Happy Friday! Don’t know about you, but this week was crazy busy but went by super-fast.
July 30, 2021 Update:
Soybeans (98 days)
The soybeans are still becoming taller and fuller, but are close to being as big as they’re going to be this season.
We’re also tracking plant growth based on what’s happening under the canopy. More pods have formed and nodes all the way up to the top of the plant have flowered.
See the white flowers all the way up to the top of the plant?
Not much left to do here besides hurry up and wait for the plants to do their thing. You can see a little insect damage on the upper leaves in this photo – soybeans are pretty resilient and can actually take on more feeding damage than this before it becomes economically necessary to intervene with an insecticide. It’s very unlikely we reach that point this season.
Corn (94 days)
In the field next door, the corn stands tall.
Not a ton going on here to share this week, but the ears are beginning to fill out. All of the brown silks indicate that they were pollinated – remember that each silk is connected to a (future) kernel on the ear.
And here’s what’s happening inside the ear. You can see a couple of spaces where kernels won’t develop because the silk wasn’t pollinated, but overall it looks pretty good at this point. Kind of looks like sweet corn – sweet corn and field corn have the same development process, but sweet corn is a different variety that tends to produce more sugars while field corn varieties produce more starch. We also harvest sweet corn at an earlier stage, which isn’t too far off of where this field corn ear is now. Our sweet corn is at its prime right now and we’ve been eating it for the last week or so.
And we’ll end with a hazy sunset photo from the soybean field.