And the Stone Picking Begins

We have had a week or so of wet weather so there was no chance to get out onto the paddocks, well for anything really, without getting any vehicle bogged. But today, after a couple of dry days we decided to give it a go. I've got some spraying to do, and the stone picking is really on the urgent list now, so stone picking it was. We started bright and early over at Oldlands on the pentonvale paddock. It wasn't real heavy picking, but we had remove an old fence line, and this year is the first year we have worked over it, and there were quite a lot of rocks that had been thrown up against the fence over the years. They all had to be picked. There is Correll Wheat growing in there and, for this time of year, it's looking really good. It's started tillering and starting to get a bit of height into it - hence the urgency for stone picking. I noticed that there is quite a bit of rye grass starting to germinate in there too, so that will need spraying out sometime soon. We use the Ford Courier ute for stone picking, the traytop ute that is, as it's a tipper so we can just load her up, and tip em off. There is a picture of the courier on the side panel of this blog with a load of stones on, taken last year. We picked 5 loads today. That was off the pentonvale paddock and half the next paddock which is Jollys trees. The Correll Wheat on Jollys trees looked even better, taller and greener, and thicker. We worked out the difference was that the wheat on Jollys trees was sown onto a pea stubble (peas grown there last year, which boosts nitrogen levels in the soil) and the wheat on pentonvale was sown onto last years pasture. There was/is quite a noticeable difference.

Tomorrows jobs.. well I am going to do some spraying (fungicide on my peas on peas trial and trace elements on the Correll wheat we used logran on), and the other guys will continue on with the stone picking (a job which will probably continue for the next month or so).