Planting, Planting and More Planting...

Well, we've been busy planting stuff over the last week or so. I figured I'd just combine it all into one post so I don't have to worry about breaking last month's record 7 posts for a while.

We traditionally plant a small tomato and pepper garden up by the house and ended up waiting a bit longer than usual to get it planted this year. By the time we got around to it this year, nearly all the normal places were very low on plants. We ended up finding nearly everything we normally plant by going to Lowes, Home Depot and Alco but couldn't find any Chili Piquin peppers anywhere so I guess we will have to do without them this year. They are the secret ingredient to our hot sauce and you very rarely ever see them in stores, but I guess we will have to make due. Next year we need to make sure and get everything going by the end of April.

Last year I improved the drip irrigation system to the gardens and we put down a weed mat and it worked okay. Not as well as you would expect, but we had some left over from last year so we put it down again this year.

Here is the garden planted before putting down mulch.

Here it is after putting down the mulch and some perimeter fencing and tomato cages to try to keep the dogs from laying on the cool moist ground and crushing the plants.
The last couple years I've tried to grow some pumpkins and watermelons and failed miserably. I'm going to give it a try one more time and see if I can make it work. I also planted some sweet corn and green beans and we'll see how that works. This garden is 25' wide by 75' long. It takes about 5 minutes to plow it up with the tractor so it actually wasn't that much work. I had the drip irrigation system in last year but I improved it quite a bit this year so hopefully that will make a difference.
I just got through with the last of the planting last night. I keep about 5 acres of land planted in wheat and sorghum for dove hunting in the fall. In the spring I plant sorghum and in the fall I plant wheat and oats. I also planted some german millet and a few sunflowers mixed in this time. I took this picture with my cell phone and the color is messed up (somehow my orange tractor looks red) but you can get a feel for it anyway.

I don't have any kind of irrigation setup on this, so I'm hoping the 40% chance of rain tomorrow turns out to be right. If you add up all the rain chances over the weekend you get well over 100% so that means it is going to rain for sure right? ;-)

Here's another cell phone picture of the finished product. Again, sorry for the quality, but I didn't think to bring a camera with me. You can see the wheat and oats on the right side of the picture and the newly planted area on the left. In the fall I will mow down the wheat and oats and hopefully the sorghum will be tall enough to sit in and it makes for some pretty good dove hunting usually. Another shot of the newly planted field looking back to the north. There is about 2 1/2 acres of wheat and oats and 2 1/2 acres of newly planted sorghum, millet and sunflowers now.
It was 100 degrees yesterday when I did my last discing and planting and the tractor worked well. I never did figure out what was causing the problems last year, but I think it must have been a problem with the cooling system being dirty or something. It worked pretty hard for about an hour when I was discing and got warm but not hot by any means and didn't ever lose power like it was last year.

Well, not too exciting, but that's what we've been up to the last week or so. It might not look like much, but there is some sweat equity involved in it.

Nathan