A Different Kind of Winter Wonderland!

Spring in March!!

While the rest of the country is buried under cold and winter and snow, we are rolling fast and furious here in the desert.  Our normal temperatures here are in the mid-s70's this time of year, but for the past couple weeks, we have been running 10-15 degrees above that.  Much of the staff is in shorts, and we are pretty smug about our weather... of course we will be longing for these temperatures come July...

Wheat

Our wheat nurseries are mostly heading.  We have a full 50 acres of wheat nurseries this year, representing thousands of plots... with luck the weather will stay warm and we will be harvesting by mid April

Lettuce and Broccoli

Our first planting of lettuce is long gone--we spent our time on the ground cutting, evaluating and weighing some drought trials as well as market evaluations of insecticide programs.  T

he second planting is getting close, the third planting, which is a full 10 acres, is abut 10 leaf with aphids showing up and mildew apps already being underway, and the 4th lettuce planting was just thinned.  Broccoli is about the, the first planting is out, second is harvesting now, and the final planting is getting aphids now.

Canola

We also have about 12 acres of Canola plots.. the early plantings from October are already 7 feet tall, and the later plantings are just emerging

Strawberries

Always a crowd pleaser, our acre of strawberries are coming on strong... we are giving tones of them away as we get ready to start in with our fertility and botrytis trials.  And we have a few thrips to count too!

Carrots

Last week was carrot harvest... we made Bugs Bunny jealous!

Tomatoes and Peppers

We will be back in the ground with Tomatoes and Peppers by the end of next week... it seems like it was just a month ago we disked out our fall fruiting vegetables... that's because it was...

Corn

We wrapped up the fall corn program here 2 weeks ago.... our field corn variety screens ran from 108 to 200 bu per acre... some varieties like the fall window, some don't.  We will put up a separate post with the results from various maturity groups in the near future.  Our spring program, which will have several drought trials as well as fertility programs, and a seed increase on the docket as well, will get planted in the next 14 days!

Melons

We have watermelons in the greenhouse, and cantaloupe seed waiting.. Like the corn, that will all go in between now and the 15th of March.

This is the time of year when sitting in a snow bank sounds pretty good...