Allan - last falls alfalfa planting

Mine is so so at best I am thinking about drilling in some more where the thin spots are. I had 6 weeks without a drop after planting. All in all it wasn't a failure, just not as good as my other fields....

Any experts?? If so, It is a grass mix field anyway, I'll add more grass.....

Mine finally came out of it okay, fact is I'm crossing the fingers for more rain and maybe a second cutting.

I'll never do that fall planting thing again. Just to darned hard on my constitution. On this patch I'm working on now, there's not any oats to speak of, but one heck of a nice stand of alfalfa under there.

Old habits die hard, I guess.

Allan

I would have been just fine, but for some silly reason I got it in my head that I needed to run the packer over the new seeding to make 'better' soil/seed contact.

Well, the last of it finally just came up 6 weeks ago. What was just 'drilled and forgot' just came a boiling up outta the ground within 3 to 7 days.

I really thought this spring that I was going to have to plow the whole mess up, but it eventally came around.

Allan

My issue was we went 6 weeks without a drop of rain. That coupled with me wanting to go the cheap route and not rounduping the field prior to planting. (I had weedy wheat, that year.) Didn't bale some of the straw. I bushhogged a number of times but didn't get it enough so i have thin spots(where straw was thickest).

In addition I only disked twice and that didn't kill the weeds. No rain, wheat(outof the back of the combine) and weeds I thought was going to ruin my planting.

But 75% of my field is just fine, cow guy round baled the wheat/alfalfa on first cutting. Second was fine(other than I cut at wrong time and it got rained on).

My thin spots(due to unbaled straw) is where I need to drill something in....

Depends where you are, I would start on this soon. In North Central indiana i planted mine on Aug 15.

Much better plan.

Allan