Sowing corn in Chinchón

Our follower and friend Miguel Ángel sent us some pictures about sowing corn on the geog of the Tajuña river (in Chinchón)... thank you very much. In our area nobody sows corn, so we don't have any knowledge about this crop... we'll try to speak a little about that explaining his comments. As he told us, he had to sow it again because wild boars had eaten it, so the fallow, which you can see in the pictures, isn't ideal for that. An important point is the birth of corn, so the weather must be appropriate if we don't want to have problems: it needs heat and moisture to grow in a week. If these conditions aren't satisfied here, corn will grow a month later and we may lost a lot of plants.

The seed drill used is a Monosem NG of four rows and the tractor employed is a John Deere 6200. This work is quick and the air seeder works without problems at 5.5 km/h. Corn is not very heavy so the turbine can aspire it easily. It is planted at a row spacing of 73 cm (it can be at 50, 70 or 80 cm in other areas), at 16 cm seed spacing and at 5 cm depth. He used about 80,000 and 90,000 seeds per hectare (if the corn is to silage, farmer can use to 120,000 units).

Regarding the seed used is of Pioneer brand and their varieties are the 1574 and 1758 (he used other varieties like w86, p66, d58 and y74 in other times). They are sold in bag of 50,000 seeds. He used 40kg/ha of microgranular fertilizer too which is fixed together with seed by the seed drill in the sowing process.

You can see a video from his YouTube channel.

Versión en español.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)

Harrowing garlic before spring irrigation

We are harrowing garlic in these days. Once they are about 15cm height and their roots are properly fixed in the soil, we can perform this task without problems. After that, we are going to begin the spring and summer irrigation, which will be done as frequently as the heat will require until a few days before harvesting them (we are going to talk about that in a future post).

Main aims of this task are: firstly, breaking the crust of the soil so we can get water in order to be infiltrated better and the second aim is we want to kill weeds which can be taken off from the soil or buried by it. As you can see in our pictures, there are several small areas where we will have to do a manual weeding... this task will be unimportant.

We used a mini-cultichissel ploug because we didn't need a deep work, but we needed a great accuracy to avoid damaging garlic. Our tool is a simple mini-cultichissel ploug but some farmers, especially in the area of Chinchón, they use more sophisticated mini-cultichissel plougs which have three tools for one row, as you can see in this video.

Versión en español.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)

Spring days for spraying our crops

After many rainy days, as we told in a previous post of this blog, we could spray our cereals and pulse vegetables. We are not able to access yet in a few areas so we think crop is lost there... fortunately, it is a minimum quantity. In other areas, cereals are very high, as you can see in our pictures, but we are sure herbicide still will work very fine.

This time, we didn't use the Cerea manual guidance system and we only used the foam marker. It really works very fine and it is comfortable because you can easy look foam from tractor's driving position. Our sprayer, having 1,200 liters of capacity, allows us to work 6ha without problems, so that is enough capacity for us. Then, it let us perform this task in a few days (using the jar we can save a lot of time because we can fill the sprayer in 6 minutes approximately). Hydraulic legs are really comfortable, so we recommend all farmers these legs. If you don’t have used them yet, you should test them.

Where it comes to operational configuration,  the working speed was at 12km/h (using 3S gear) and 1,500 r.p.m. (530 P.T.O.). The sprayer, which worked with a pressure of 4 bar and red drip nozzles, threw about 200 litres/ha.

You can see a video from our YouTube Channel.

Versión en español.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)