Field of raked hay. After two to three days of drying, the mowed hay is raked into a double windrow, meaning two are merged into one, resulting in less time baling. The hay continues to dry as the hay which was underneath is now exposed to the air and sunshine.
The picture below is of our wheel rake. Each arm of wheels moves up and down hydraulically. When the wheels are down, they turn along the ground moving the hay into the center.
Photo by Melissa.
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The series without an ending. Even after I’m gone, the land will still be here.
I have a box of arrowhead fragments, which the previous owner found during years of plowing and erosion. Through conservation efforts, some of which he started, we no longer lose enough soil to find arrowheads. But the box helps me remember we’re just here for awhile.
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This was my worst field of down corn, Monday, after the severe storm. We received close to three inches of rain in less than an hour. Wind speeds of 70 mph were reported.
I was shocked when I looked out and saw the fields. I examined it right away and figured it was a total loss, but held out hope because I only found one stalk snapped off. Sometimes corn can pull itself back up if it’s early enough in the growing season.
And thankfully, that’s what our corn did. The picture below is of the same field on Friday. The mud on the leaves shows how down it was.
Before me, Citygirlfriend had never known someone who actually talked about the weather. I think she’s starting to see why we do.
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I cut the oats with the haybine yesterday. A severe storm blew in Monday morning and flattened the field, pictured below. It flattened the corn as well, but the corn is straightening itself back up. The oats won’t come back up this late in their life cycle, so they would be close to impossible to combine, (removing the grain from the straw). We’ll bale the whole plant instead, and feed it as a forage.
This is definitely not what I envisioned when I started this series. We planted late, the weeds were coming worse than usual, and now the oats blew down. I guess I’m illustrating the Eisenhower quote:
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”
— Dwight Eisenhower
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Shepherd and I found this newly moulted Dragonfly while picking BlackCap Raspberries.
It was nearly invisible and we probably wouldn’t have seen it, if it wasn’t sitting on a ripe raspberry.
You never know what you’ll find if you go outside, but if you don’t go, you won’t find it.
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Canadian Thistle (Cirsium avense)
Canadian Thistle is classified as a noxious weed in Wisconsin. I love the way “noxious weed” sounds. I thought weeds that are the baddest of the bad are listed as noxious. I found out it’s actually bad weeds, which are economically feasible to control. I’m shocked. It’s like the government having a most-wanted list with only relatively easy-to-catch criminals.
I can tell you why Canadian Thistle is a noxious weed on our farm. Two words: Perennial and Rhizome. Perennial means it comes up year after year in the same area. Most thistles are biennial and relatively easy to control. Don’t let the second year growth go to seed, and cut out the first year’s growth which is a rosette growing close to the ground, and you’ve got it licked. A good herbicide applied around the first of June may kill two years worth of thistles, also.
A Rhizome is a root that travels laterally underground and sends up new shoots every so often. This is a powerful weapon in a plant’s arsenal. Kentucky Bluegrass is another example of a plant which uses rhizomes to expand.
The picture below is a powerful example of rhizomes. The Canadian Thistle growing along my machine shed found a crack in the concrete and pushed up a new plant inside the shed.
It’s a continual struggle to carve out a little space of our own. Without us here, nature would overwhelm this place. It reminds me of a poem I had to memorize in High School English.
Ozymandius
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
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Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) flower.
If you click on the picture above, and blow it up, check out the winged pollinator flying in for a meal in the upper right corner. The picture below shows a closeup of the flies.
This got me to thinking about alternate pollinators. I shouldn’t even call them “alternate”, but that shows my thinking before I researched. There are an estimated 200,000 wild pollinators, mostly insects, not one of them considers itself an alternate.
Everyone gives a lot of credit to honey bees, and the media was in an uproar over “Colony Collapse Disorder,” CCD, but I found out bees are not native to North America. There are no native plants which require bees for pollination.
Bees are valuable for agriculture. Some crops are highly dependent upon bees for pollination. Some beekeepers are paid more to place their hives in Almond orchards than they receive for the honey produced.
A beekeeper friend of mine thought CCD was overblown. He said, “Get the government to stop allowing the Chinese to import corn syrup mixed with honey, and the price of pure honey will go up, and beekeepers will find a way to combat CCD. I for one don’t truck my hives all over the country chasing big dollars. You know the bees mix with other hives and they come back home with every disease known to bees.”
The media turned a human economic problem into an environmental disaster. The only real problem is to large-scale agriculture. Plants will be pollinated, fruit will grow, some bees will survive. To quote Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way.”
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This is a traditional 4th of July picture in my family. Shepherd snapped the photo this year. Links to the last two years are here and here.
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I took the second photo from a different angle. I used to kneel, but the oats are taller than me kneeling, now.
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