Here's a quick update from the farm -- a 240-acre piece of land I manage for wildlife in southeastern Iowa.
I got a lot of work done at the farm earlier this week. I took some soybeans with me for planting food plots. Unfortunately... the tractor wouldn't start. We worked on it much of the day and finally got it going. I tilled and disc-ed until about 9:30pm because of the rain forecast. Good thing I did, because it started raining about dawn the next day. I'll see if I can get some spraying done between rains.
I also worked up 5 spots for fruit trees in the orchard to replace trees killed by rabbits and mice.
Planting corn and prairie will have to wait until it dries out again.
When I travel or go to the farm I can take my laptop and hard drive along and do virtually anything here at the farm that I can do at the home office. That means when it rains, or at night when I can't work outside, I just fire up the computer and go to work in the trailer. For example, I have thousands upon thousands of digital photos that need to be sorted and tagged as reference material for future paintings.
I just glanced out the window to see how the rain was doing and there was a male bluebird sitting on the cottonwood tree 10 feet from my window. I've got the curtains pulled back so I can sit right here and look at the evergreens, prairie, food plots, timber, wetland and pond just by turning my head. Things are really coming along down here.
This year I've put in about 10 acres of switchgrass, 500 miscanthus (I will write later about my goals for planting these tall plants), 8 acres of beans in in 8 different plots, and corn in 4 plots. I still have more switchgrass, prairie, beans, Egyptian wheat, and fruit trees to put in.
There are lots of birds feeding and gathering nest material right hear by the trailer. Whenever I have good lighting at dawn I get in a blind and shoot bird reference for future paintings. See this post for notes on the birds living around the trailer.