Well, the barley’s up! Its had a lovely couple of drinks from the rain we’ve had over the past week, the insects have been sprayed out, we can’t see any weeds … so this crop has had a good start.
Now, it’s got a fair bit more growing to do over the next five months. It’ll grow fairly slowly for the next month or so, as the ground is really cold, but as soon as the warmth starts to break through, it’ll take off.
That’s when we’ll need rain as the plants suck up so much moisture when they’re growing quickly.
In November/December sometimes, depending on how the season finishes up, we’ll be putting the header in here to harvest, what we hope will be, beautiful, plump grains!
There’s always something to do on a farm and we’ve been picking rocks recently.
This paddock is going to be seeded to oats, when we get our opening rains. As you can see, it’s pretty dry here at the moment but we’re hoping for rain so we can get this crop and make our hay.
Paddocks that you are going to make hay in, need to be really clean–no rocks, stumps, old fence posts or anything like that because if you hit something, you’ll damage your mower or baler. It’s expensive to fix these machines!
Anthony and I have been out with the wheel barrow, bucket and front end loader, to pick this row of rocks that should have been done ages ago. Even though these jobs aren’t a lot of fun, it can be made that way with dog’s sniffing around, Anthony and I yarning to each other and just enjoying the fact that we’re outside on our place.
Ah … the weather! It often sounds like farmers are complaining about the weather, but so much of our business relies on it.
It needs to rain in March/April so the ground is still warm enough to grow feed for winter.
Even though it rains (or at least it should!) during the cold months, the ground is too cold to grow much, so the feed that grows during March, may not last a long time!
At this time of the year we hope that it’s going to be warm and sunny so we can take our crops off. Not get 30mm of rain in 20 minutes like we did on Sunday!
A torrential downpour has now downgraded our crops but filled our dams that were very low and watered out a summer crop of sorghum, so we are grateful there was some good out of bad!
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