This week we have dove in head first into the fencing phase of our internship. Due to our hungry four legged creatures that like to play in our fields, it was time to take action. Our plan originally was  to start building our 8 foot high fence this week, but it wouldn’t be interesting if things went to plan.

So instead of starting to build our new fence, we started pulling the old to put in the new. For the past 50 plus years there was a hog wire and barbwire fence that stood 4 feet high. This fence had conveniently stood next to the ditched and slowly became apart of the bank due to lack of matiness. Our task was to removed this old fence, T post, wire clips, and all. However, it didn’t just stop there.

Once we got all the fencing material removed, with assistance of heavy machinery and hard labor, we needed to use our sickle bar mower to clear the area so we can see where we would like to put the fence. But weeds, rose bushes, and all sorts of grasses wasn’t all what we uncovered. When we had got the ditch looking nice, we found an area that needed improvement pronto! With the help with other employee on the station, we were able to make the improvements needed and get the water flowing better.

All in all this week I have shed a lot of sweat and some drops of blood here and there. However, with all the sweat and blood, I can say I have by far made an impact on the station that is outside my internship, and I can’t complain about that. But the big thing I want to stress, is it is important to maintain fences and ditches. Although its not the greatest job, nor the finest, it can impact your operation significantly and can help you avoid situations with neighboring farmers.

This week we have learned a lot about our irrigation. One, we are not getting 37 PSI at our sprinkler heads and two, in order to get 37 PSI at our sprinkler heads we need to crank up the PSI and hertz at the pump and only keep a couple of the stations irrigation lines on. But before I get into how we need to fix it, let me first tell you how we got to this conclusion.

Throughout the summer we have been trying to figure out why our sprinkler heads have not been shooting out as far as they need to be. We had many hypothesis and observations, but never actually knew what our PSI was at our sprinkler heads. So what we decided to do is make a pressure gauge so we could see what we were shooting out of our sprinklers. After testing 10 sprinklers of each row, we concluded that we were only getting 15-20 PSI while operating. That is 17-22 PSI below what we should be at.

But why is this? Well there is a couple reasons why. One from the pump to our sprinkler heads, the water makes eight 90 degree turns till it gets to our sprinkler heads. Second, we condense down from a 6 inch aluminum pipe to a 3 inch aluminum pipe. That alone can loose 3-5 PSI from condensing. This doesn’t also add that each of our lines have 38 sprinkler heads and produce 0.618 GPM per line.

So what do we do? Well first off we need to increase the PSI and hertz at the pump. Second we need to be hogs and turn off some other lines on the station. However, that isn’t realistic in a non-experiment situation, so ideally what we will have to do is increase the PSI and pressure as much as we can and irrigate in two days. Hopefully then we will get the water pressure we need and the results we are hoping for.

Growing is just an understatement of what are plants are doing. They are sky rocketing! All of our annuals are doing amazing! Most of them grew up 4-5 inches in just a week. Thanks to our early week rain and hot weekend.

Although annuals are doing awesome, our perennials aren’t doing the best, however this was to be expected. All of our perennials have growth, but none are even above five inches tall. The plants that are doing the worst are perennial cool-season grasses, which was surprising. All in all, I was reassured that this is very typical for first year perennials and that next year they will be growing victoriously!

Exciting news to add, we are starting to harvest next week! Our annual brassicas are starting to bulb out, so we hoping to get one more irrigation set on them before the weekend and look forward to harvesting them to calculate tonnage.

Along with identifying our plants during our monitoring state, it was hard to not avoid looking at all the weeds that were in the field. Previous to our experiment, the ground was made up of prostrate pig weed, red root pig weed, and lamb’s quarters. So for this week our main task is to spray like crazy and go on a mass killing spree of weeds. Since a good majority of our plants are grasses, we are able to spray with 2-4-D. 2-4-D is a spray chemical that kills all broad leaf plants, such as our weeds, and does not kill our grasses. However, the difficult part about spraying with 2-4-D is we need to avoid all our brassicas and plants that are broad leaf. Instead of spraying 2-4-D on brassicas and broad leaf plants, we need to go through and hand weed instead so we don’t kill the plant. There are sprays that just take care of grasses in brassicas and broad leaf’s, but most of our weeds are broad leaf plants. Here’s a couple of pictures of what we have had to deal with and all the weeds in our field.

As you can see we have a weed problem. However, from what I have been told and found, is this is pretty typical for a field that use to be made up of weeds and has not been touched. Most of the weeds, if they go to seed, can produce 1,000 of seeds per plant! No wonder they are hard to get rid of! Also, multiple applications are much necessary for these type of situations, but make sure you switch around with chemicals, that way the weeds don’t get immune to them. This will be our third time spraying these weeds and we probably won’t kill them all!

Weeding is just as important as the planting of the seeds. The biggest lesson I have learn this week is weeding should not be neglected and always put a cover crop down if you aren’t using a field, that way you don’t have weeds that take over. Here is some of us after shots of the dead weeds we killer this week.