Bio-Diesel - Fall 2008
Sunflower Plot (Seed Stock for 2009)...
The previous
section to this project was posted back in May of 2008 (7 months ago), this
recounts how things turned out...
I checked for sprouts almost
everyday for the first week, this image was about 2 weeks after the date of
seeding.
The field is showing a haze of
green, though a good number of sprouts are the natural ground-cover that was
just plowed under.
Another week or so later a
second set of leaves have emerged...
The race is on between the
sunflower plants and the grasses.
If the competing plants start to
over-shadow the sunflowers they may not develop properly of simple be over
crowded.
It would seem that the rocks are
also a crop, as I picked-up at least 6 (six) truckloads of rocks before
planting.
This is the situation at the
beginning of July.
Mid July (or so)...
The sunflower plants definitely
have the upper hand.
I think that this is the last of
the normal growth, as the remainder of the summer was extremely wet, the months
of July & Aug either broke rain-fall records or came very close.
Last week of July/1st week
Aug...
As the summer grinds on, it
starts to become clear that the seed spacing has to be addressed.
out of sequence shot....
2nd or 3rd week Aug...
3rd week of Aug...
I stand 6ft tall, and the camera
was held slightly above my head to catch this shot.
1st week September...
This head is larger than most in
the field, though considerably smaller than the 1 foot diameter mutant
confectioner's sunflower growing at the front of the house.
I think that the head size is
largely related to internal competition between the plants due to over seeding,
as I'd been following the progress of a field that was planted locally with the
same seed stock.
The field would change colour
through the course of the day as the heads tracked the sun across it's arc.
The image of the rainbow was one
that my wife took after yet another dousing of rain, I opted to include it as
the rainbow seems to end right in the sunflower plot.
This is mid to late October, and
it's been bedlam about the farm trying to get firewood hauled in from the bush
and the 1,001 things that need attention before the snow flies.
From Labourday onward I was
caught up in a construction project that gave me a view of 100's of birds
picking the field over.
This head is one of the few that
isn't completely cleaned out.
This one is...
This weapon is an old Sythe
blade that the tang has broken on that I shaped a handle onto and added the
wooden grips.
It makes a nice job of the
sunflower plants, but the heads are so dry and fragile that what few seeds are
left in them fall out as the plant goes over.
Regardless, I did get about a
1/4 truck full before I decided that this was a lost cause...
Deer season came and went while
the heads were stored in bins...
The idea hear was to see how
easily the seeds could be liberated from that heads.
Surprisingly, not very would be
the answer. Any loose seeds had already fallen out when cutting the plants and
during transport and handling.
To make matters even worst,
almost 3/4's of the heads started to rot from a mildew or mold that covered
everything but the top layer of heads in the bins.
That included at least 1 full
bin of loose seeds that were at the bottom of the bins.
So after all the work that has
gone into this project, realistically this all that I have to show for my
efforts.
Of which easily half is chaff,
making the remaining seeds likely some of the most expensive and labour
intensive sunflower seeds to be grown in the history of agriculture.
At this point I wanted to see
how the sickle cutter would move through the field...
...just fine.
So next year, I'll add a Tarp
Catch-Bag onto the sickle bar so that the plants will fall backwards into the
bag. The bag will be manually emptied into the truck every 100 feet or as is
required.
Done...
The field has started to be
plowed under, but the cut growth is so heavy that the coulter discs get
overloaded with the stalks.
The field has been disc'd and
harrowed twice to reduce the stalks for plowing.
Parallel to the sunflower
project our household garden is also way past it's prime.
The only remaining visible vegetation
are a single row of Brussel sprouts (which is one row too many).
Plowed, Brussel Sprouts and all.
Disc'd and ready for
freeze-up...
At this point we've been in
sub-zero temps for a couple of weeks and already started to get snow instead of
rain.
In closing this section, I don't
see the Sunflower plot as a loss, in that the crop was viable except that it was
harvested too late.
The seed spacing does have to be
addressed next year, as well as some type of seed separator and storage system.