As the title says, FINALLY a nice day to work. This was a day that makes me glad to work in Michigan. It was sunny, warm and no wind for the first time in a very long time. You could drop a feather from your chin and it would land on your feet. These are common conditions of spring here, but not this year. So needless to say, Research Assistant Phil Dush got caught up on spraying herbicide on planted soybeans. We like to spray residual herbicide on soybean plots so that we don't have to make trips through the plots later for post applications. I just like to reduce traffic in plots. That is, unless it is the purpose of the experiment, post spraying plus fertilizer. But one big activity of the day was Brian Levene returned from Indiana with thousands of transplant tomatoes and peppers. These are grown by some transplant growers that use LIQUID fertilizer for transplants for area vegetable growers and the NCRS for fertility research purposes. Brian and some of the research staff spent the whole day planting well over a thousand tomato plants. This will continue for the week, taking advantage of the great weather.
We were able to plant our last soybean experiment before moving to new Farm 7 tomorrow, as it is pretty much dried out by now. Doug Summer did drill some non-plot production beans on Farm 7 today. Another thing we did was make some foliar fertilizer applications to corn that was frozen in the frost last week. I am happy to report that there is excellent recovery of the frozen corn now. Regrowth of leaves has been quite rapid since last Friday, when they were still mostly brown. The color is still pretty yellow, but should green up now with sunshine and warmth, two conditions absent for the past two weeks. After a suggestion from one of our SAM's, I sprayed 3 rates of ferti-Rain on some corn in the V2 growth stage, with plans to repeat the application again at V4 or 5. We haven't had much repeatable success at foliar applications of corn in the past. But I have never sprayed corn this small, with the objective to help corn that has been stressed. Hopefully this is all the stress we have from now on. But we will see.
