A week of beautiful sunny days, that’s the week that was. The Big Guy needs to send us some rain soon. It is so dry out there that it is just a question of time before somebody has a fire get away. With all the land in stubble it becomes difficult to stop a prairie fire. With everything in crop there are no fire breaks. When my grandfather came here in 1902 there was prairie wool as far as a guy could see. Prairie fires were one of the hazards for early settlers to deal with. If a prairie fire started it could go for miles. The same could happen today.
On the farming front, a lot of guys have picked Monday to start seeding. The sloughs that are going to dry up have. The rest are too deep and will have water in them and will be a slough all year. Having to go around anything with this large equipment is more than just a nuisance. It costs time and money with double seeding and double fertilizing anywhere the seeder overlaps. Clean open fields are the best.
For most farmers now the first operation is with the sprayer. Some are spraying weeds that are so small you have to get down on your hands and knees to see them. This sort of leaves me out of the picture, as when I get down these wonkie old knees make it a big contract for me to get back up. I must have blinked before these Golden Years happened and I missed it.
The chemical the farmers spray on has to be taken in by the plant. If it is cold and the plants are not growing, the chemical is not as effective. If the chemical is not taken in and just sits there, the sun and the weather start to break the chemical down and the farmer has paid full price, but may only achieve a per cent of the weed control he wants. I myself am an old fossil farmer that likes the hard cold steel of a cultivator shovel. No weed is immune to a cultivator shovel. Unfortunately none of these modern farmers can get done the acres they are trying to farm if they would have to cultivate first. It also costs money.
The farm chemicals now available are hard to keep up to. It used to be just Roundup for spring burn off. There are now a half a dozen different chemicals. As the professional agrologists like to say, more tools in the tool box. That is fine, but a person has to know what each chemical doe, as some have a residual effect and you can’t seed canola after. If it kills the stink weed, the shepherd’s purse and the hawksbeard, then it will wipe out your canola crop, too. With canola seed costing up to $50 per acre it would be a serious mistake to spray the wrong chemical.
One advantage of spring burn off is you get to attack the weeds that are difficult to control with tillage. One of the main weeds that is a big problem is quack grass. Until we started spraying, I had no idea how many different kinds of quack grass there were. You just looked at it and it all looked like grass. There is a big, broad-leafed plant. It is light green in color. It takes in chemical well and is easily killed. Then there is a darker-coloured, slower-growing plant with less leaves. It is hard to kill because as it doesn’t have the leaf area, it is hard to spray heavily enough to kill it. Then if you are in a field that had brome grass and there still is some of it left, be aware brome grass takes four times as much Roundup as ordinary quack grass, if there is such a thing. Another annoying grass is foxtail. It stays small in the spring and is difficult to kill because it is so small. Every oil lease has foxtail that they share with the surrounding farmer’s fields. And that is all this old farmer knows about spring spraying and quack grass.
On a personal note, my body is starting to heal up from all the needle holes I had in me from drugs going in and blood samples coming out. The Heparin I got to prevent blood clots has an unpleasant side effect of turning the injection site black and blue. I don’t handle Prednisone well and I ate a bunch of that stuff. I am off all that stuff now and thankful to be home. I have come to the conclusion the Big Guy doesn’t want me yet.
I would like to send a brick to Canada Post for having the Maidstone post office closed this week as they have torn off the front step and are replacing it. I am well aware the steps and ramp needed to be replaced before there was a real incident with someone falling. But, the mail could have been given out the back if there was better planning on someone’s part. One side at a time? Duh! Redonkulous! Canada Post complains about losing business to the electronic media and then they pull a stunt like that. Other people are trying to run a business. Maybe you could provide a little service, eh!
Joke of the week from my friend Liz: Two old ladies were sitting in church and the service went on and on. One old girl leaned over and said to her friend, “We have been here so long my butt has fallen asleep.” “I know,” she replied, “I think I heard it snore.”
