Copied and pasted from last week’s column, changed to 10 font and the scurs are ready for battle once more. They were right about the showers and thunderstorms for Saturday, but did you notice how those crafty scurs didn’t predict any rainfall amounts? How about this week? Starting Wednesday, mostly cloudy with a good chance of a shower or thunderstorm. Highs near 60 and lows close to 40. Mostly cloudy for Thursday with another good chance of a shower or thunderstorm. Highs near 50 and lows of 35 – 40. Cloudy again for Friday with a slight chance of showers. Highs of 50 – 55 and lows around 40. Partly cloudy for Saturday and Sunday with highs of 50 – 55 and lows near 40. Cloudy for Monday and Tuesday with a chance of shower and thunderstorms. Highs around 60 and lows of 35 – 40. The normal high for October 20th is 59 and the normal low is 35. The scurs will be dumping their purple umbrella and cap after the drubbing the Vikings received at the hands of the Redskins. Go Gophers hockey!
Not much going on in the fields this past week, save for some primary tillage on corn ground, and with good reason. Harvest is for the most part over and the soils remain very dry. It remains too early yet for anhydrous ammonia applications and some are wondering if there is enough moisture, especially as we head west, to hold the nitrogen in place once it’s applied. Spring application of anhydrous ammonia or using urea or 32% as alternative nitrogen sources remain viable options should that be the case. The latter two forms are more expensive generally per pound of nitrogen but are better alternatives than fall applying nitrogen and losing it. Some have been advocating the use of fall 2’ nitrogen tests on the premise that we have some nitrogen left in the soil profile that may be usable for the next year’s crop. That may be but past experience with this test followed by warm temperatures and heavy rainfall in April, May and June has rendered the practice questionable at best especially east of Hwy 71 in Minnesota.
So, what is our weather up to? If you listen to several of the pundits, they are claiming a change is coming for the latter half of October. This is where I turn into the original man from Missouri: Show me. So far the predictions for a change other than for cooler temperatures have missed the mark by a mile. If anything it has become even drier, something not even I, the eternal optimist, believed possible. Last year in October at the ranch I recorded .37” of precip for the month. This year thus far I have recorded only .22”. Ah, but the month is still young you say. Looking back, that’s what we were saying last year at mid-month too. And we had, .33” at that time. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket coming off a tremendous crop, but we’re in serious trouble if things don’t change. While the old adage that this is a good time to have a drought as far as crops applies, this pattern has entrenched itself for the second year in a row. It has become very difficult to make it rain anymore. Washing cars or windows and leaving wagons full of corn or hay out doesn’t matter. Tuesday morning that point was driven home when a surprise shower made me wonder if I should back a wagon containing a few screenings into the shed. I decided it was perhaps warranted but by the time I got it under cover, the rain stopped. Imagine that.
It has been another strange fall. Ladybugs haven’t been the issue they have been in the recent past, although as predicted the boxelder bugs have more than made up for them. Eating my lunch at an abandoned farmstead Monday, I quickly rolled the pickup windows up as I had uninvited guests crawling all over inside. By no coincidence, the old grove contained dozens of boxelder trees. Leaves came off the trees in a hurry even though the colors for a brief moment were spectacular. There still are some pockets of color but the woods look more like the end of October than mid-month. The 10-man dryer at the elevator ceased operation quite some time ago and even the neighbor David’s bin dryer only ran a day or so before it fell suddenly silent. That particular dryer is pretty loud but it creates the perfect white noise to sleep by. How do I know? When its run is over, I don’t sleep as well for a while. The constant howl is soothing and reassuring should I awaken from my slumber, as only a farm boy can appreciate.
It was finally time to take down the hummingbird feeders, clean them up and put them away. There comes a time when the chance of a straggler at our location is almost nil. And besides, there were still a few salvia that somehow managed to escape the freezing temperatures. The nectar feeders were replaced with suet feeder. To see if the migrating bluebirds would enjoy some mealworms, the jelly feeder was pressed into service. The squirrels have become part of an experiment with waxy corn versus regular dent. In our survey, it appears that squirrels chewing corn prefer waxy by a margin of 3 to 1.
The show sheep have returned from their travels on the show circuit. The brood ewes at home in the meantime have been getting by on short pasture, some corn screenings and the vegetable peelings and garden leftovers that come their way almost daily. It doesn’t take long for them to appear on a dead run anytime one approaches the fence especially with a bucket in hand. They are a lot like people however and that may explain some of the biblical references to them. They certainly have individual preferences about what they’ll eat. For example, one night we looked over the fence in horror as a few of them looked to be bleeding from the mouth. Turns out these were the ewes that had developed a taste for the out of code tomatoes we’d been tossing from the garden. On a white-faced sheep like a Cheviot, that’s gonna leave a mark.
See you next week…real good then.