Harvest this year is like pulling a bandage off a wound slowly rather than yanking it quickly and getting it over with. In the areas that were seriously dry during the spring and much of the summer, harvest will seem interminable.
Combines were rolling in pea and lentil crops by early August, which is what you’d expect in a drought year. Most of those crops had relatively even germination so they matured in a timely fashion.
Not so with many other crops, where strips and patches never germinated until the middle or even the end of June. Much of the crop is dead ripe, but there are still too many immature plants for the combines to roll.
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As this is being written, we’re about half way through combining brown mustard. In some spots, a mustard crop was actually starting to flower underneath the crop that we cut. It’s amazing we were able to nip the pods off the mature growth without running too much of the green material through the combine.
The other mustard fields have too many green pods. We’re babysitting half a tandem truck load of high moisture mustard from taking samples and trying to find something dry enough to harvest.
Interestingly, an intercrop of chickpeas and flax matured early and has been combined. It seemed that wherever the chickpeas didn’t all germinate, the flax did and vice versa. As a result, there wasn’t as much regrowth and we were able to grind it through the combine before weeds became too bad. We didn’t even use a desiccant.
It was a low yield, like everything else is going to be this year, but it’s dry and in the bin and both crops have good quality. With harvest stalled, we’ve set up a cleaning system to separate the chickpeas from the flax.
It’s going to be a huge year for pre-harvest glyphosate applications as producers in the dry region try to manage late crop and extensive weed growth. Glyphosate is slow, but hopefully it will provide some lasting control of Canada thistle. Picking the proper timing for application in a multi-stage crop is quite a guessing game.
Weed growth is horrendous in some fields. With poor crop germination, there was limited crop competition, and weeds love that. Herbicide applications may have controlled the early weed flushes, but many more weeds came when the rains finally arrived and by then it was too late for control measures.
In addition to big patches of Canada thistle, kochia is also thriving.
Many of the fields that have been harvested are now green with weed growth.
We have flax that was seeded before the chickpea- flax intercrop, which is still a long way from harvest. There was actually a sprinkling of blue flowers in it when pre-harvest glyphosate was recently applied. Every stage from flowering to dead ripe is represented.
Our canaryseed will be the last to combine. The question is whether the late germinating plants will make seed or whether they will be lost to frost. In some spots, the green plants are nearly a foot higher than the mature plants because they’ve had adequate moisture to develop properly.
It’s ironic that such a piddling harvest can take so much time, effort and money. It hurts more when the bandage comes off slowly.
