Here Comes The Rain

Well, looks like we're headed for another wet spring. 80% chance of rain tomorrow, 90% tomorrow night with a possibility of snow, 90% Friday, and they've put some chances in for the first few days of next week. And to think some guys are out planting corn... Good for them. My seed's still in the bag, and I'm pretty confident that's the best place for it right now. 

Finished up row stalking yesterday. I took some pictures and made a short little film for you to demonstrate what it does.

This is the Row Stalker:

Whoever invented this machine is pretty much awesome. It runs on top of the old ridge and pulls the old roots out of the ground. The disks have knobs on the outsides of them, which allow the disks to pinch the old root system and pop them out of the ground. 

The planter has an attachment at the front of each row called a row cleaner, or sometimes referred to as an opener, that will basically sweep these old roots off of the ridge, leaving a clean, flat seed bed. Where we gravity irrigate, we use the same ridges year after year. This machine makes it possible to do it in a very fast and efficient manner. I normally go 11.5 MPH while row stalking. That might not sound like a lot, but in a bumpy cornfield, it's plenty. 

I tried to take a short video so you could see it at work. Not really sure how well it turned out:

We also got Dad's planter out of the shop yesterday. If you look, you can see the row cleaners I was talking about. They're on the front of the planter - the black spike wheels:

This is what happens when you don't wire down your irrigation pipe after you pick it up, kids:

I thought I had wired everything up after we picked it up. Whoops. It's really fun getting a 30' piece of aluminum out of a tree by yourself. Guess I learned that lesson. Hey, Ben, does the wind blow around here in the winter?