Air March 19, 2003

Thank you Gary, and good morning everyone. It’s been somewhat comforting to see a change in the weather pattern. While the weekend weather may have been just a little bit too warm, it was sure nice, and seeing rain is truly a blessing! And if it gets a little bit too wet, let’s not be too fast to condemn it!

Along with the middle of March comes thoughts of starting to get serious about crop production. Maybe some soil to till, well probably not the rest of this week, fertilizer to get planned out and final cropping decisions to make. Is there still time to get bromegrass and alfalfa fertilized or for that matter wheat also. The answer is yes on all counts. Ideally, I would have like to have had that down by now, but if you didn’t get any applied, get it done now. One thing working in our favor is the fact that soil temperatures are slow warming up. They obviously made a big jump over the weekend, but the cloudy rainy weather is tempering that back out quite a bit. We are still looking at soil temps in the upper 30’s to 40 for an average. That means that while wheat, alfalfa and brome are obviously greening up, they aren’t growing all that fast yet and we still have time to get fertilizer applied and utilized. If we get clear up to April 1st however, and you still haven’t fertilized, we may need to talk about it. How about planting brome or alfalfa? We are still in the latter time frame for planting brome - we normally say up through the first of April. And given the cold soils we may be able to push that clear into the first week of April but don’t wait much longer. We’re still a little early for planting alfalfa. Alfalfa seedlings are much more tender than brome seedlings and we need to worry about frost damage. But we are getting close so get ready to go. Our normal planting window for spring alfalfa is April to early May. I do strongly encourage using a planting time herbicide for spring planted alfalfa. We tend to have a lot more weeds with that spring planting and those little alfalfa seedlings can’t tolerate a lot of competition. We had a lot of fall seeded alfalfa that didn’t come up until the October rains. We may need to critically look at these stands in early April and see if a reseeding or overseeding is in order. Give me a call if you have any questions.

This is Chuck Otte, Geary County Extension Agent, with Ag Outlook 2003.

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