Hi, I’m Evan with EZ Custom Ag and it is a beautiful rainy day in August. My favorite for these beans, keeping them growing, going to make these pods just explode. We’re finally getting to set some seed, really excited.
We were in one of our clients fields and saw about four waterhemp sticking up above the beans so we stopped to pull them. If you look down the road ditch here those four turned into many when we went below the canopy. You’ve heard us talk about waterhemp before, Palmer Amaranth, any kind of pigweed species, and it’s amazing how they can move through a field so fast, and just take over. 90 % of what you see here was underneath the canopy; still going to seed still going to give us problems, so I guess the moral of the story is if you’re seeing seed heads of waterhemp, Palmer Amaranth, or anything that’s invasive like that sticking above the beans, or corn for that matter walk out there, pull some beans back, and just kind of see what you’re actually dealing with. Is it just those one or two plants, or you’ve got three or four hundred maybe underneath there that we need to address either with a chemical application, or just by hand weeding like we did.
Back to the topic of what we were actually out here doing today. We’re doing some pod counts, looking at some things. About a third of these plants have really started to set seed pretty good. Beautiful looking plants we’re getting, we’re setting pods here at the top, more blooms at the top. These rains here in August are really keeping these things cranking, but if we look at the field, we’re completely canopied over. Most of these leaves are hidden except for the top six or eight, so how are we protecting and keeping these pods growing at the bottom third of the plant where most of our yield actually comes from? You could see the potential pods that are there, most of those will be sloughed off just due to lack of sunlight or due to lack of moisture, but losing a pod can mean a bushel or more depending on your population.
One thing we look at when we’ve got a really good bean crop coming on is adding some extra nutrition even after the fungicide pass, even after that R3 time. Coming in here at R5 about where we are now and throwing some extra nutrition, whether that be with KB, some potassium, or boron. We want to keep holding these pods and getting the biggest bean size possible. So, along with KB we also use shimmy in different applications. It’s a great product for multiple micronutrients, also has a fulvic acid in there, and some sugar. It’s a great product to cover more bases than just the potassium, boron, and molybdenum, but depending on your situation both of these products can work very well. Just remember the big goal is to hold as many pods as possible as long as you can. Maybe catch that extra rain, that extra sunlight and pack as many bushels on these beans as we can.
So, we’ll be out here walking fields and looking for different things to talk with you guys about but we’ll see you next time out in the field.