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| Garreth and a friend filling the small drills |
The seeding season went fairly well. Between Chris, me and Dad we managed to get our fields tilled and seeding in record time this year. A full week earlier than last year. Even with our fields spread over creation, three people helped with the logistics of moving equipment and keeping things progressing. Son Garreth even got in some good tractor time helping out with cultivation and harrowing. He also helped here and there with cleaning out the seed drills and filling them between crops. We bought an old end-wheel seed drill for spreading Red Clover Seed in one of our fields. Our big drills don't have a grass box for such a task so it was necessary to purchase this old drill. It also worked well for seeding our smaller plots with the specialty grains.
We are trying a few different things this year. As I mentioned earlier we planted some Red Clover. We did this as an underseed for our Oats and our Gold Flax. This will act as a nitrogen fixer in the soil for next years crop. We will plow it under next spring or perhaps this fall.
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| Bags of Red Fife Seed |
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| Breaking Hayland |
A lot of effort also went into breaking a piece of old hayland across the road. It is around 40 acres. Breaking hayland takes a lot of time and effort. The sod is difficult to break down into viable seedbed. We probably should have taken some time last fall to at least run over it with the chisel plow. But, we managed to get it seeded into Oats/Clover. Hopefully we will get a half decent crop of oats out of it and it will be ready for wheat next year.
Now, we gratefully watch the rain fall on newly seeded fields. What perfect timing! I finished seeding and it started raining the very next morning. The only things left to do is a little bit of harrowing on the oat seed, another disc of the field where the Hemp is going and then seeding Buckwheat in June. Fingers crossed for a warm, dry summer after some June rain. That's all I can do now.
