P Words

Today we picked up Brynnie at preschool. LuAnn asked her what the letter of the week was and she said P! She asked her what the color was and it was purple. So we rhymed P words all the way home.

We have pretty good yields but it is pretty wet now. We can't party until the last pea is in the soup, that is corn kernal in the bin. The parsnips and pumpkins turned out pretty well, but we just put 12 bags of peppers in the freezer. Thanks again to our friend Steve who kept me working on the garden this summer when it was trying to turn into pigweeds once more.

I see farmers talking about tillage again on Crop Talk. The only tillage I want to do is a little riPPing and planting rye to perk up the soil particles. Radishes are still the best riPPers I have found. The garden is full of tillage radish now and they are big enough to really do their job, now. I see some sticking up several inches out of the soil so that means they have a deep tap root exploring the subsoil.
There are some big ones in the double crop soybean test plot hidden off US 68.

A friend sent a picture of radishes in soybeans this week so we are also going to get to try soybean harvest with radish tops sticking out of the ground. That will be a new experience for us. Another Steve was so curious he wanted more pictures so I hooked him up with the orignal sender.

I have a lot of soil samples to pull yet, too. I hope it fairs up enough after this rain to get that done before winter but the clock is ticking on all this fall work. We are running out of time. There is always something else I want to get done before winter sets in and this late year the list could be long.

My clients to the west have their's pulled and I have been flooded with soil test results from the lab. I get them email and a paper copy a week or two later. Most are short on P, K, Ca, S, Zn, Mn and B. I tell them to spread ALL of them within their fertilizer budget, don't leave one out.

Another young man stopped by yesterday who reads my comments on Ag Talk. He is starting a new soil sampling and mapping service so he introduced himself and we talked over the basics. I met his father at the NoTill Conference in the 90's and his family is known in farming in the Springfield area. He doesn't live too far from my brother.

I am starting to get lots of plot data from all over, particularly Iowa as they finish up. There hasn't been many plots around here.

Watch those P words so you don't get in a pickle.

Ed