seeding

Looks like the timing is good with the rain. Those oats and turnips will jump. How wide is the swath with that spreader?

@Countymouse 20813 wrote:

Yes, it was originally designed for a lawn tractor. The settings are supposedly in “pounds per 1000 square feet.” It not even close! I ended up spreading oats at the setting of “11 pounds per 1000 square feet.” It is an easy pull, I can move it around myself no problem. If I was going to pull it with a much smaller animal, I might rig up way to prevent the tongue from nosediving into the ground from time to time. That the only time it gets hard to pull by hand. The horse, of course, doesn’t notice this. She’s way overpowered for this job, but she’s reliable. The booklet on the spreader says the swath is 12 feet, but it looks pretty thin 6 feet away from the center, so I overlapped and made about 8-10 foot passes. I actually made alot more passes than this, because I was getting used to the seeding rate, which was so far off the booklet info it took a while to convince myself. I have concerns that the small seed (turnip seed) may have settled to the bottom of the seeder when mixed with the large seed (oats) and been broadcast at greater rates at the beginning of the run, but not much can be done about that now…

Nope, what is done is done.

However, for next year try premixing your small seed with coarse sand then mixing that with your larger seed. I’ve done that before and it worked pretty well for me.

@Tim Harrigan 20854 wrote:

One of the reasons oat/turnip are a nice mix is that the oats carry the turnip through the drill. Turnip alone is really hard to meter because it is so small. I used a drill and there was some separation on a small ledge in the grain box, but the stand looks great. I did not run it through a broadcast spreader. I think is is more likely that the seeds will throw at a different distance. So the suggestion to seed at right angles is good. It will probably turn out better than you think. You can always spread between a couple of tarps and see what hits and where.

That is how I was talking about planting it, with a broadcast seeder.

I seeded some oats and peas on September first as a cover crop in 2 different fields. Field A was bare fallowed with discs and /or a perfecta harrow for the month of July and August to knock off some hot weather seeds in the bank. It is also on good slope next to the road and has a wet spot in the middle of it during a normal year. We have not had over a half inch of rain at one time in the last 9 weeks, total we have not had more than 2.5 inches in that time.
Field B was our first seeding of sweet corn on the flat, after harvest it was slowly chopped for the beef cows a little at a time and then plowed under and disced once. It was moist when plowed, but was a little dry when I disced it just before seeding. Both fields were broadcast seeded, incorporated with a light harrowing and cultipacked with a double gang brillon.

So far we have received a tenth of an inch here and a three tenths there with above average temps. Field A actually has some oat and peas growing, thinner than I wanted but fairly uniform except for a shallow corner by the only bordering tree. Field B on the flat (with water table usually just inches below) has a couple little strips of oats and some random peas here and there.

Here is what I would like to have done different if I had it to do again. I would have liked to have chisel plowed Field B, with the corn chopped off there was not a lot of debris to deal with but the plot was very weedy. I would have liked to have disced it at least once more and given it a little more fallow time before seeding into a hopefully smoother finer bed than the one that I had, I don’t think I had good soil/seed contact. Perhaps this is not the best thing to do but I wish is was a possibility, but we actually cannot use a chisel on the flat because we are afraid of ripping up the 100 year old shallow clay tiles that drain our only flat ground. Any ideas of what I did wrong or rather do you have a different approach that I could try in the future to conserve moisture in a less than ideal cover crop seeding season?

Thanks in advance,

Erika

PS We are talking tractor farming here, cattle are slowly getting worked into the mix as they grow, change is slow sometimes.

@dominiquer60 20989 wrote:

…
So far we have received a tenth of an inch here and a three tenths there with above average temps.

… Any ideas of what I did wrong or rather do you have a different approach that I could try in the future to conserve moisture in a less than ideal cover crop seeding season? …

Thanks in advance,

Erika

PS We are talking tractor farming here, cattle are slowly getting worked into the mix as they grow, change is slow sometimes.

Erika, welcome to my world.

I have had these exact same moisture issues nearly every year for the past 15 to 20 years. Minimal rainfall during the summer, especially late in the summer, coupled with very high temps turns the blackland into something that seems to be harder than asphalt, but not quite as hard as concrete!

The sandy land can be disked and a nice seed bed prepared, but unless we get rain early in the fall we see no germination on the fall wheat, oats or rye. Sometimes ryegrass will sprout, but unless we get enough moisture to keep it going it will burn up fairly quickly. Last year I didn’t get any rain to speak of until December. Got some minimal germination, by that time it was too cold to get any real growth. It was an ugly winter, at least by our standards. No winter grazing and hay was sky high because of the record breaking drought. That is why I am now down to less than 3 dozen cows.

Anyway, I don’t know that there is a good answer to this problem. Maybe move to somewhere that gets more timely rain? I am going next week to look at some property about 500 miles north of where I live & one of the main things I like about that area is that they seem to get more consistent rain in the summer and fall. That and the land up there sells for about 20% of what it does where I live. Not everybody has that option, up and move, but it was I am looking at for now.

Good luck, because what you are up against is tough.

Thanks guys for the reply. It has been a challenging year in our droughty clay soil, it bakes like a brick. I did seed these oats and peas down before a forecasted rain, but like all the rain in the last 9 weeks, it never amounted to anything. A couple weeks ago we got 4/10 of an inch and it only moistened the top three inches of soil, just dust underneath. Of course the long range for the next two months is below average rainfall. Our trees are already turning and many are barren of leaves too.

Last night we tried watering this 1/3 acre oats and pea seeding on Field B, we used 2400 gallons of water which is two firetrucks worth of water, I wish I had a video for you all. It may not amount to much I fear.

You are right about the bare fallow Tim, without the rain it doesn’t work well, fortunately we had just enough to have a few flushes of weeds in field A.

Right now we are struggling wondering what to do with the 8+ acres of winter rye that we want to seed. We have many different scenarios to deal with. First field was silage corn on a normally dry hilltop, it has been chiseled and disced, it is nice and fluffy waiting for seed and rain. Second field was sweet corn that never had enough water to make a saleable crop and some fallow ground, still working on chopping corn to feed the beef. Third field was rye on normally wetter ground, a good amount of grass and clover volunteered after harvest and my two have been rotated over it the last 3 weeks, they have a couple days left before we would like to work it up a bit. Fourth area is on the flat near my original field B, different strips of vegetables that burnt out with the drought and heat, usually a high water table. I plowed it up a couple weeks back and have been waiting for enough rain to make discing somewhat effective, it is just hard clumps at the moment.

I would like to chisel where my cattle are, but the guys don’t want to hit the two old tile lines in that field. I know you can adjust a chisel plow to go shallow, but they are rather gun shy about trying it. We will see what happens with weather, moods and all.

Erika