Spring Planting Farm Update

Spring 2024 Update:  Planting Progress Hi and happy spring!  Today I'm posting a blog version of our Farm Family Newsletter I write and send out each spring to our farming partners.  Enjoy!   It’s a rainy April day today, and we had a big 2” rain yesterday, which is something we haven’t seen in a while.  More rain is expected in the next few days, and we are thankful for the moisture to help fill up the ponds and keep things growing.  Dry but windy weather earlier this month made for good corn planting conditions.  All of the corn was planted within the first two weeks of April, then we switched the planter plates over for soybeans.  Nathan planted a couple hundred acres of beans ahead of the rains, and we are mostly caught up on spraying/weed control and fertilizing the wheat.  There is always plenty more field and cattle work to do, but we’ve got a good start on the growing season. (Since I wrote this, we received 9" rain in 48 hours.  Some areas around us received much more, so the creeks and rivers are up, and we have some fields under water.  There may be a little clean-up/replant action happening when it dries out!)   The wheat looks pretty good!  Some fields in the area really suffered from poor emergence, wind erosion and winter kill, but most of our wheat has tillered out well and is starting to form heads.  We also have a wheat test plot, where we side-by-side trialed eight different wheat varieties.  It has been interesting to watch them as they grow, and note the slight differences in leaf color that tell you where one variety ends and another begins.      We continue to utilize cover crops on a few of the fields.  We have seen benefits of this in the rockier-type soils and areas where the field might wash out due to heavy rains.  Our cover crop test plot is our 4000 sq. ft. garden, where I like to try out different things.  Our garden was originally broken-out pasture, with tough, clumpy soil.  After four years of relentless growing, weeding, and utilizing cover crops in the “off” seasons, our garden soil has improved, and we can grow some items like mustard greens and kale almost year round (unless the chickens get them!).  Last fall I broadcast leftover wheat seed over part of the garden.  This spring I direct seeded snap peas into the growing wheat, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the success I had with germination, and how well the peas have grown inspite of having competition.  In another part of the garden I plan to let the wheat go to seed and die off naturally, then build soil mounds and plant melons into the wheat straw.  We’ll see how it goes! Tales from the Farmyard:  More Chicken Capers Well, here I am with another chicken story.  Love them or hate them, those quirky, fluffy little critters are interesting, and have quickly become a focal point of our farm family story.  We’ve had quite a lot of chicken drama in the last month or so.  We’ve learned some hard lessons and some interesting lessons along the way, but the best lesson of all happened very recently, in what I like to call the “Great Chick Hatching Experiment”.  Case has always wanted to keep an egg to hatch.  Personally, I think we have enough chickens, and I’m not sure what we’d do with more, so I’ve always kind of pooh, poohed this idea, telling him to wait until 3rd grade (where they sometimes hatch chicks in the classroom).  But this spring we had a Buff Orpington hen go broody and want to sit on one of the nests, so I caved a little and told the kids that they could leave the blue eggs under Broody, and see if she would hatch them.  Why the blue eggs you ask?  Well, in that part of the flock we have an Americana hen (who lays blue eggs) and an Americana rooster, so the chances are good that any blue egg will end up being a pure-bred Americana chick, rather than some random cross.  Before you know it, we had two blue eggs being naturally incubated by good ol’ momma Broody hen.  Fast forward a few weeks.   The blue eggs were still in the nest with Broody and that nothing had happened.  Then last week, when I reminded the kids to change the straw in the nesting boxes, Elijah remarked that one of the blue eggs was cracked.  “Wait!” I said, “Show me.”  We opened up the coop, picked up the egg, and sure enough, there was a little pipping crack on the side of the egg.  “I think this chick is getting ready to hatch,” I said.  Right on cue, our little buddy in the egg started cheeping to let us know he was in there, and trying to get out.  Now, I have ZERO experience with hatching chicks, so what followed was a kind of what-do-we-do moment.  Do we take the egg out of the nest and put it in the incubator I borrowed?  How long do we wait to check on it?  What do we do with the chick once it is born?  Will the hen protect it, or sit on it and kill it?  Ultimately, we decided to let nature do its thing.  We left the egg in the nest with Broody, and waited another hour to check on it.  This time the top of the shell was off and a wet, bedraggled little thing was trying to make its way out.   We waited a little longer, and now a cute, fluffy dry little thing was hiding under the hen in the nest.  The little chick had made it.  Two days later, the other egg hatched as well.  They haven’t come out of the coop yet, but in spite of cold, wet weather and about thirty other big chickens running around, little Pip and Skip appear to be doing well.  Our little farm family has witnessed another miracle of spring, where new life chips it’s way out of the winter world (or egg shell in this case), the earth wakes up, and new discoveries and adventures begin all over again.  😊