Saturday, June 5, 2010

Ready, Set, FERTILIZE!

Sorry to be a day late with the Friday post, but I was tired last night. But here is the Friday June 4 report. Yesterday started off nice enough, but there was rain in the forecast. In fact the several sources we check said it would be raining by noon. We got an early start, and divided up and went to work. One thing that I had to do was spray our sugarbeet experiment as it has gotten weedy. We planted Roundup Ready beets, and took the opportunity to add some different fertilizer treatments. We generally have not had consistent success with foliar applications to sugarbeets in the past. But most of our past applications have been to larger beets with bigger leaves. But this is the first time we have added fertilizer to glyphosate for applications to smaller beets. Some of our friends in Montana have had favorable results with this, so we are taking a look. We will also make repeat applications as weeds always come back in sugarbeets. Our alfalfa test had its first harvest a week ago, so this is the time to apply fertilizer. Here we see around 4 inches of regrowth, enough to enable coverage with the foliar spray. We had several different treatment comparisons centered around Sure-K plus additives, plus conventional. Doug and Stephanie worked on sidedressing corn, with Phil philling in later in the day. The short week plus rain on Tuesday has us a little behind on sidedress application experiments. But fast work enabled us to meet our goal of compeleting sidedress of all experiments on Farms 3, 4, 5 and 6. Next week we will move to the new Farms 7 and 8.

This picture shows Phil spraying weeds in the background of one of the corn experiments. This field was shown on the May 28 blog post. The picture then was taken on May 27, or 8 days prior to the picture below. It showed rows that did not receive any planter fertilizer next to rows that received a planter application of Pro-Germinator + Sure-K + Micro 500. Now look how much smaller the six untreated rows are compared to the fertilized rows. And the fertilized corn has really grown in those 8 days.

So hard work and clean living paid off, as the rain missed us and I was able to do some more spraying, as did Phil, and the sidedressing goal was met. On the vegetable front, Brian filled in some missing transplants and sprayed for weeds in the vegetable zone. With the day complete, it rained pretty hard around 6:30 pm. So it was a good day and week at the NCRS. Next week I am off on another fertilizer mission, so I will be reporting from the road for a few days.