Week of 10/13/24

This week started out on the cold side with a high of 50 on Monday and a low of 36. On Tuesday the high was 47 and the low was 29. Then on Wednesday the low got down to 22, a really hard freeze. On last Sunday I had picked all the tomatoes that showed any color and got four 5-gallon buckets full. My wife and two daughters will can a lot of them as I don’t have a market for most of them. I also picked two 5-gallon buckets of cucumbers. They got soft by Saturday market, so they went to a lady that makes a lot of pickles. Monday evening, I picked the last of the peppers and got three 5-gallon buckets. Most of them will also be preserved as I only sold about a quarter of them at the Saturday Market.

This last Saturday was out last farmers market for this year. We did really great that day. Ruth had made 46 pies and she sold all but 2. I also sold 4 books, which was one more than I had taken there so I will have to deliver that one. Overall the year has been very good.

Ted has started to pick corn this week. As usual I help with the harvest, it is something that I really like to do, and with the weather being just perfect, with cool nights and warm sunny days makes being out in the fields even more enjoyable. With this perfect harvesting weather, the harvest will be about done by the end of this week. The corn yield is all over the place, the monitor in the combine is reading lows of 50 bushels per acre on the low wet spots where the water sat at times this summer. On the better fields with good drainage it is reading as high as 275 bushels per acre. Overall it is averaging about 200 bushels per acre, which is about the average for this farm.

After the harvest is over there will be some stalks to bale and some fall tillage to get done. It might all be done by the first of November, which is very early for this area. I don’t know if many cover crops are being planted as the topsoil is bone dry. We will need some rains for anything to germinate.

Out in the woods the walnut trees are now bare of all leaves and nuts. Many of the maples have also lost many of their leaves. The hunters will have much better vision of the game this season. The bucks are leaving many rubs and marking their territory with scrapes.

-Helmuth Krause