Almond Bloom- III

   Well, almond bloom is past the peak. The petals are falling and the leaves are pushing out. It is pretty amazing, the trees go from dormant to leafed out in about a month. We have had a nice bloom. It was windy a few days last week and the bees don't like to fly in the wind, but other than that the last week has been nice.


   I rode the motorcycle down to a growers' meeting near Coalinga. Riding along the orchards was like riding through a living colonnade of color. A very different experience on the bike, not like driving by in my truck. Of course, the bees are a little more problematic.

   BTW- the growers' meeting was interesting. We are at historic high prices and there wasn't a word said about the markets. Most of what we talked about were the new government regulations and pending government policies. Kinda shows what we worry about. We'll have to talk more about that some time.

   We got the corn ground bedded up and started watering it. We should be ready to plant corn the end of next week. We'll see what the weather is like then and go from there.

   The wheat looks fabulous. We are going to fertilize it again this week and start the water again. Yes, we have had a lot of rain fall this winter. But, we still need to irrigate to make a crop. Remember last winter's rain? The guys who dry land farmed their wheat, that is they didn't irrigate, made a quarter to half a ton per acre of wheat- even with all that rain. Those of us who irrigated made over three tons per acre. And that is the reason we irrigate.

    We started working cotton beds last week. We run a cultivator over the beds to knock down the weeds and break up the clods in preparation for planting. We'll run at least two passes and then wait for the weather to warm up. I hope to have the beds and the equipment ready by April 1st. Then we wait for some warm weather and plant. We'll talk about it more later, but cotton is very susceptible to cool weather. Here are the two things I have learned about planting cotton over the years: if you plant seeds in dry soil they won't sprout and if you plant when it is too cold the seed will rot in the ground. That is it. That is all I know for sure about growing cotton. The rest of what we do has a certain amount of windage.

Yes, things are busy on the ranch again. We are coming out of hibernation. As my father-in-law says, it is time to 'whoop and scoot'.

I hope y'all have a great week.

P