Cool and Sweet

July has passed and is officially the coolest on record for Central Illinois.  We have had adequate rain and the crops are lush looking.  The weeds in the soybeans have also thrived this year and its been a battle to control them.  We have cultivated some, walked some, and double sprayed some.  It looks like we have a bumper crop coming on, although maybe a little late maturing because of the cool weather.

I've been doing double duty chores for the past week as both my brother and our neighbor have been gone.  Fortunately, things have gone smoothly.  We shipped a semi-trailer load of hogs on Monday that averaged 292 Lbs. per head.  That's a lot of pork!

I went to a land auction last week at Eureka College.  There were five pieces of farmland being auctioned off, two of which were just down the road from us.  We would have liked to have purchased one of the pieces, but the price was a little out of our league.  There were a lot of farmers and a lot of money represented in that room that day.

It's been another very good sweet corn year.  It seems like the sweet corn is always ready when we are on vacation, so this year I planted three different maturities on four different days to make sure we had plenty.  And we did.  We started eating and freezing corn in mid July, and we are still eating fresh corn out of our patches.  The ears have been good sized and fully pollinated, and lots of double ears and even some triple eared stalks.

Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine:
Genesis 27:28