This Week on the Farm: Wheat harvest has begun!

It's always a pretty sigh to see the harvesters roll in to the field. We have been working on this crop since last winter.

Of course, as soon as the harvesters and balers leave we'll start working the ground to get it ready for next year's cotton crop. Never a dull moment.

In other news-
Not only does the wheat look good, but prices are going up. The heat wave in the Midwest cooked a lot of corn and grain prices are going up. On the news yesterday they were saying that losses are big enough to raise food prices 3% by the end of the year. I don't know about that, but I do know wheat has gone up $40/ton since last month. I have only pre-sold about half the red wheat. I'll keep an eye on things for the next few days. Have I mentioned recently how much farming can be like gambling?
We started the second irrigation in the cotton. Looking good so far. Bloom began about a week early. The heat hasn't been too bad so the plants are growing well. I sent leaf petioles to the lab. We should have results back on Monday. I'll use those results to tell if we need to put more fertilizer on, or not. No need to guess, fertilizer costs too much to leach any below the root zone.

I wish I had a good cantaloupe photo for this story. This is the script for one of my radio pieces this week.

Fresh

By Paul H. Betancourt

When I was a kid my dad loved cantaloupes. As a kid I was unimpressed. Years later we moved up here and we were growing cantaloupes. Wow! Let me tell you, I am a convert!

There is nothing like a vine ripe, sum warmed melon. Mmmm- sweet and mellow. We’d eat ‘em fresh in the field. We’d take ‘em home, slice ‘em in half, scoop out the seeds and fill it with French Vanilla ice cream. That is a hot weather treat. For variety we’d eat melon slices with pepper or Mexican spices. I’m starting to sound like Bubba on Forrest Gump when he would start listing all the ways you could make shrimp aren’t I? Well, I don’t think you can make cantaloupe Gumbo, but there are quite a few ways to enjoy fresh cantaloupes. Just ask our neighbors in Mendota-the Cantaloupe Capital of the World.

Here in the Valley we are blessed with a wide variety of fresh produce. If you can’t eat well here, you can’t eat well anywhere. Even the lowly cantaloupe can become a summer treasure.

You can find the audio at-

http://www.940kyno.com/index.php?c=68

I hope Y'all have a great week.
Keep cool, summer's back in town.

P