Friday June 20, 2025

This is my mother’s 110th birthday.   I sure miss her, she died in September of 2003.  This date is a typical day for wheat harvest… we’re usually cutting wheat on mom’s birthday.  Not in 2025.  Checking the moisture in the grain, it is still a bit too wet to cut dry (13%) wheat.   So, we think we will begin on Monday.  The weather forecast is the most favorable one we’ve had in many weeks, no rain for at least a week, and temps in the low to mid 90s!  That oughta get the wheat dry enough for us to cut it.

Here is a wheat field at the home farm on Wednesday. You can see the rain coming.

This is the same field on Thursday with the sun shining! Can you guess which one we prefer this summer?

In the meantime, John is spraying some post-emerge herbicide on soybeans.  It was beginning to feel very urgent for him.  Because of the very narrow window of opportunity to do this spraying (made narrow by the frequent rainy days), we are hiring Nutrien to do some of it for us.  They will do one field of soybeans and 3 fields of corn as soon as the soil conditions in those fields allow.  John has plans to work on Sunday, too, to get the Freddie farm corn field sprayed.  After that pass, those corn fields will be ‘laid by’ until harvest.

JD R4044 sprayer at the Waldo farm

This sprayer, with John at the helm, is quite accurate.

We have loaded the air cart of the soybean planter.  Now, if we have a little window of planting opportunity some morning while we wait to start cutting wheat, I can put in a few acres of double-crop soybeans (DCB).

Loading the soybean planter air cart.

…

The lightning bugs began to be apparent last evening.  Their peak time of activity seems to be 945 to 10 pm.   Their number will increase significantly over the next week or two. Those little green blinking lights are a delight to me.  I get a lot of enjoyment from watching.  These are the State Insect of Indiana.  Did you know Indiana has a State Insect?

Have a great weekend!