This has been the most unusual of years!
Terry is planting the pinto beans right now. He is taking his time — only planting one field, watching how the water is acting and assessing if he wants to get several more acres planted , if there isn’t enough water that would be foolish on our part.
He has left the 20 acres of alfalfa for later on in the year…hoping for more water. When the sweet corn and the wheat starts to come off, those farmers stop watering that field and the field sets until next year.
(Since we do NOT irrigate from an underground aquifer, but from reservoirs, all the water that is used on a farm passes on down to the next farm below it. This is how all farms from Montrose, Colorado, to Grand Junction, Colorado, are irrigated. Nothing is wasted and all is put back into the canals so that eventually the water ends up in Arizona, Nevada and California. That is where our water comes from….we get our water from Blue Mesa Reservoir and the Ridgeway Reservoir….people on the Surface Creek Bench get theirs from Grand Mesa)
The water from the sweet corn and wheat fields should allow us to have enough water to plant the alfalfa. We just might not get the acres we had hoped for into pinto beans, we will just have to wait and see. The decision to plant the rest of the pinto beans will be made by June 1st. after that it will be too late to plant the seed.
The other strange part of the farming this year is the heat…we build heat up until we are smothering around 90* during the day –with 20-25 m.p.h. hot winds ( the heat is very early for this time of year) and then cooling down in the high 30s or low 40s at night, making the corn turn purple. The purple color is leaf injury, although it doesn’t kill the plant.
The last two nights we were warm enough (48*) that this morning we saw the crown of the plant starting to green up, which is a welcome sign.
Well, hope I didn’t bore you…farming is a huge part of our every day (and sometimes worry at night). Often times people get to thinking it would be easy to be a farmer…just get some land, plant some seed, harvest the crop and make money.
I wish it were so easy.
Still those people are right in lots of ways—it is a good way of life. At 68 and 63 years of age Terry and I can’t think of anything else we would have liked to do (although we both worked in town in really fun jobs to support this way of life) and we can’t imagine doing anything different for the rest of our lives.
Thanks for stopping by….
Linda
Life on a Colorado Farm 