Planning

February sunshine feels so good. The cows love standing in it. The calves look for the sunrays and lay where is will warm them. Even the kids enjoy being outside more when the sun is shining.

However, when the sun shines through the windows and make everything bright and warm, I find myself looking through seed catalogs. I start planning. The coming garden season will be here soon!

Last year I ordered most of my seeds really early and I then started a lot of seeds in haste thinking that Spring would soon be here. Only to my surprise we ended up having a very late Spring. I soon found that my plants were growing too fast and before long they were taking over my whole sunroom!

So, this year I am dragging my feet. I haven't bought any seeds, yet... But I have looked through the calalogs and I know what I want to order but... I will not start any seeds in the month of Feb. or even early March. (That's what I keep telling myself anyways.)

It's also during the winter months that we start planning for the coming year of crops that need to be planted.

My husband and I discuss what crops we will plant where, and what field will be planted for double cropping.

Then there is the soil. What will we use for fertilizer and how much? Rotating crop is always very important to us, not only for crop yield, but also for healthy soil. More over we look at how much yield we got from the previous years harvest and make decisions base how much product we have left over. 

Winter is the time when we place our orders for the seeds that we will be planting. We work with several different companies that provide us with all different varieties or corn, sorghum, forages, and hay. We always look for high yielding crops that yield good quality feed for our cows. 

Of coarse there was the Spring of 2019... What we "planned" didn't go as expected. With all the rain and mud, crops got planted late and we had to make a lot of changes to what we had first planned. But, we were thankful to have a  good harvest and we are looking forward to an even better harvest in 2020 brings.