We're REAL Farmers Now
Ok, upfront, this post is more for me than it is for any of you. I want to remember what we did right and what we did wrong for next year. Well, at least as it pertains to planting.
Early MAY is the time to start working the ground. Planting can start as early as 15 MAY and can go as late as you wish, based on maturity schedule. The sunflowers need to be in before 01 JUNE.
The depth to plant both sweet corn and sunflowers is close enough to identical, that one setting works for both. They were planted at 1" in moist, but not wet nor dry, soil. That is #2 on the hydraulic lever on the tractor. No need to measure it again next year.
The brand of sunflowers we planted is Dove Kandy and consists of different types of sunflowers, including some corn. We got this from Pheasants Forever. We purchased a 1# bag of sweet corn seeds from Co-Alliance here in town. It was plenty to do our six rows of 100 yards. Shhh, don't tell Sandy I planted SIX rows. I told her I would only do FOUR. Those "extra" are for 'Just in Case' some does not come up. It's okay to post this here. She does not frequent my blog. She lives it. Why read about it?
Be sure to clean out the drop chute. Some very large spider built TWO tunnel webs in the drop chute and clogged one of them. This is something we did not realize until AFTER we had planted the majority of the sunflowers - one hopper drained faster than the other. And, it dropped seeds outside the row. And now we know why.
We did tape off every other seed catcher inside the hopper bin so that the seeds would be planted farther apart. Trust me, we tore the planter apart last year and slowed it down as much as possible, but it was still dropping seeds every 2-4". That's too close for our purposes. Now they dropped every 4-8" which is better.
I put down 20-20-20 fertilizer after spraying the field twice with RoundUp. The first treatment was to knock the competition down. The second treatment was to kill the weeds where I missed on the first. I wanted to plant a week ago (2 weeks post RoundUp), but Mother Nature would not let me. Too Wet. This is the same as last year. So I shall try again next year. There is still some green out there, but the competition has taken a huge hit. Hopefully the sunflowers will do well.
I put down pure Nitrogen on the corn patch - sparingly. Just tossed it out by hand. Less than a third of a bag. Should have enough for next year. Then I ran the disc to get it into the soil. Speaking of which, I used the disc THREE times. Pass one was deep and opened up the soil. After a rain, pass two was to get it fine (small particles). I towed a telephone pole behind the disc to smooth things out. Then, after a week and more rain, Alex LIGHTLY disced again to break up the hard top. Remember, we were only going for a 1" planting depth.
We pulled out all the seed we could by hand to change-over from sunflowers to sweet corn. What we could not grab, we used the ShopVac to get everything clean. That worked like a charm.
We lowered the springs on the flattening wheels to all the way down. This helped to press the ground back down over the seed rows. They were in the middle (at a 5) and we put them on 10. But, we did this AFTER we planted Alex's field. So we can check on the difference between here and what we planted back at Nick's.
We planted somewhere between 2.5 - 3.5 acres with 1/2 a bag of sunflowers. Have plenty left over for next year (if they germinate). Currently they are stored in the basement - cool & dry.
The sunflowers will take approximately 90 days to mature. Which should be the first of Sept. Just in time for dove season!
The sweetcorn was 70-day maturity. I should come up just as our first batch is dying out - sometime about mid-August. Nick thinks we won't get tired of sweet corn. His mother (who freezes it all for us) might beg to differ!
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