Corn plot in

[E J]

Last year I scaled back on the corn plots because they didn't get hit too hard the year before. Then of course the drought hit and my one smaller corn plot didn't amount to anything. This year I went back to one bigger and one smaller plot and got them in today. I don't do them too fancy, I spread fertilizer, disc, spread seed then disc one more time. Then when the corn gets close to a foot tall I spray it with round up. This seems to work pretty good. With rain showers in the forecast for the morning I should have corn growing before you know it!

[wolc123]

My corn plots are too wet to plant now.  I missed a small dry window before last Thursday's 2-1/2" rainfall and got in a few acres of pasture mix instead. Hopefully, the fields will dry out enough so that I can get the corn in by the end of June.  I have planted it as late as July 4th and still had pretty good crops.    

[wolc123]

I finally managed to get a 2-1/2 and a 1-1/2 acre corn plots in yesterday.  It was not easy with the heavy rains we have had this spring.   This is the first time I remember needing a 4wd tractor on the planter.  I was able to drain most of the standing water from the plots earlier in the week by opening some ditches but some of the lower spots were still muddy.  There is more heavy rains in the forecast today and later this week, so it was basically now or never for the planting.  

I was surprised that my old JD 246 planter did not plug up thru the muddy spots.  I put new shoes on it a few years ago, and those probably helped with that.    I remember it plugging up on some wetter years in the past with the old wore-out shoes that were on it when I bought it "well used" from a local sweet corn farmer.  He was asking $200, and took $175 for it about 20 years ago.  You could find used planters cheap back then, before the deer food-plot craze and the spike in scrap metal prices.

The starter fertilizer did not go on quite as heavy as I wanted.  It looks like it was 50 pounds per acre, on 36" rows.  That was with the gate openings set at 3/4" on the planter's fertilizer hoppers.   At least it makes the math easy for calculating input costs, right at $10/acre for fertilizer.  I paid $10 per 50 lb bag of triple-15 fertilizer.     Seed was free, and fuel cost for tillage was a bit less than $10/acre.  Throw in a little more for cultivating and spraying in July, and my total input cost, for that 4 acres, should add up to around $100.  Who says planting corn is expensive?    

After that corn is up about a foot, I am looking forward to trying out an old, 2-row, 3-point cultivator, that I just traded an old snowplow for.  The row width matches my planter perfectly.   Using that, on a modern 4wd diesel tractor, should reduce time and fuel costs considerably compared to the antique gas single-row machine that I used in prior years.  

My next project is setting up my 15 gallon, 12-volt tank sprayer and dual nozzles on that cultivator, so that I can apply the gly, just on the rows while cultivating.    Leaving a few weeds between the rows (that the cultivator shovels miss), makes the corn plots much more attractive to deer than the "clean" ag corn on surrounding acreage.   Those "weeds" are mostly white clover, which comes back very well on its own the year after the corn if you don't nuke it down completely.   That saves lot's of cash, that would otherwise need to go towards clover seed.   Free clover is always good.  The free nitrogen it provides for future corn plots is even better than the food it provides the deer at night.   

[E J]

Checked my plot last night, no corn sprouted yet. The rain today should help with that.

[wolc123]

It has been a little bit on the cold side for corn.  I don't expect to see much growth until the nightime low temps are in the sixties and daytime highs are in the eighties.   Looking at the long range forecast, that looks to be about a week out.   I expect to see some sprouting in about two weeks.