It feels great to be firing on all cylinders

It feels great to be firing on all cylinders.

Quicksilver is healthy. Mrs ERJ is healthy. I am still functional although that could change as soon as the orchard grass starts pollinating.

Our normal routine is for me to care for Quicksilver for the first couple of hours and then hand her off to the beautiful and talented Mrs ERJ. I am the morning person.

I was out-the-door at 9:00 AM and got 88 feet of sweet corn row planted. I ran the weed whacker. Mowed. Lugged fence posts to a staging area. Put replacement posts into the grape arbor. Solved world hunger. Figured out a way to get the lambs to lay down with the lions. Tied a bunch of raspberry canes to a trellis. Washed some bedding. Cleared out several brush piles. Wrote the Fine Art Tuesday post which includes several pictures of TB as a child.

OK. Maybe I exaggerated a little. But I did get an honest 4-1/2 hours of work in today.

Phenology

Prunus serotina range map

With regard to planting field corn and the first flight of sweet corn, the most obvious "marker" for me is that Wild Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) is in full bloom.

This observation requires some caveats. Commercial farmers use seed that is treated with fungicides and insecticides and they can plant into cold, wet soils that would be a big problem for a duffer like me who saves his own seeds. Even with all of the fancy treatments, most years the seed that is planted early just sits there and not much happens until the soil warms up.

Furthermore, sweet corn has shrunken, shriveled seeds that don't have a lot of get-up-and-go. They benefit from being planted into a finely prepared seedbed and planted not quite as deep as field corn. Because they are fussy, an extra week or two is not a bad thing for planting sweet corn as long as you have moisture.

The main point being that planting a couple of weeks after the commercial farmers does not mean you lose a month of the growing season...as long as you have enough soil moisture to get reliable germination of your corn seeds.

Hummingbirds

Sprite informed Mrs ERJ that she just saw the first hummingbird of the season at her feeder.