Made it to the weekend! If you’ve been following along, you probably noticed that I haven’t posted #FollowTheField updates the last two Fridays. I can’t believe that it’s already the middle of August. This year has been a whirlwind between getting married (you probably noticed the name change in my blog signature), moving back to “normal” life after spending so much time at home during the pandemic, and moving! Here’s a rundown of what I’ve been up to over the last 30 days:
- Makers Market (prep and the market itself) for one of my other gigs, Rural Route Design Co.
- Packing an entire house and craft room – the craft room itself was an entire trailer load…(!!)
- Moving over three separate weekends
- Unpacking…slowly but surely
- Travel with the full-time job and getting used to being back around the office regularly
- Volunteering and judging at our county fair
- Thoroughly cleaning, working on outside landscaping, and making minor repairs at my old house to get it ready for sale.
- Everything else that comes with life and getting settled into a new house. At the moment, we’re waiting on a washing machine to arrive (scheduled for sometime in the middle of harvest) and waiting somewhat impatiently for Starlink to come to our area so that we can have access to good internet, or at least something close to the speeds and bandwidth that I was used to having with fiber optic internet at my old house. Fortunately, we have pretty good cell service at the farm, so we’re getting by just fine using hotspots – thank goodness for unlimited data plans.
It’s fair to say that I’m looking forward to things slowing down sometime after harvest. Now that I’m married, I’m involved in two farms now, so it’ll be interesting to see how my roles on either farm shake out during the busiest season of the year. I’ll be taking a bigger role on my family’s farm in McLean county while living and helping out on my husband’s family’s farm in Bureau county (about a 1 hour and 45 minute drive if anyone was wondering), so we’ll see what everything brings!
Anyway, that’s the major life updates on my end – here’s the long overdue #FollowTheField update!
August 14, 2021 Update:
Soybeans (113 Days)
Even as things got crazy over the last couple of weeks, I made sure to stop by fields and get photos! Here are pictures from what should have been the last two Friday updates. We had really warm temperatures for several days over the last two weeks (heat indexes in the 90s and 100s), plus quite a bit of rain in the last few days. I actually didn’t walk into the soybean field this week because the sun hadn’t come out after the last rainfall and the soil was pretty sticky and I wasn’t dressed to have muddy shoes and soaking wet clothes. We did luck out with rain though – there was more than 8 inches of rain in the matter of a couple of hours just a few miles to the north of us, which would have definitely resulted in more water standing in the ditches, creeks, waterways, and probably in the low spots in the field, too.
All in all, crops look pretty good given what the weather has thrown at us this year.
The soybean plants are bearing lots of 3- and 4-bean pods in this field.
Here’s what the inside of a bean pod looked like about a week ago. It would look pretty much the same today with the exception that the beans inside would be a little bigger. These beans will stay green and grow for a few more weeks before the plants begin to die and the beans begin to dry out and become more round and turn yellow/brown in color. But for now, this is like really small edamame (and totally edible!).
The soybean plants are still actively growing, but should be slowing down soon. You can see a few more flowers towards the top of the plant.
The field is one great big mass of soybean plants, which is exactly what we want to see. I love to photograph the repetition in pattern.
You can kind of see how wet the soil is in this photo. Normally you can’t see into a soybean field like this, but I happened to be standing at the field entrance (where there’s a driveway over the ditch) and there are quite a few soybean plants knocked down from when we had the sprayer in the field to apply a herbicide earlier this summer and a fungicide just a couple of weeks ago. Things should be a little drier today now that the sun has had a chance to shine and dry things out.
The corn field was a little drier, but you can see how easy it was for me to make an imprint in the soft soil with my shoe.
Corn (109 days)
And here’s an update on the corn from the same day two weeks ago and the same day earlier this week.
As I’ve talked about before, the corn is still 8-10+ feet tall in most of the field and won’t be getting any bigger. In fact, the plants should begin to die and turn brown over the next few weeks.
All of the corn plants’ efforts are going into developing these ears. This is what we’ll be harvesting soon.
At this point, the kernels are mostly filled out and will begin to turn starchy. Field corn is very close to sweet corn in terms of development. Sweet corn is just a variety of corn that tends to be – you guessed it – sweeter than field corn would be at the same stage. At this point in the growing stage, if this field corn were sweet corn, it would be considered too hard to eat (or harder than the majority of people would want to eat). You can see how some of the kernels are starting to dent – it’s a sign that sugars are beginning to turn to starch.
You can see just how many kernels are on these ears of corn. The very tip of the ear didn’t quite get filled out, but considering the weather we’ve experienced, this ear looks pretty good. There are 16 rows of kernels around the ear, which we would consider average.
When I talk about these plants putting all efforts into producing an ear, I mean they are putting *all* efforts into producing the ear. Normally, we wouldn’t see plants start to do this until later in the season, but it appears that they have been scavenging nutrients from lower leaves to support the ear. We’re pretty sure that this is because of how saturated the soil is and that nutrients haven’t been as available to the plant roots, but honestly, there’s not much we can do about it at this point.
And there’s your Follow the Field update for the first half of August!