About a week ago we got an inch and six tenths of rain. This is not enough to break the drought but I am taking it as a hopeful sign. Since the rains cut off abruptly in early summer after spoiling any chance we had of getting the corn planted, it has been a roller coaster of planning and worry.
There is one aspect of it we shouldn't forget. Our soil is very miserly when it comes to giving up moisture. This is one of the soil characteristics that drove us around the bend this spring when it was continuously too wet to plant, but it is also a blessing when the weather turns hot and dry.
It was late by the time we could think of getting a tractor, let alone tillage, through the wet soil where we had planned corn. It was mid July, and we had weeds two and three feet tall on the acres we had planned for corn. Looking at the situation, it seemed we would be better off not tilling and planting a cover crop in part because we were thinking about trying to plant a winter annual on at least some of the acres. But no farmer can sleep at night surrounded by fields of weeds about to go to seed. We needed to do something.
We chopped the weeds down in late July. We got the old stalk chopper out there, hoping it would hold together when challenged by the extra load offered by the green weeds. We thought that the chopper made more sense because it was cheaper and closer to the junkyard than the hay mower. It came through for us so we ended up with fields of cut off annual weeds poking through a rough mulch of chopped lambsquarter and pigweed and foxtail grass.
As it turned out, this operation held the weeds in check and covered the soil completely protecting it from the heat of late summer. And when we did disc in fall to prepare for planting the rye, we could see the advantages of what we did. Instead of powder dry soil six inches deep, which is what would have been the result of complete tillage to control the weed growth we had a decent level of moisture throughout, enough to start the rye we planted.
There is another aspect of this, something of which I had not a clue until I started studying various aspects of soil health a decade ago. A good complete cover of living plants or even residue will keep the soil from heating to temperatures well over 125 degrees, which is more than hot enough to destroy much of the soil life. When you allow soil to be overheated like that you can plan on a delay in getting a healthy soil life back. And soil life is critical to growth and production! Life long learning, I guess.
