Time Flies in the Summer!

Wow, a month has gone by and I finally got back to put up another post.

The corn is growing FAST now. The last half of June was, and always is, a very busy time period. During those two weeks we cultivated all the corn with our rolling cultivators, fertilized all the corn with liquid nitrogen using our coulter applicator, and ridged all the corn to prepare it for irrigation.

One step at a time. We use two 8-row cultivators that are adaptations of the Lilliston cultivator. they have curved spider wheels that run in the dirt, loosening the soil and throwing some soil onto the row, covering up small weeds next to the corn plants. They work best when you can travel about 6-7 mph. This is a picture of one of 16 gangs per cultivator.

The picture to the left is one of our ridgers. We run two like this and can convert one of the cultivators to ridging if needed. This year we needed it.

This is looking back while ridging with the adapted cultivator. The picture below is looking ahead over the hood. The corn has almost shaded the entire row now. It would have already shaded the row except we received some hail in June which slowed the corn down.

This is the corn today. As you can see the corn is growing rapidly. This is only one week after ridging. Now the corn is adding a leaf per day and 4-6 inches of height.

We normally would be irrigating like crazy by July 4, but we are much wetter than normal. The soil is fully saturated and we will wait for a week or two before starting to irrigate. The more we can keep the pumps turned off the lower the expenses will be.