7 28 2013 cover crop and farm doings update

It has been a couple of weeks since I posted an update on my cover crops here at home.

There have been a few changes. I have grazed and mown and reseeded the little paddock in front of my front yard. The horses and the donkeys grazed in it for nearly two weeks. I took down the division fence and mowed it on Friday and yesterday I broadcast more cover crop seed and then ran over it with my spike tooth aerator…..We had a nice little shower last night…..

I did something different with this one…. Because it is almost too late for summer cover crops and a bit early for fall cover crops…..I planted both…… I broadcast half summer cover crop seed and half fall cover crop seed from a bucket of fall mix I had left over from last year…… Too early for any photos. Should have some buckwheat up soon.

Since I last posted, I have seeded two grazing paddocks after grazing. Both were with the summer mix. The first is nearly a foot tall and it is probably four weeks since seeding. The other is right out front near the road and it is up and just becoming noticeable.

Okay….here are this weeks photos with comment.

below is the most recent shot of the test row in my garden….recall that I just scratched a row in the grass in the garden and distributed some seed and covered it up. My garden maintenance is to mow between the rows…Dee Dee inspecting….

below is one of a series of shots of the cover crop in the bull field….this one highlights a sunflower…they have just begun to make themselves evident….the sorghum sudan has been dominanting lately,

below is a shot of buckwheat, soybean, fescue and rape

My assistants have become camera hogs and showmen and are now showing off in front of the cover crop

The fence post in the photo is five feet tall….some of the sorghum must be nearly eight feet tall….

front and center is a pearl millet head….could not distinguish sorghum from millet until it headed….the sorghum sudan is the taller more open heads.

all in all I would call this field a sucess…mowed, seed broadcast and aerated with a spike tooth aerator.

this is an attempt at a shot of the whole field….I can no longer hold the camera high enough to get a shot beyond the first phalanx of plants

I planted this crape myrtle five or six years ago after losing a dogwood tree in the same spot….it has been slow growing but it gets prettier every year….really enjoying it this year. does not smell as sweet as the magnolia in the back yard in the early summer but it is even prettier.

This is a shot of the cover crop buckets…they have pretty much stopped growing….I have to water them daily…the stuff is so thick in the buckets that I am sure they are really pot bound….there is a corn plant in one of them that is only two feet tall…and tasseling.