than the soybeans, so a little bit more of an exciting update here.
The field is in the middle of pollination. You can see the silks coming from the beginnings of ears down the rows in this photo. The silks are each connected to a potential kernel and are ready to catch pollen dropping from the tassels. The pollinated silks will eventually turn brown and dry out, having served their purpose.
Silks ready to collect pollen. Silks in field corn are the same as silks in sweet corn. If you’ve ever noticed when husking sweet corn, the yellow silks can be kind of sticky, which helps catch pollen.
And here you can see the nubs on the ear, which are all potential kernels. I didn’t do a great job pulling the leaves away without ripping off a bunch of silks, but you can kind of see where each silk is (or was) connected to each potential kernel. The ear is about the size and kind of looks like the baby corn you get in Chinese food.
The ear/silks are the female part (receives pollen) and the tassels are the male part (produces pollen) of corn reproduction. I bent a stalk down to get this photo, but you can get a better view of the tassel. This tassel has already dropped some pollen and is ready to drop more. Each of the little dangly things (I feel like I know what these should be called, but going to be honest and say that I don’t) are full of pollen.
The yellow stuff on my hand and in the little dangly thing are balls of pollen grains.
If you want an idea of how much pollen is in the field right now (or on Thursday when I took field photos), here’s my shirt after walking about 100 steps into the field. My arms, hair, jeans, and phone all also gave off a yellow sheen of pollen. It’s everywhere.
I expect the corn will wrap up pollination over the next week or so and then will focus efforts on developing the kernels within each ear. And we’re [this] much closer to harvest season!