So like the title says, there is always much to do here at the NCRS. We start our Research Field Days next week, and that takes preparation. Look at these Navy Beans in an experiment on Farm 3. They are filled in nicely and will be shown on the Field Crops tour.
But there is still plot work to do. Crops don't care about tours. Here we see Brian making a fungicide application yesterday, again with the wonderful Prop-Tech sprayer.
Today though, it was back to the backpack sprayer for fertilizer treatment applications to these carrot plots.
There are a lot of vegetables in this field, all in fertilizer testing plots. You can barely see Brian making the long walk back for another fertilizer mix. Then do it again. Better than a day at the gym.
Who doesn't like broccoli? Well that leaves more for me. I love the stuff, especially with melted cheese on it. So here was a basket of it sitting out today. Where did it come from?
It came from the broccoli experiment of course. Here we see Dan and Tim making a harvest. Broccoli grows so fast that plots are harvested twice a week. Lots of work here. (Time for me to go.)
The cabbage is only a few weeks from harvest. Tim and Dan are glad it is harvested only once.
So guess what I saw in one of the corn plots? No really, tell me. I don't know. I have never seen this before. There were two of them right next to each other. Obviously some sort of fungus. It was kind of sticky on the brown end. I will say that it was in a plot that received urea, if that means anything. I was by myself, and as I bent in close to take this picture, I did kind of think about that scene in the movie Alien where that thing came out of the egg thing and attached itself to that astronauts face.
That sure wasn't very pleasant for him. But fortunately that thing I saw didn't have an Alien inside. Or it wasn't ready to come out yet.
And here is field crop Tim at the end of the day making foliar applications to sugarbeets. Why are the beets so small? Well we had a sugarbeet experiment here that was planted in mid-April, but one day in early May we got nearly 3 inches of rain and it collected on this part of the field and killed the stand. This rain kept us from planting for several weeks. But it was decided to re-plant (we hate the "R" word) on May 21, which is late for sugarbeets. And it became mostly a foliar experiment. So we will see what happens.
