Seeding Rye Grass 9/29/14...

It's Monday morning once again, and the work week has begun on the farm. Our neighbor who helps each morning was hunting last week...and we missed him!  He's back today, and things feel a little bit more back to normal.

We got a call this morning that the no-till drill that Jim rents was available today (unexpectedly), so Jim went to pick it up.  He was planning to seed rye grass in the field after silage corn as usual, but wanted to do something a little different this year.  Last year when the rye grass was cut and baled, we ended up with more corn fodder in the bales than we had hoped.  It made a mess to be swept out of the cows' troughs each day, so this time he ran over the field a time or so with the disk, to try to break up the corn stalks a bit before planting.  I think it looks like it will help.

He got started fairly early with the seeder, and here he's making a round in the field...

Do you see how much more brown the beans are in that field beyond the tractor?  A week ago when I posted, they looked much more green...

I took him some coffee, and he needed to stop anyway, to refill with seed...

It's working out great to get this field seeded today, because there's a chance of rain in the forecast.  That would be perfect timing!

Here's to a good week of getting some projects completed...I'm trying some recipes with ground cherries, a first for me...and a week of feeling a little better.  I'm scheduled to have a second injection next week in hopes to see even more improvement and keep me out of the surgeon's office.

Contentment...

Remember this field?

That picture was taken on September 22nd.

Here's what it looks like today...

Jim seeded this rye grass with the intention of baling it next spring for the cows. Considering how fast it's grown in the past few weeks, however, he decided to graze the cows on it some this fall, to keep it from getting so high that it lodges (falls over and gets damaged) this winter. The grazing will keep it a bit shorter for now, but will still allow for good regrowth in the spring.

It's a twelve acre field, so it took lots of fence posts to create sections for the cows to graze. The field in the left half of the picture is the old Sudan grass field that the cows grazed on this summer.  Jim mowed it off one final time earlier this week.  The brighter green field to the right is the rye grass...

This morning we left the cows out to graze in the first section. We fed them some dry hay before we put them out, because Jim didn't want them to fill up on that rich grass alone.

They had to walk around behind the barn to find their way into this field. They're still trying to figure it out here...some of them got sidetracked and are eating on the barn hill...

Once they found the grass, however, all heads were down...

If you look closely, you can see Jim sitting on a dirt bike next to the corn crib.  He's ready to do damage control if  "someone" gets a little rowdy and breaks through a wire.  I was supposed to be on a dirt bike too, but couldn't manage to keep it running.  Oh well...luckily they behaved themselves...

After a little while, they had spread out the length of the field and got down to business...

Pure contentment.